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 (18th 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.