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A few updates unrelated to anything in particular...

In pictures: How the world is changing at BBC News, courtesy of Cake. The scary thing about these comparative images is how little time has passed between them. The world from your high school geography textbooks is going away.

The Superficial has unexpectedly posted the best Academy Awards observations you're going to find online. In the process, they mentioned this archive of Charlie Kaufman scripts, which includes Being John Malkovich and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, my favorite film of last year.

And in me-news, in an attempt to make some sort of use of my second, otherwise unused 30GB hard drive, I've been ripping just about every song from just about every CD I own. The result has been a very eclectic random Winamp playlist. When you jump from "Piggy" by Nine Inch Nails to "Feathers" by 12 Rounds to "I Be the Prophet" by Tricky to Tchaikovsky's Symphony No.4, movement 3, you know you're having fun.

1.0.1 Nightlies... and Bikinis

Keep your eyes on the nightly Firefox builds and mozillaZine, as the final, bugfixed preference window update should be posted shortly. Ben Goodger (Inside Firefox) has been working on the new prefwindow for quite a while now, but it wasn't quite ready for the 1.0.1 release.

In "God, that makes me feel old" news, there's a Slashdot blurb about the tenth anniversaries of Yahoo!, Apache, eBay, Amazon, and Netscape. I started using the internet at the insistence of my friends (including Garrett) in late 1995, so while I didn't get in on the ground floor, I was there at the emergence of the Web as an entity unto itself. At that point, Netscape 1 was still the dominant browser, and Mosaic and LYNX were still useful. I can remember frequently checking how my own website looked in LYNX and doing a ton of chatting via a VAX app called Talk.

I saw the February issue of Wired Magazine tonight, the one with Blake Ross on the cover and the feature article on Firefox, but I didn't buy it. I picked it up, flipped through it for a couple minutes, and realized that there wasn't anything remotely interesting in there, other than the Firefox article, which I've already read online. And it was five bucks. So I reached up to put it back into its slot in the magazine rack, and as I did so, I noticed the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue not a foot away. It was six bucks. I bought that instead. And I didn't even open it.

Full Impluse, Mr. Sulu

I've been spending way too much time lately playing with Celestia, the open-source, multi-OS, interactive planetarium app. Essentially, it allows you to glide easily across our galaxy, tracking any and every moving chunk of matter within literally 800 light years (and beyond) from any angle. It's just way fucking cool. I already have some very nifty screenshots of the inner solar system as seen from several hundred meters above the surface of the asteroid Iocaste. Download it here or get it as a part of The Open CD.

As you know, Firefox version 1.0.1 has landed. Highly recommended that anyone you know using Firefox 1.0 should upgrade ASAP. There's nothing flashy about 1.0.1, just loads of security updates and bugfixes. I uninstalled 1.0 before installing the new version (a measley 4.7MB download) and all my themes, extensions, bookmarks, cookies, and even toolbar configurations were automatically and flawlessly maintained.

Slashdot put up a post about the first image ever posted on the web, and guess what? It's chicks! Hot, geeky, rock band chicks singing about "colliders, quarks, microwaves, antiprotons, and the Internet." Nothing screams "sexy" quite like Mosaic Browser and girls in weird, ill-fitting prom dresses.

Odd Stuff is Goin' Down

Weird news from just about every corner of the web this week. First there was this article at The Inquirer claiming that sources inside Microsoft say the official name of MS's new OS, code-named Longhorn, will be "Microsoft Windows e-XPedition." It's just so stupid it can't possibly be made up.

Then there was the report that scientists at Cardiff Univ. have discovered a dark matter galaxy. If you're thinking, "Oh, I remember that from Star Trek," you're probably right.

Finally, there's the guy who actually read a EULA (I've tried, but it seemed impossible) and won himself a thousand goddamn dollars. The outfit who awarded the money, PC Pitstop, did so to make a point, which seems a little pretentious, but they've written an extremely enlightening article on just how dangerous EULAs can be. Definitely recommended for any computer newbies you'd like to scare the shit out of.

