June 18, 2008: Firefox Breaks All Records

We did it guys! Yay! FireFox was hoping to reach five million downloads yesterday and ended up powering on to a full seven million. Talk about a busy day. Downloads were so abundant that it appears that FireFox 3 not only overtook a huge amount of the FireFox 2 market but may also have expanded marketshare in the blitz. The downloads will continue as well, of course, and some non-leading edge adopters will be jumping on the bandwagon once the first patch release comes down the pike. For those who haven’t tried FireFox in a while, version 3 is am amazing update and well worth the install time. Remember, it is free so there are no excuses.

In related technology news, the new Freedom Toaster is serving as a potential relief to South Africa’s daunting Internet bandwidth limitation issues by providing a “CD burning service” for free, downloaded software. The Freedom Toaster is like a vending machine already loaded with the latest open source software. People can just pop in a CD, select the software that they would like to have burned onto it and away they go! No Internet connection necessary. Personally I would be excited to see the service expanded to allow for DVD burning (for the big items like OpenSuse all on a single disc) and support for USB drives for applications which would make the whole process simpler for, I assume, many people looking to just grab simple applications. Overall, though, it is a very cool idea.

I was up at five thirty this morning so that I could get ready for Dominica to drop me off at the train station. I hate getting up that early. Oreo doesn’t like it either as he likes to snuggle until the very last second. He has been tired recently and not looking forward to going to daycare each day. He will be home with me tomorrow which will be a much needed break for him. Tomorrow evening Dominica, Oreo and I are driving up to Peekskill, New York to look at some houses with our realtor. This will be our first trip to look at actual properties. We are excited. We have several to look at already.

I timed the trip this morning and it takes an hour and twenty-five minutes for me to go from Newark to Warren when I work out here in New Jersey. It is a long commute. It seems to be faster on the way home but that might just be my imagination. I read a good chunk of “The Thoughtworks Anthology” on the train coming in this morning. I might even manage to finish it tonight.

I discovered this morning that the office has switched from awesome Ritazza coffee in the cafeteria to run o the mill Dunkin Donuts coffee. I particularly dislike DD coffee because they only offered “flavoured coffees” which I don’t drink and “dark roast” which I prefer to avoid. I am a serious light-roast (more coffee flavour, more caffeine) drinker and not a trendy, just-discovered-coffee Seattle coffee style drinker. But DD doesn’t offer roasts, at least not at any DD I have been to and not in our cafeteria, so I am stuck with a mediocre coffee. It would be fine if Ritazza wasn’t awesome coffee, but switching away from such a great coffee with choice to one without is a backwards step even if DD is more “well known” in the states.

Today was busy but in a good “makes the day fly by” sort of way. It was mid-afternoon before I even knew it. I had lunch at a “new” Thai place, the Thai Kitchen, in Warrenville with a friend. The good was good although I think that I prefer by old stand-by Thai place right downtown in Warrenville that I have been going to for years.

OpenSuse 11.0 releases tomorrow. That is going to keep me busy. I need to get it downloaded and installed on my main workstation at home which is currently running OpenSuse 10.3. Then I will be immediately working to get an image built for Castile Christian Academy who are planning to move to OpenSuse 11.0 over the summer on all of their machines so that they are ready to use it when the new school year begins in the fall. My cousin Jeremy is planning to spend the summer doing installs down at the school to get them ready. There are a lot of new desktops being installed there in addition to just moving to the latest operating system. We are hopeful that version 11 will be faster on their old hardware than 10 was. The old machines are fast enough but still rather slow. A little performance boost wouldn’t go astray.

I left work at five thirty just barely catching the late shuttle out of Warren to Summit and the train back to Newark.  The rain started just minutes before I arrived in Newark.  So I was stuck walking home in a moderate rain from Broad Street Station.  I was completely drenched by the time that I got back to the apartment.  That was rather crappy.

Dominica cooked dinner tonight and we watched 3rd Rock from the Sun. Dominica was asleep by nine as was Oreo!  I wasn’t tired at all so I let them sleep and went out to the living room / office.