Miscellaneous Ramblings....

Firefox 2.0.0.4 has been released. This release includes some minor security fixes as well as additional support for Windows Vista. Here are the release notes for the interested.

iTunes 7.2 has been released. Some of the notable new features are: Higher quality DRM-Free music. iTunes U: Free lectures, sports clips and videos from selected universities like Stanford and MIT. Speaking of the DRM-Free music, it seems that the DRM-Free music downloaded from Apple still has the user's name and account email embedded in it - hmmmm.... Update (6/01/07): It seems that there is a gotcha with MP3s and iTunes 7.2.

The latest addition to Google Maps is the nice StreetLevelView feature, which lets you zoom in on the actual street and navigate. Currently, this feature is only available for selected cites (Denver, Las Vegas, Miami, New York, and San Francisco), with additional cities to be rolled out in the near future.

Finally I decided to at least start the process of setting my new Epson R380 Printer (mainly because the ink was running out on my HP Deskjet 970 cxi ). The main reason for purchasing this printer was to be able to print directly onto CDs/DVDs. After letting other activities get in the way, I finally wrangled enough time to try out printing a couple of DVDs and I must say that the end results looked nice!. In honor of my coworker who is an advent soccer fan ( ), the first DVD that I printed was a soccer DVD (Shot At Glory).

In anticipation of the upcoming start of The 4400: Season 4, three new websites were launched (in addition to the main USA site being redesigned) - all dealing with different sides of the Promicin issue: Promicin Power Promicin Terror Promicin Info Enjoy! (As for me, I am still working on trying to get through Season 3 before Season 4 starts ).

Well, this is certainly surprising to me -- thanks to one of my coworkers, I just found out that Pentax is essentially being taken over by Hoya. It will be interesting to see what effect this will have on the Pentax camera line.

Compliments of LifeHacks, some top 10 del.icio.us tips. (For the uninitiated, del.icio.us is a handy site for maintaing online bookmarks, as well as some nice tools {including a decent help page} that enable a user to quickly find information within their bookmarks). (This is addition to the del.icio.us tips that I blogged about last fall.)

After suffering in silence trying to make do with the 2 GB of memory that comes with the MacBookPro (mainly because both Microsoft Outlook under Parallels and Firefox seem to be memory hogs), I decided to take the plunge and boost the memory to 3GB (which is the highest amount currently that the Apple MacBookPro will take ). The installation of the new 2 GB memory stick was very painless and quick (under 5 minutes) and there are several good tutorials on the internet (here and here) for this as well. Needless to say, my MacBookPro has been running much more swiftly with the additional RAM (since the OS no longer has to spend valuable time swapping ). For those interested in why there is a 3 GB limit (in both Windows Vista and Mac OSX), there are a couple of articles (here and here) that I have come across which seems to imply that this limit is more of a hardware issue and not a OS issue. As a side note, there have been various discussions about whether the MacBookPro will run better with 2x2GB memory sticks (even though only 3 GB will actually be used by the OS) versus 2 GB + 1 GB stick (even though the memory is unmatched). The results seem to be inconclusive (although some testers said that having unmatched pairs didn't cause any slowdown {here (see comments) and here}). As for my personal experience, I can conclusively say that my MacBookPro runs much faster with the additional 1 GB of RAM. I would conclude that the performance boost I gain from not having to access (disk) swap for memory significantly outweighs any potential slowdown I am getting by not having matched memory.

There is a new version of Joost available (version 0.10.1) that has a number of upgraded features (being able to invite an unlimited number friends from within the application, for one). On a related note, there is evidently a signup page where you can request an invitation (evidently there are 10,000 available). (Note: If you are running the old 0.92 version, you will be forced to upgrade to the new version).

Over the weekend (in between all of the family activities that were going on), I found a cool new iTunes plugin (Mac-only, sorry) called appropriately enough iTunes-Lame. It is a iTunes Applescript plugin that makes use of the LAME encoder to make very nice MP3s at VBRs (Variable Bit Rates). Since some of my earlier CDs have questionable mastering quality, this tool helps make my MP3s a little bit easier to listen to on my iPod (even if it does take longer to rip a CD).

In surprising news (to me at least ), it looks like Amazon has acquired the DPReview site. Since DPReview is one of the sites that i use pretty heavily for camera reviews/info etc., I am keeping my fingers crossed that Amazon buying them won't mess up the site.
Here is the official press release over at the DPReview site.

Serendipity 1.1.2 was released on March 1st, 2007. It looks like this is mainly a minor bug fix (the perceived SQL injection issue among one of them).

Update (6/20/07): It looks like there was an SQL injection bug introduced in Serendipity 1.1 (prior versions are not affected), which has been fixed in Serendipity 1.1.3 and 1.2-beta2. All users on Serendipity 1.1 or Serendipity 1.2 are encouraged to upgrade.

Had some interesting issues with automatically joining wireless networks with my MacBookPro. If I would try to join a wireless network after waking up from sleep mode, it wouldn't work, but if I rebooted my MacBookPro, it would join the available wireless network with no problem. After looking through the (very handy) Mac OSX Software Update log (which actually tells you when you installed an update, unlike Windows, which just tells you that you have the update installed), I determined that this behavior couldn't be caused by the recently installed Airport Extreme update. After looking through some of the Mac OSX log files, it seemed that the problem might be stemming from the recently installed JiWire Dashboard widget. Sure enough, as soon as I disabled this widget, I was instantly on the wireless network. (As a post-script, I now use the Airport Wireless widget, which seems to play a lot nicer with my wireless card ).

A nice list of 9 attitudes of highly creative people. As a companion piece, the "How to be a more creative blogger" article.

It is always nice going from a movie that doesn't have decent script (Spiderman 3) to a movie that has a very good script, in this case: Diggers. It was a very nicely done movie set in the 70's about the lives of a close-knit group of friends who are all clam diggers. The ensemble cast all did a good job with their roles and the movie successfully managed to be both humorous and dramatic at the same time.