Microsoft Almost Gets It Right

Because Windows XP's auto-update downloader is a pain in the ass if you use a dial-up ISP, and because I don't even want to think about how long it would take me to download Service Pack 2, I ordered a free SP2 CD from Microsoft. I was told to wait the standard 6 to 8 weeks for arrival, but it got here in four days. So far, this has all been very nice and easy.

So I installed SP2 in about an hour, spent a little longer configuring the firewall and running a scan/defrag of my primary drive. But there's a problem. I can't stay online for more than five minutes without arbitrarily losing all downstream data. No error, no disconnect. Just no data. And the dialer stops responding and I have to reboot to get back online for five more minutes of quality internet time. Oh boy, this is fun.

So I uninstalled and reinstalled my ISP's autodialer software, started using a different (significantly slower) local access number, and disabled the fucking firewall entirely, and it seems to be working again. I'm hoping it was the firewall and not the number.

Oh, and after installing SP2, my computer abruptly reset itself in the middle of a game of Half-Life. First time I've had a sudden crash since switching to WinXP Pro. Interesting timing...

Seamonkeys and Robot Chickens

In a recent post, Asa brought up the limited lifetime of Seamonkey and a fairly hysterical forum blitz followed. Basically, the Mozilla Foundation has been planning on phasing out development of Seamonkey, the basis of the Mozilla Application Suite, and a lot of people seem to think this means the end of Mozilla Suite forever. Mike Connor has eloquently summed up the situation on his blog. I don't really see the need for future Seamonkey development myself. If you combine Firefox and Thunderbird, and throw in an IRC client and an HTML editor of questionable usefulness, you've got the Mozilla Suite. Or, put another way, it's Netscape Communicator with 2005 compliance standards and a number of bug fixes. Do we really need that? In any case, it's open-source software, so even if the Mozilla Foundation stops development on Seamonkey, the project can (and probably will) live on for years.

And speaking of Thunderbird, I found the minimize to systray extension I'd been looking for at The Extensions Mirror. It's sort of an unofficial database for Firefox, Thunderbird, and Mozilla Suite extensions. Why these extensions aren't posted to Mozilla Update, where they would go through extensive testing and bug-checking, I have no idea.

I saw the premier of Robot Chicken on [adult swim] tonight, and it was funnier and stupider than I'd hoped. I have no idea why stop-motion animation action figures falling down is funny, but somehow, it's really fucking funny.

I discovered that my beautiful (if used) Philips 107P monitor supports 1360x1024, so that's what I'm running now. It also supports 1600x1200, but I'm nearsighted enough.

More Old New Hardware

So I went to Rite-Aid this morning to by paper towels and light bulbs and dog food (of course) and that sort of shit, and I picked up a rather crappy five-button "4D Internet Wheel Scroll Mouse," made by something called Sakar International under the brand "iConcepts." The two thumb buttons are positioned so far forward that they're almost useless. The hastily-written software came on a floppy disk and the mouse isn't even optical. So why did I buy it? Because it was three dollars, that's why. Cheaper than the light bulbs. I really don't know why, but I have three or four ball-mice now and not one optical mouse. I think it was worth buying this one just to not have to clean out one of the others again.

The NBA All-Star Game is on right now, and I'm not even watching it. Look, I'm a huge NBA fan, but the Skills Challenge last night was horrible. All-Star weekend just keeps getting worse every year, as it gets more and more commercialized, and as the league tightens its grip upon the whole thing to push its more marketable teams and brands. Let's just get back to basketball already.

Oh, and one more thing. PimpZilla, bitches.

Pimped

Is PimpZilla the best Firefox theme ever? Yes. Yes it is. Go download it right now.

Took a look at both the Opera 8 beta and that Netscape Browser prerelease that came out a while back. To be honest I can't tell much difference between the Opera beta and Opera 7.54u2, the most recent full release. It's nice and fast and all, but without adblocking I just have no use for it. When I want to fire up a browser for a minute without loading all my Firefox LiveBookmarks, I use K-Meleon 0.9.

