Just over 10 hours to go, and Firefox 3 has already been downloaded 4.5 million times. It’s been downloaded over 2 million times in the US alone.
Keep checking the Download Day 2008 site for the latest updates.
Hmm…this is curious. Earlier today, the deadline was 10:00AM PST on 6/18/08. It seems that the timeline has been shifted back an hour and 16 minutes until 11:16AM PST. Weird…I wonder if they’re gaming the system or trying to compensate for downed/drowned servers from this morning. Interesting…
In any case, I guess that means there’s more like 11.5 hours to go.
Today marks the release of Firefox 3. In celebration of the release (and presumably an ingenious marketing ploy), Mozilla is celebrating Download Day 2008. Mozilla is asking people to
Please download Firefox 3 by 17:00 UTC on June 18, 2008. That’s 10:00 a.m. in Mountain View, 1:00 p.m. in Toronto, 2:00 p.m. in Rio de Janeiro, 7:00 p.m. in Paris, Madrid, Berlin, Rome and Warsaw, 9:00 p.m. in Moscow, and June 19, 2008 at 1:00 a.m. in Beijing and 2:00 a.m. in Tokyo.
So that they can set the record for most software downloaded in 24 hours. Their hope is to set a Guinness World Record. That shouldn’t be too difficult, because I think that’s a brand new category. But if they play their cards right, it might be a difficult record to break.
According to the statistics as I write this, about 1.87 million copies have been downloaded in the last 8 hours. That’s not bad, working out to about:
- 310k downloads/hour
- 5.2k downloads/minute
- 86 downloads/second
If that pace keeps up, they should have around 5.5 million downloads by the end of 24 hours.
Anyways, you should do your part to become part of the record and download Firefox 3.
My friend Andrew introduced me to this website. You’ll only have an appreciation for Goosh.org if you’re kinda geeky and have an appreciation for a Unix shell-like environment. Pretty creative, and definitely geeky.
Just type your search query at the command line prompt. As the instructions indicate, you can also type “h” or “help” to get help.
A bit like Unix, it is slightly case sensitive. The menu options are case sensitive, so “h” is not the same as “H” and “help” isn’t the same as “Help,” but the search terms are based on Google’s engine, so they are not case sensitive. So when searching for “wongside” turns up the same results as for “Wongside.”
WWDC, the Apple Worldwide Developers conference is tomorrow. I can’t wait. The rumor mill has been spilling thoughts of a 3G iPhone, so I’m excited to see what they release. Yay!
Ars Technica has an article on a relatively new company called Backblaze that intends to make backing up one’ files easy and transparent.
I think the concept is really cool, and great for people who don’t want to deal with the hassle of backing up their machines with DVDs or tape. Everyone knows that’s a pain. I like the fact that they do versioning of your files, keeping daily and weekly versions of your files. This means that if data was inadvertently erased last week, I could still go back and get a prior version without losing my data.
I also like the idea that it’s only $5/month, for unlimited storage. That seems pretty reasonable to me. I also think their restore options are pretty cool. You can download files directly from the website for free, or you can pay to have DVDs or a USB hard drive mailed to you. Sounds pretty good to me.
Right now, it’s invitation only because it’s still in beta, but I’m excited about the possibilities.
I read an article over at Ars Technica about Windows 7 the other day. Honestly, it sounds like a disappointment to me. I recognize they still have a couple of years to go (it’s not scheduled to be released until 2010), but if the latest and greatest feature of Windows 7 is multi-touch, we’re in for some serious disappointment. I mean, what happened to WinFS? The much lauded new File System that was supposed to arrive with Vista (Longhorn). They’ve got an extra 3 years, and they still can’t get it out the door? What’s the deal?
I guess this is why I don’t own MSFT stock.
B&H has another great article on audio compression. I learned a lot from it. Maybe you can too 
Google is officially allowing users to sync their Google Calendar with their Outlook Calendar. There’s a help page with a utility that you download that syncs your calendars. There are three options on how to synch:
- 2-Way Sync to have information from both calendars completely in sync
- 1-Way Google to Outlook to have all Google Calendar events on Outlook
- 1-Way Outlook to Google to have all Outlook events on Google Calendar
Pretty slick!
All you have to do is download the utility, give it your username and password (it works with Google Apps for your Domain by the way), choose a sync method, and then it goes off and downloads and/or uploads all your data for you to sync your calendars. Sweet! I’ll keep you posted on how it works.
Oh, one caveat, according to this page it only works with Outlook 2003 and 2007. I’m sure Microsoft is happy about them not supporting earlier versions of Outlook especially with all the trouble they’re having getting Vista to sell.
I don’t know about you, but there are certain things on my hard drive that just need to be encrypted. Back in the day (like the days of Windows 98 and 2000), I used PGP to do file and e-mail encryption. It was provided for free from MIT at a now defunct website. Since then, PGP has had a wild ride, both as a piece of software and as a company. It was bought by Network Associates, where it languished and “suffered a near death experience at the hands of NAI.”
Now PGP has been upgraded and has a new home at PGP Corp. But I’m not sure that I’m a huge fan of the new version. I’ve got version 9.6 installed on my machine, but the new interface is a little confusing to me. Things aren’t as simple as they once were. (I guess this can happen when you skip three generations of software–I haven’t used PGP since version 6.5.8 or something like that.)
So I was ecstatic to discover another solution called TrueCrypt that is completely free and open source. Its mechanism is different from PGP’s, but it still accomplishes the same purpose. TrueCrypt enables me to create a file on my hard drive that can be mounted as a separate, secure drive. So even though it’s technically a file, to my computer, it looks like a hard drive. I can store any file on it, and it can be any size I want.
It’s a pretty cool little piece of software, so if you have encryption needs like I do, I’d highly recommend that you look into it.
So I know I’m over a week late, but work’s been really crazy the last 2 weeks or so. But Apple released their iPhone SDK on March 6 in case you were hiding in a cave like me. You can watch Steve Jobs, Phil Schiller, and Scott Forstall all give their presentation on the iPhone update here.
I thought it was ingenious that they decided to release the SDK early to a few companies like EA, Salesforce.com, AOL, epocrates, and Sega. The companies all had 2 weeks to build an app for the iPhone using the SDK. And I’ve gotta say they came up with some pretty nifty apps. I think the coolest prospect is the gaming on the iPhone. As one of the presenters said, “These aren’t cell phone games.”
The fact that Apple hosts the app and makes it available to all iPhone users is pretty awesome. 30% of the revenue doesn’t seem that bad of a take either. It almost makes me want to become an Apple developer. Now, if I only had a software idea that could make me some money.