Archive for the 'Software' Category

I just found out about Perl 5.10, which has been out for some time now (released on December 18 … how did I miss this?). The perldelta documentation goes into detail on what’s new, but here’s a brief overview of some of the features I find most appealing:

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A new build of Paper Plus is now available. Here’s what has changed in this release:

New Features

• Drag and drop support is now available for adding files to the current list

Bug Fixes

• The “Add Files to List” action could incorrectly add file entries that were already in the list (causing duplicates)
• Files with a “jpeg” extension weren’t always being handled correctly
• The “Globally Set Position” dialog box did not have an appropriate access key for the drop-down menu

Miscellaneous Fixes

• When removing a file from the wallpaper list, the next item in the list is now automatically selected
• The accelerator for applying the selected wallpaper is now the Enter key instead of Ctrl + A
• The “Save wallpaper list automatically on exit” option is now disabled by default
• Changed the default button in the “Recycle File” confirmation dialog to “Yes”

There’s an interesting article at InformationWeek about the new Windows architecture that Microsoft is developing. Windows 7, which is slated to be the successor to Vista, will use a new “MinWin” architecture. Essentially, the Windows core will be stripped down to the bare essentials, and additional functionality will be supplied through modules. According to the article, Eric Traut, a Microsoft distinguished engineer, demoed a version of the Windows core running with only a 25 MB footprint (as opposed to the 4 GB footprint of Vista).

I think this is a step in the right direction. Hard drive size increases have made sloppy programming, resulting in software bloat, much more prevalent. It’s time to step back, trim the fat, and work towards leaner software.

There are a few gripes I’ve got with iTunes, all of which revolve around my subscriptions to podcasts:

1. Large downloads freeze iTunes (and sometimes the entire system) upon completion.

When a large (~250 to 500 MB) video podcast file has completed downloading, iTunes will completely freeze up. It feels to me like this hang is related to copying the file from a temporary download location to the intended destination (which is undoubtedly what iTunes is doing). Seeing as iTunes is a multi-threaded application, this should not, under any circumstance, happen. It should spawn a child thread to do the copy operation in the background, so that I can still use the application. Every once in a while, I even see my entire system hang up during this operation, which is doubly bad.

2. Some video files cannot be recycled immediately after viewing them.

After completing a video podcast, I find that I cannot immediately recycle the corresponding file from within iTunes. If I try to do so, the entry in iTunes is removed, but the file does not get removed! To recycle the file properly, I have to shut down iTunes, start it back up, and delete the entry. Somewhere a handle isn’t being released properly, and the file remains locked. Again, this is a bug that could easily be solved.

3. The Windows screen saver screws up video playback.

If you have iTunes installed on a Windows system, try this experiment. Get a video file through iTunes (a video podcast for example), and start it playing. Pause the video and walk away from your computer for a while. Allow the screen saver to turn on and, when it has, come back to your computer. When the screen saver is cleared, try to play the video again. What happens? No video! This particular bug has existed for years (I’ve seen forum references to this bug as far back as iTunes 5 and 6), and it’s apparently a known bug at Apple. That they don’t get around to fixing it is very intriguing to me.

It seems as if Sun Microsystems has purchased MySQL. I don’t fully understand the motivation behind this purchase, but Sun must have some plan; otherwise they wouldn’t have paid one billion dollars for the company. In my opinion, Sun doesn’t have the greatest track record in software, so it should be interesting to see what happens as a result of this change. According to the official MySQL post:

Will MySQL’s support for other programming languages and operating systems now be given less attention? Absolutely not. MySQL is still being managed by the same people, and the charter is still the same.

We can only hope.

If there has ever been proof that we are living in the end times, it’s this: Internet Explorer 8 has passed the Acid2 test. This is the scariest thing I’ve heard all year.

Interestingly enough, IE8 only passes this test in ‘Standards Mode.’ From what I’ve gathered through brief searching around the web, this appears to be an IE8-only feature that requires some ‘magic meta-tag’ to enable, though I’m only getting the sketchiest details. The comments in this post shed a little light, but not as much as I might have hoped for.

A new build of Paper Plus is now available over at Born Geek. This release fixes a small bug.

On an unrelated note, I’ve updated this blog’s WordPress install to 2.3.1. Please let me know if you spot anything out of the ordinary. I try to be as careful as possible when upgrading to new WordPress releases, but they make it painfully difficult to upgrade, so something could always slip by.