The Netscape prerelease is clearly an alpha, whatever they may have called it. I ran into two bugs almost immediately: it stopped responding to keyboard input entirely, and if you close the browser window while a download is in progress, you have to create a new profile (or stop the download) to get it to open up again. Early bugs aside, the interface is just odd looking. It's very green and very busy. By default, there are two scrolling news tickers and a stock ticker on the "personal toolbar." It also opens two huge, obnoxious Netscape-hosted home pages. But that can be changed. It's based on Firefox 1.0, so the rendering engine is literally as good as it gets, but really, what's the point of Netscape Browser? If I'm not mistaken, Firefox 1.0 is also based on Firefox 1.0.

Gates on Firefox

From Asa at mozillaZine, via Slashdot, comes a meandering interview with Bill Gates at ABC News. Said Billy:

The browser space that we are in we have about 90 percent. Sure Firefox has come along and the press love the idea of that. Our commitment is to keep our browser that competes with Firefox to be the best browser — best in security, best in features. In fact, we just announced that we'll have a new version of the browser so we're innovating very rapidly there and it's our commitment to have the best.

Cute. Clearly the directive to announce an IE7 beta the day that Firefox 1.0 hit 25 million downloads did indeed come from high in the Microsoft food chain. Peter Jennings asked, somewhat indirectly, whether IE7 was being rushed because of what The Mozilla Foundation is doing to IE6's market share, but Gates, as usual, ducked the question.

I may have found the reason for the somewhat unsettling performance increase I got switching from Win98SE to XP Pro. According to the AMD Duron product brief, they were invlolved in the development of XP, and made sure it was optimized for Duron (and Athlon) architecture. On the other hand, I also found the marketing schlock for the AMD K6-III 3D, and it says pretty much the same thing. I know from using that processor in an old Compaq that it's breathtakingly underwhelming, even at 500MHz. In certain situations, my old Pentium 133 could out-perform it. The Duron, on the other hand, has been fast and flawless.

XP Pro and 25 Thousand Thousand

I have to thank Garrett for hooking me up with WinXP Professional (perfectly legitimately, of course) this weekend. Surprisingly, I manged to format, install, and configure it in less than a day on this second-hand Duron box. Had some problems on install with XP freaking out about the second HD, but I sorted it out by trial and error. There's still a PCI conflict that I can't seem to get rid of, but it doesn't affect anything. And the OS has managed to resurrect the onboard audio, which I thought was dead, and is using that instead of the Herc sound board, despite the fact that the Herc is installed and properly configured with up-to-date drivers. Doesn't really matter though. With just 128MB of PC100 RAM, I thought I would run into memory errors and slow performance, but it actually seems to be a bit faster than 98SE was. I think the Duron 800MHz gets the credit.

Firefox 1.0 broke the 25 million downloads mark yesterday. SpreadFirefox.com is planning a special update for later today. In related news, there's been a lot of yapping about Microsoft's pseudo-low-key announcement that an Internet Explorer 7 beta will be released this summer, and even more yapping about posting this information in an IE team blog, where the tech-types will see it first, on the same day that Firefox reached a landmark download number. I personally don't think there was anything particularly insidious about this (by MS standards). Blake Ross pointed out the most important line in this announcement:

I think of today’s announcement as a clear statement back to our customers: “Hey, Microsoft heard you. We’re committing.”

There has been a massive migration away from Internet Explorer since November. Firefox has become the most successful open-source application in history, and MS has to realize that they created this situation by allowing their software to stagnate for literally years, something you just cannot do when you have a monopoly.

So the question presents itself: Is it too late for Internet Explorer 7? I think so. By the time IE7 final is released, Firefox 1.5 and 2.0 will be too widely distributed. When the mass conversion to Longhorn begins (and it will), users will have to choose a browser; MS won't be allowed to prepackage their own again. So why get IE7 when Firefox is just as good and just as free, and by then, will have equal (or better) name-recognition? How will Microsoft focus their ad campaign? "Remember how much you loved us in 1999?"

