Archive for June, 2007

Anyone who’s had their eye on the ball for the last year or so saw this coming.  Apple’s Safari browser was released as a public beta for Windows today.  In fact, I’m using it to write this post right now.  It’s not bad.  It’s a little jarringly disconcerting to see Mac Aqua-style UI in a Windows application, however.  Doesn’t really matter that it’s pretty — it’s woefully out of place amid the sea of ugliness that is the Windows UI landscape.

It’s also disconcerting that it looks so much like the Mac version (right down to using Lucida Grande for the fonts), but the window close/zoom/etc widgets are at the right end of the title bar, which is Just Wrong.  It would be easier to cope with if the window looked like a Windows application.

It’ll be interesting to see what effect this has on the browser space.  I think it will take a little time to tell for sure.  I do look forward to seeing some more impartial performance comparisons between Safari 3 and Firefox (and other browsers, I suppose, as well).  I always take with a grain of salt performance data from the publisher.

That’s just common sense.

So I installed the Parallels 3 update on my iMac yesterday.  Let it update my Windows XP VM, because, like a moron noob, I opted against backing up my VM before starting this process.

Have yet to actually successfully run Windows XP on Parallels 3 since then.  Crashes 100% of the time during or immediately after startup.   And of course the updated VM won’t work in Parallels 2.5, so even though I’ve reinstalled 2.5, I’m now having to install and set up a new VM from scratch.

As I write this post, XP is rebooting after installing its second batch of updates.  I’m not sure how many more there will be.  Then I can start installing the apps I need on it.

Tedious.

It’s the first time a Parallels update (including betas) hasn’t worked flawlessly for me.  Frustrating.

Campy and silly.  Somewhat dull.

My daughter’s 2nd birthday is on Thursday, so I’ll be having some personal-life stuff going on that will have me in and out of work at random intervals this week, and I’ll be ducking out quite early on Thursday to help set up for (and attend) her birthday party.

This week is going to involve a lot of active collecting of information so that serious documentation work can begin on Places and  other top-priority stuff in Firefox 3.  With my goal being to have the most critical stuff documented at least to some extent before beta 1, it’s time to get cracking!

Yesterday, the Tennessee state legislature passed a bill banning smoking in most workplaces, with the only exceptions being those that do not admit people under the age of 21, businesses with 3 or fewer employees, or nursing homes (figuring that the dying deserve to smoke if they want to, I guess).

This is wonderful news, and I’m very happy about it.  The governor intends to sign it, and from what I understand, enforcement will begin on October 1.

Finally I’ll be able to come home from taking my 2-year-old daughter out with me to a restaurant without her coming home reeking of smoke.