New Stuff

I’ll be celebrating Download Day Tuesday June 17. That’s when Mozilla will release Firefox 3, the new generation of the Open Source browser.

I have used test versions of Firefox 3 for months and love it. I love the performance and speed even when I have multiple tabs open, which I almost always do. Right now, I have Firefox 22 tabs open, and the browser remains perky and stable. Yes, it’s using up a huge amount of my computer’s free memory, but I’d rather give it to that then most anything else on my desktop.  

Being in the customer service line of fire myself, I'm always impressed when a small company manages both good products and good service.  

I visited the Forest Hills Cemetery today, on Memorial Day. I rode my bike over for a quiet afternoon visit.  Fresh flags had gone up along the winding roadway in, and commemorative flags marked some of the graves.  

Recently my Carbonite back-up stopped working. Carbonite is one of the new breed of low-cost, on-line, continuous data back-up services. I have tried Mozy and Jungle Disk as well, and stick with Carbonite because I started with it, it works quietly and reliably, the control panel is simple, and its costs just $50 a year for unlimited storage.  

I have been trying to follow the problems in the new T5 terminal at Heathrow Airport. There are small project management problems and there are big ones. Ours are modest. On the scale of big, you have T5 which apparently included 400,000 hours of software development (that’s a lot of lines of code!), a full year of testing and a full year of training. Yet its open was a technology disaster.  

From the opening scene of Blade Runner, you know you are in for a more personally challenging vision of the future. Harrison Ford’s monologue interposed with messages from oversized personal billboards (“a new life awaits you…”) still come to memory first for me even after all these years. Visually alluring ads clash with the degraded city.   

I joined Goodreads this weekend. I had heard of it, but not gone down that road before.  

The 2008 Nonprofit Technology Conference reinforced my sense that at this point, it's useful to consider choices about Open Source as a continuum rather than a yes/no.   

I have been using the beta version of Firefox since last weekend. I love it! You can try it here.

The main thing I needed and that I’m experiencing is that it stays perky even with a ton  of tabbed windows open. Yes, my browsing habits include opening and keeping open lots of windows at once. Firefox has had the ability to support this for a while, but memory use grew, sluggishness crept in, and Firefox sometimes crashed.