Madrid is Burning

A freakin' skyscraper almost burned to the ground in Madrid yesterday, and now they're worried about it collapsing entirely. Take a look at the really eerie AP photos that BBC News posted.

This AlphaGrip controller is just freaky. I can't imagine ever getting comfortable using that thing. Maybe if it didn't have a tiny plastic trackball for mouse control. Hey guys, how about an analog stick? They're not expensive.

It looks like Mozilla Update is finally working again. For whatever reason, it wasn't updated from December 24th until late last week. And speaking of Mozilla, we're roughly a week away from passing 25 million Firefox 1.0 downloads, having passed 24 million today. Firefox users unofficially outnumber AOL subscribers now, as Asa noted last week that AOL has dropped to 22.2 million paid subscriptions.

I Heart Duron

So I picked up the spare parts I needed to get that Duron box running, along with a 128MB stick of PC100 RAM, which turns out to be more than I need. It runs Quake 3 Arena at 1024x768, with every conceivable graphic detail maxed out, at a solid 70fps. Half-Life at the same rez at 100fps. That's the good news. Unfortunately, the USR 56k is pre-v2 standards, and is slow as all hell. While that's not a big deal since I'm rarely putting this box online, there's a more serious problem. It resets, and shuts off, for no reason. At first, I thought it was caused by the Herc Muse XL sound board, but now I have no idea. Add an mp3 to a Winamp playlist, and it resets. Open cdplayer.exe while a browser applet is playing sfx or music, it shuts down and won't restart. Hell, today I checked a random dialog checkbox totally unrelated to the audio subsystem and it rebooted immediately. This is on a clean Win98SE install, after a scandisk/defrag. Anyway, it games flawlessly. I'm just wondering what's going to happen after I install the GIMP and do some RAM-heavy photo editing.

Finally got around to seeing Napoleon Dynamite this afternoon. Nice little flick. After the commercial blitz the studio unleashed, there's no reason to think of this as an indie film anymore, and as a mainstream comedy, it works very well, but only if you have the right sense of humor. Kind of like Monty Python and the Meaning of Life. There are a ton of tiny little touches in Dynamite that almost knocked me off the couch, but I can see how a broad audience wouldn't get it. There's a definite Wes Anderson feel to it, and I'd say it's more entertaining than Bottle Rocket, if not as ambitious. I hear that the commentary is quite good, but I didn't have time to get into it. In any case, in terms of 2004's major comedies, it's no Anchorman, but it's worth a rent.

PC Salvage

I temporarily pulled the 64MB PC100 DIM out of this Compaq PC today, along with the Philips CD-RW, and managed to boot that junked PC I got last week. Turns out the CPU is an AMD Duron 800MHz, which would have been my last guess. Still, it's better than I expected. The Duron is a vastly underappreciated processor. The primary, 40GB hard drive had Win98 installed, along with a huge amount of useless garbage. The system tray had 13 icons in it before I started ending tasks. I couldn't access the second hard drive, but later I realized it was because its previous owners had connected the secondary IDE cable connector to the master drive. The second drive is 30GB, and I think I might just wipe it before I get around to seeing what's on there. This box is in serious need of a clean format/reinstall of Windows.

All I need to make this machine usable is a power cable, an internal audio cord to connect the PCI sound board to the CD drive -- both of which I know I have somewhere -- and a stick of RAM, which I'll be buying this week. The only snag is that while I know this machine can use PC66/100/133 RAM, I have no idea if the motherboard supports DDR RAM, which would mean I could get a 256MB PC3200 stick for cheaper than a 128MB PC100 stick. Hopefully, the random PC guy at Office Depot will know...

In any case, I'm looking forward to using it as a primarily offline time-killing machine, as it ran Half-Life very nicely at 1024 in my short test, despite some awful texture tearing. That should be resolved by the Radeon 7200 drivers I'm running on this box, as well as the huge RAM upgrade. I think I'll also leave the CD burner in this Compaq and put the DVD-ROM in the junker, as it should have significantly better DVD-playback capabilities.

