Every cloud has a silver lining. Despite the whole “Firefox 2 is out!” “No, it’s not!” debacle, preed’s post about it got slashdotted. “But wait, that’s not good news at all,” you’ll say, and, by Jove, you’ll be right. However, if you look a bit closer, you’ll notice that the post links to The irc.mozilla.org QDB, which got over 6,000 visits out of it last Tuesday. To my best knowledge, both Chirpy! and DreamHost survived the semi-slashdotting, which is reassuring, and will hopefully get Chirpy! an extra user or two in the future.
Granted, getting two million downloads in 24 hours is pretty amazing, but, relatively speaking, Firefox did go from a 50% increase in downloads (1 to 1.5 million) to a 33% increase (1.5 to 2 million), so I’m not sure the Firefox 10 argument stands. But, like I said, it’s impressive, and with IE7 out the door, it’ll be really interesting to see market shares evolve. For the record, I think neither Internet Explorer 7, nor Firefox 2 can be considered enough of an update to justify a full version bump. That being said, Firefox was great already, while IE was, and still is … functionally challenged.
Even if you look past the marketing mumbojumbo, Kore looks like a cool product, and 500 bucks is a pretty reasonable price. If I weren’t already throwing money out the window, I might even consider buying it.
Today, I purchased a Braun cruZer³, which, in spite of looking tacky, is allegedly pretty decent for an €80 shaver. One might argue that, with the acquisition of a new cellphone and a new printer (forthcoming), I’m spending too much money already, but it’s not like I enjoy shaving.
Update: Obviously, I don’t go about randomly buying shavers. My old one was just due for replacement. I could’ve replaced the head again, but that wouldn’t have fixed the worn out battery.
If you’ve ever used Wireshark on Windows, maybe you’ve noticed that the installer bundles the GTK+ runtime environment and just bungs it into the Wireshark program directory without asking. However, chances are you’ve already got a compatible GTK+ runtime environment installed, if you use, say, Gaim or a Windows build of X-Chat. In this case, you’ll either have duplicate data or one will be more recent than the other, and you’re likely to have a .gtkrc file that references a GTK+ theme which isn’t present in one of the installations, crippling your software. Fortunately, there’s a relatively easy fix.
Make sure Wireshark is closed and browse to its installation folder. Now remove all the files that are already present in the GTK+ folder—typically %ProgramFiles%\Common Files\GTK\2.0. Wireshark puts stuff that is in GTK+’s bin directory in its root directory, but don’t let that bother you. You can also safely remove the lib and etc directories. Now restart Wireshark. It will automatically use the common GTK+ runtime environment found on your system. If it doesn’t, check if the %PATH% environment variable contains GTK+’s bin directory, so it knows where to look. Also, make sure your GTK+ runtime environment is up to date. I’ve found that the one that comes with Gaim is pretty recent, and it’s also available as a separate download.
There, I just saved you about 8 megs of disk space and a whole lot of duplicate configuration issues. My next post will be less geeky. Well, maybe.