In case you haven't heard, Apple has released a public beta of Safari, which is their web browser.

The surprising news is that it supports Windows.

I have to admit that this is a really good move for Apple. Their software has been intriguing me quite a bit lately, and watching John Lam demo Silverlight on a Mac certainly doesn't make me not want to try it out for myself. My only experience with Mac OS X is via tech support while I was in college. We had an iMac desktop in the office for the rare occasion when a Mac user would call in asking for help getting their LAN connection set up (note, the rarity had more to do with the lack of Macs on the network than the lack of problems). The system ran quite slowly because it didn't have enough RAM and it didn't have any software on it. The dock was pretty cool, but it didn't seem to add much value at the time.

Things seem to have changed, though. I would really, really, REALLY like to try out Quicksilver. The Parallels software looks really cool, too. I like Windows too much to switch, but the capability to run both Windows and OS X side by side is very attractive. Everybody seems to like TextMate a lot, too. I do wonder sometimes if I just want Windows ports of these programs or if it really is OS X that seems so nice.

For the time being, I'll probably still stick with Windows Vista. I just like using custom hardware too much to lock myself into Apple hardware right now (that, and I hate not being able to resize windows from the top). If they ever come out with a virtualization option to run OS X on Windows, I would probably give that a try. I would encourage you to check out HardOCP's 30 Days with Mac OS X article if you've been curious what running OS X might be like.

For the past month or so, my internet connection at home has been dropping constantly. There hasn't really seemed to be any rhyme or reason to it either. What's interesting is that one of my neighbors with a similar network setup was experiencing similar behavior.

I decided to take this as an opportunity try out some new firmware for my router (a Linksys WRT54G). I first decided to check for updated official firmware. Luckily enough, there was some updated firmware, though it wasn't what I would call current (i.e. 2005).

Taking a failure to update as a bad sign, I instead took Scott Hanselman's advice and decided to try some alternate firmware. So far, it is working with flying colors and my router suddenly has all sorts of new functionality. It is a little frustrating that the hardware could support this out of the box, but the firmware wouldn't allow it.

Here's what the web administration tool looks like with the DD-WRT firmware installed:

Much snazzier than the "official" firmware.

If you're interested in trying out DD-WRT, look no further than http://www.dd-wrt.com/. I was able to find plenty of resources online for getting DD-WRT working, too. Hopefully, this will fix some of the connection issues I've been having.

UPDATE - Interestingly enough, Lifehacker named DD-WRT their number two network utility of their top 10 network utilities.

Here's the link: http://worsethanfailure.com/Articles/Film-At-1100.aspx

Wow. We're famous.

My cubicle neighbor pointed it out to me.

Don't worry, I did this over my lunch break. Because I'm a nerd.

A few weeks ago, I posted on the Stack Style Tabs extension for Firefox. I used it for a little while and I realized that it wasn't exactly what I was looking for... I think it was because I couldn't use my keyboard arrow keys in addition to ALT-TABing around. What I really wanted was a keyboard-centric way to quickly navigate through my tabs.

Today, I was going through my feeds and noticed a post from Lifehacker on a new experimental feature that Google was working on to allow you to navigate through search results using j/k and a few other keyboard shortcuts. My first thought was that this would be great, because I use the provided keyboard shortcuts to navigate through my feeds in Google Reader all the time. Unfortunately, it was a little rough around the edges still.

Then I saw a comment to the Lifehacker post on vimperator. I had seen posts on vimperator before and had even tried it, but it was a little too weird for me at the time. I mean, I still use my mouse occassionally; however, the comment mentioned that you could type :set guioptions=mTs and get your menu and toolbars back.

So I thought, eh, why not. I'll give it a shot again.

So far, I'm liking it.

First off, I'll recommend turning your menu and toolbars back on using the guioptions setting. It makes the transition to vimperator a little easier. Once you've done that, just start browsing.

Here are a couple of my favorite features so far:

1. If you press f, you'll get Hit-a-Hint like labels pop up on all of the anchor tags which will be numbered. If you press the number in the label, it will navigate to that link. No mouse!
2. If you press b (comes from the vim idea of buffers instead of tabs), you'll get a list of your tabs! Just press the number and it will open that tab up! Awesome! THIS is what I wanted for a Firefox extension.

Here's a screenshot of it in action:

There are a lot of other options that are probably great, but I still need to spend more time learning them. I encourage you to give it a try, too. Don't worry if it seems a little overwhelming. You can always turn to vimperator's help, which is excellent.

This post has absolutely nothing to do with anything. Just some ramblings from my brain this morning.

I got to work a few minutes ago and the first thing I do every morning is go pour myself a cup of coffee. The coffee doesn't bother me too much - at least after I pour some sugar and cream in it and it looks more like milk than coffee. However, others at work despise the stuff. It's the typical coffee you might find at any other corporate office... except maybe Starbucks.

That's when the ironic thought hit me.

What if the coffee that Starbucks has for their employees is the same coffee sludge that every other corporate office has? Wouldn't that be hilarious? Wouldn't it be... ironic?

It must be too early in the morning to form coherent thoughts.

I've already shared with you about how cubicles really can be annoying when you sit next to the loudest two individuals in the world.

Now, I'd like to point you to a video that Long Zheng posted (from istartedsomething) from when Conan O'Brien visited Intel headquarters.

Here are some similarities between Intel and where I work:

1. Cubicles really are like parking garages, except that you have assigned spots.
2. Cubicles really don't have much color or individuality (I do have a National Geographic map on my cubicle wall, though - yay!).
3. People really are picky about their chairs. Seriously picky.

Here are some differences between Intel and where I work:

1. No cafeteria.
2. No "ultra-clean" factory.
3. Hairnets only come into play on Halloween.
4. I haven't ever seen kids on a field trip, though we do have kids come around our cubes to sell cookies sometimes (and on Halloween).

One other thing - I think I've met Bill Lumbergh's clone in our cubicle farm. I'm guessing any and all work environments that make use of cubes have their Bill Lumberghs.

I just finished reading this post from the BCLTeam blog on the Silverlight 1.1 Alpha release that was announced at MIX07. It sounds like there is a new security model that is being introduced with Silverlight as a replacement for CAS (Code Access Security). I haven't done any research yet, but it looks like we'll be able to just decorate methods with attributes like Transparent or SafeCritical.

From just a cursory glance, it sounds like this will be much easier to work with than CAS. I couldn't ever really follow CAS very well - usually I just followed the FxCop guidelines and left it at that. I found the MSDN documentation on developing Silverlight applications with the .NET Framework, but there isn't much on the security side of things yet. I'm interested to see if Microsoft will start to move away from CAS to a more developer-friendly model.

Sounds interesting.