Gmail, AOL, and Frame Rates

Thanks to David Tenser for the Gmail invite. He and Asa at Spread Firefox are giving out a ton of invites they've suddenly been given. Looks to me like Google's viral marketing deal is winding down. I set up my account in Thunderbird 1.0, which is still the best free mail client I've ever used on a consistent basis, and I actually managed to send a test message, as well as recieve one. I hadn't been able to do that with any POP/SMTP mail account using any client while using PeoplePC. I think PPC blocks the default SMTP port. Gmail uses a different one.

Speaking of Asa, he raised an interesting question yesterday: Do Firefox users already outrank AOL subscribers? With 23 million downloads and counting, it looks that way. If not, there clearly will be before Firefox 1.1 (final) is released on June 1. And speaking of AOL, in an article at CNet News about the upcoming Netscape Browser's phishing counter-measures, I saw this:

Netscape claims to be the No. 2 browser company--after Microsoft--but sources close to the company say that Firefox is gaining "really fast."

"Firefox is moving the needle," said one source close to Netscape who asked not to be named. "They are gaining very rapidly."

That's just bizarre. Firefox is known to have over 5% of the browser market already, with IE just below 90%. That means Netscape, Mozilla, Opera, Safari, and god knows what else are sharing the remaining 5%. So what the hell is AOL talking about?

Anyway, turns out that Half-Life maps with low r-speeds, like the entire hazard course and Opposing Force's boot camp, run quick enough with this Rage 6 that I get a frame rate between 45 and 60fps even at 1024x768. And Quake II, which was released before my video card was made, holds a rock solid 60fps at that res. That surprised me a bit, as id Software built the Quake games with 3Dfx chipsets primarily in mind. Hell, GLQuake requires 3Dfx drivers. Anyhow I installed the Quake 3 Arena demo, and it runs decently enough, but to get a halfway decent frame rate I had to tweak it 'til it looks like complete crap. I cut my teeth on this game on a borrowed box I had for six months, and I'm too used to playing at 800x600 with all the graphical goodies turned up high to actually go out and buy a copy now. At least, not until I can see what this junker box I got last week can do. There's a gigantic heat sink sealed onto the CPU that I can't seem to get loose, so I don't even know whether I'm dealing with an AMD or Intel chipset yet.

Spare Parts

First, the non-me news: Ars Technica has posted that the groovy new Sony PSP will be released in North America on March 24. The minutes of the most recent Mozilla staff meeting are online. And Avant Browser 10 build 121 is available for download. If you haven't tried Avant and still use Internet Explorer for any reason at all, go get Avant as a backup to Firefox right now. You do have Firefox, don't you?

I picked up a stripped-down old computer the other day for nearly nothing, along with a very nice used Philips 17" flat-screen CRT to replace the 15" Compaq-branded .28dp monitor I've been using. The PC has no RAM and no optical drives at all. But it did have an old ATI 32MB Rage 6 PCI, which I immediately installed in this old Compaq. So now, along with the new monitor, I'm browsing at 1280x1024 (32-bit), instead of 1024x768, and I'm playing Half-Life (and Blue Shift and Opposing Force) at 800x600 in OpenGL mode at 60fps, as opposed to 320x240, software rendered at 30fps. But I don't want to strip down this old box entirely just yet, because it has two hard drives, a 30GB and a 40GB WD, and I'd like to see what's on 'em first.

Our former neighbors, who are moving to Kentucky after their house was foreclosed upon, finally agreed that we should keep their adopted former-stray rottweiler Maggie. We've been taking care of her for so long that nothing will really change. She'll continue to sleep in our yard (or house, when it's below 35 or above 85 at night), play with our other dog (Lucy the Jack Russell/mini pinscher mix), chew up our stuff (shoes, towels, furniture, etc.), and eat the food we've been buying for her (mostly Pedigree, with Alpo thrown in for variety). But it'll be nice to have the added insurance of a rott in the backyard to keep an eye on the place, assuming she hasn't managed to force her way through the fence into someone else's yard yet again.