With relatively little fanfare, Firefox 2.0 was released last week. (Yes, I know, IE 7 was also released recently. Does anybody actually still use IE???) Firefox 2.0 brings some very nice improvements. My favorite feature is session recovery. Although Firefox is generally pretty stable, it nevertheless suffers the occasional crash. Thanks to session recovery, it is now possible after a restart to continue where one left off before the crash. Firefox can also be configured to always start with the previous session, which is a tremendous improvement....

Last week I added a new device to the list of hacked devices in my house, next to my hacked Tivo and Xbox: the Buffalo WHR-G54S wireless router. My D-Link DI-624 router had been giving me trouble for a while, and since I had heard a lot about the various open source firmware alternatives that are available for many routers, I decided to give this a try. One of the most popular router firmwares is DD-WRT, which is based on the original Linksys firmware that Linksys had to release as open source in order to comply with the GPL....

Salon.com posted a very good interview with Richard Dawkins (this link goes to the more readable printer friendly page). As usual, Dawkins comes across as sharp and non-compromising on his views. He also defends his confrontational position on religion - after all, he has been characterized as “Darwin’s Rottweiler” and is certainly one of the most famous atheists in the world. One quote I particularly liked (even though I have heard this in similar form before):...

I just came across SkepticWiki - the Encyclopedia of Science and Critical Thinking. This looks like a comprehensive resource for all skeptics out there, and the articles on the Wiki debunk such popular myths as UFOs, alternative medicine, pseudohistory (such as Holocaust Denial), and of course religion. The amount of information on the site (both in terms of breadth and depth) is very impressive!

I’ve been working with Ruby (mostly Ruby on Rails) for over a year now, both at work and at home, but I still haven’t settled on a Ruby IDE or editor. Most of my development is done in Linux, but lately I’ve started working in Mac OSX, as I have recently adopted an old PowerBook G4 at work, which then got me hooked and prompted me to go out and buy a Macbook for home as well… (more about my initial experience with OSX later)....