So, Down­load Day 2008 is done, and they man­aged slightly over eight mil­lion down­loads. That’s got to be enough to get them the record. I hope you all contributed.

Of course, there cur­rently is no record for the most down­loaded piece of soft­ware in a single day, so it’s not a hard one to set. The ques­tion is: how long will it stand? And will it be Fire­fox 4 that breaks it?

At some point in the next day or so Fire­fox 3 will be released, and they’re aim­ing to estab­lish the record for the most down­loaded piece of soft­ware within a single day of release.

Fire­fox 3 is a great browser; a notice­able improve­ment over ver­sion 2, and much bet­ter than any of Microsoft’s efforts (and I’m speak­ing as a web-​​user here, not just as an open-​​source advoc­ate.) Even if you can’t see what all the fuss is about I’d encour­age you to find out, and if you do it sooner rather than later, you’ll be part of a set­ting a world record.

So head over to their world record attempt site and grab the browser if it’s up by the time you read this, or pledge to do so if it’s not. It’ll be worth the few minutes of your time it’ll take.

Edit: It’s now live, you can go and grab it any time you like, and if you do so before 6PM BST tomor­row (18^th June 2008) it’ll count for the record attempt.

Edit 2008÷06÷18 12:00: Three quar­ters of the way through, and just shy of six-​​million down­loads. It’s a great fig­ure already, and there’s still six hours to go. If you haven’t got hold of it yet, you haven’t missed the chance, and the serv­ers all seem to be cop­ing much bet­ter now.

So, I’m a soft­ware engin­eer. I work for a large-​​ish com­pany that is a major player in the digital TV arena, and I think I’m con­sidered pretty good at my job. I think I’m paid slightly shy of aver­age for a developer of my age and exper­i­ence, but I like my job and my co-​​workers enough to let that slide. I have a reas­on­ably good income and no depend­ants, and if I wasn’t pay­ing out a stag­ger­ingly huge amount in debt repay­ments each month, I’d be very com­fort­able (rather than just pretty comfortable.)

So far, so aver­age. So can someone tell me how the hell I earn more than Wil fuck­ing Wheaton? This guy was in Star Trek for cry­ing out loud! And on top of that (or, depend­ing on your opin­ion of Wes, des­pite it,) he’s grown into one of the best, most nat­ural writers of the blog­ging gen­er­a­tion. Oh, and he’s a great spokes­man for unashamed geeks every­where too; I mean, did you hear his PAX key­note?

Hon­estly, it’s a sign of his tal­ent that it’s been years since I’ve thought of him as “that kid who played the annoy­ing one in TNG.”

So how come he writes enter­tain­ing, uplift­ing, even self-​​validating blog posts every day¹, pro­duces books that are truly a joy to read, is cap­able of whip­ping a con­fer­ence full of high income geeks into a frenzy, and yet is still wor­ried about how to provide for his kids, while I show up to an office every day, write code designed to make rich people richer, which may or may not ever be released, and some­how earn enough that my biggest worry is whether I can afford that new mon­itor this month without cur­tail­ing my pizza habit?

Is that fair?

Hell no. So here’s my plan. I bought “Just a Geek” ages ago, but have lost my copy some­where along the way. I bor­rowed “Dan­cing Bare­foot” once, and to my shame have neither bought nor Read “Hap­pi­est Days of Our Lives” yet. So I’m going to buy all three of them. This month. I’m not doing this as a char­ity thing; I genu­inely love his writ­ing, and want to own his books; I’ve just not got around to to buy­ing them. So I want the books, I’m sure he’d like the money. It’s a win/​win situation.

Because I know he’d hate the thought of people buy­ing his writ­ing out of char­ity, I’m not going to sug­gest every­one goes out and does the same, but I will point you all at his blog. Add it to your blog-​​roll (if you haven’t already.) Read it for a while. I’m pretty sure that, if you’re a geek or a gamer or just love good writ­ing, you’ll end up buy­ing his books for reas­ons he won’t hate.

Go. Now. Read.

1. I smile to myself, genu­inely cheered, when he writes about his kids — who I’ve obvi­ously never met — get­ting into role­play­ing, or Monty Python, or the right com­puter games, or any of the other things I love. [↩]

Just before Christ­mas, I switched my news aggreg­ator from Bloglines to News­Gator, largely because their iPhone cli­ent is bet­ter. Being a Mac user, I also grabbed their fam­ous OSX cli­ent, Net­News­Wire. In all it’s been a very sat­is­fact­ory switch; News­Gator for iPhone works great for check­ing my feeds on the train (which was the main driver for my get­ting the iPhone in the first place,) and Net­News­Wire lives up to its repu­ta­tion — it really does have a great news read­ing inter­face. Also, being a Mac only applic­a­tion, it cuts down on the tempta­tion to read dur­ing work hours (on my Work PC,) which can only be a good thing.

The only fly in the oint­ment was that Net­News­Wire was share­ware, so I was going to have to pay to read my news. After about an hour using it, I knew that it was well worth the ask­ing price and that I wasn’t going to resent pay­ing at all, so that ceased being a prob­lem, and I got stuck into my trial period.

Hav­ing already decided that Net­News­Wire was worth my money, it came as a bit of a shock to dis­cover that some­where dur­ing my trial period News­Gator have made it free. That’s right dur­ing exactly the right thirty days, a fant­astic piece of soft­ware has transitioned from Share­ware to Freeware.

I know I might some­times over­use the phrase, but, you know what? Sod it, this time it’s really appropriate:

FTW!

Yes, I’m still alive, and yes I’m still blogging.

It’s been a bit quiet for the past few days because I’ve been sort­ing out some server issues. Basic­ally, my host ran out of memory on Fri­day morn­ing, and I’ve been get­ting it upgraded and try­ing to sort out some of the memory use and per­form­ance issues since then. It’s noth­ing par­tic­u­larly huge, but it’s taken all of my non-​​work/​non-​​gaming time. All the soft­ware work is now done, but there’s a server migra­tion still to hap­pen, that’ll come up when my host­ing com­pany (the excel­lent RimuHost­ing can sort out some trouble they’re hav­ing with broken Intel BIOSs. But since that’s almost entirely man­aged by them, it shouldn’t take any more time out of my blogging.

While I was at it, I installed a couple of plu­gins for Mov­able Type 4, which should give quite a bit more flex­ib­il­ity in how you sign in while com­ment­ing. Not that any­one ever does.