Thursday, September 11, 2008

The Mac is finally on the network.

Until tonight, my Mac Mini had not been connected to the Internet since I bought it when I moved into my house 16 months ago. This can be attributed to a few factors:
  1. I actually tried to connect it to the Internet several times without success.
  2. I'm lazy and give up easily.
  3. I have 3 other computers I could use instead.
I finally figured out today (technically yesterday) that the version of OS X that shipped with my computer last year still included the "old" Airport software which doesn't support WPA wireless encryption, which I use on my network. I temporarily disabled the encryption, connected to Software Update to acquire the new software, and then was able to connect after re-enabling WPA. I'm not sure why I never even tried connecting unencrypted or with WEP (which the old software supported). In any case, all is now well.

Wednesday, September 03, 2008

And then there was Chrome...

Not more than a few days after my last post about upcoming upgrades to Microsoft and Mozilla web browsers, Google surprised us all with a beta release of their own browser: Chrome. Features include a novel tab organization scheme, Incognito browsing (like IE8's InPrivate), domain highlighting in the URL (also available in IE8), an "Omnibox" address bar (mixes history and search), a novel "new tab" page, a simpler interface, and a slew of interesting "about:" pages. While the new browser is fairly sleek, it is not as full-featured as the big boys. Also, even though the project is open source, it does not (yet) seem like developers can write extensions like Firefox allows.