I guess Adobe AIR does not auto-detect updates to itself on the Mac (still need to check Windows boxes). I downloaded the current version from...

Get Adobe AIR

...and found myself updating from the apparently ancient 1.1.0.5790 to 1.5.0.7720.

Turns out that VirtualBox 2.0.2 was released on September 12. I just learned about it tonight while firing it up to check something in Fedora 9.

VirtualBox.org

FYI: Just noticed that...

VirtualBox 2.0.2

...was released on Sept. 12. Its changelog indicates a lot of fixes compared to the 2.0 release on Sept. 4.

Sun released a major update of its free Open Source multi-platform (Windows, Mac OS X, Linux) virtualization software...

Sun Microsystems Unveils xVM VirtualBox 2.0 and New Enterprise Support Subscription

I was pretty impressed with what I saw while testing with Windows and Mac OS X. You can read what I wrote about the 1.6.2 release on O'Reilly's DigitalMedia at...

Google's Chrome browser sure has drawn a lot of attention and speculation for something that mere mortals like most of us have never seen.

A fresh take on the browser

Having a cool comic book to promote the product doesn't hurt of course. Here's my take on it launch: This is all prep for launching the Google Android phones which presumably uses the same browser technology as Chrome. Makes sense, right?

I've been playing with the Opera 9.5.x browser for the past few weeks after having ignored it for the last couple of years. I received a notice that a version 9.5.2 update was available when I fired up Opera this morning. Unfortunately, a lot of other people must be using Opera again too this summer, because I got the Service Temporarily Unavailable message instead of an update download from their opera.releasenotes.org server.

I am pretty happy with iTunes on my Mac. However, I am not nearly as satisfied with Windows Media Player or the Zune Player when I am using a PC running Windows. I noticed that the first release candidate for the Mozilla Songbird project was released a few days ago...

Songbird 0.7 Release Candidate 1 is Available for Testing

Randy Pausch, project lead for the free and Open Source Alice 3D Computer Programming Educational Software passed away earlier today. I posted a few thoughts and pair of links to extended articles about him on the O'Reilly Media News site...

RIP: Randy Pausch - Known for the Alice Project and the Last Lecture

I just downloaded the Windows version of the freeware...

Yahoo! Zimbra Desktop

...which is the only email client that Yahoo! allows IMAP4 access. I have a paid Yahoo! Plus mail account. But, it only provides POP3 server access which is useful for archiving but useless for leaving and managing mail on Yahoo!'s server. I was amused to find that in a turn of events, the desktop client looks like the Yahoo! Mail web interface.

TrueCrypt 6.0a was just released with a couple of bug fixes on the heels of the 6.0 release on July 4. TrueCrypt is an Open Source multiplatform (Windows, Mac OS X, Linux) encryption tool that can create either encrypted container files (which can contain multiple files within it like a virtual disk) or whole-drive encryption.

I'm putting together a Freeware/Open Source security tools for Windows list and TrueCrypt will definitely be on that list.

I just noticed that Audacity 1.3.5 (beta) was released on May 12. Audacity is a powerful Open Source multiplatform (Mac, Windows, Linux) audio editor. As you might guess, I'm making another attempt to figure out a fast and easy way to create regular (say weekly) podcasts. Basically, I don't want to work too hard or spend a lot of time creating podcasts. If it is difficult and takes too much time, that will seem more like work than a fun project :-)

I blogged about the Open Source Census project in the O'Reilly Media Inside Port 25 blog earlier this week. The project claims that the tool (written in Ruby) is non-invasive. But, I'm still not comfortable letting an unknown app crawl around my computers. I think I'll try it on a virtual machine that can be tossed out if neeed be.

EverNote has become a mainstay in my toolkit. It is still in beta, but the it is now available for everyone to signup. And, more importantly, they have a business model to drive revenue. The free service is limited to 40MB of monthly uploads. That seems pretty generous. However, for $5/month or $45/year, you get a 500MB/month upload allowance, more security, and support.

Can't believe I did this. I mentioned that twhirl can now play Seesmic videos but never talked about twhirl itself here before (I think). I wrote about it as part of an Adobe Air blog/article for O'Reilly's Digital Media Center though :-) So...

twhirl

OK, after a long wait, Mozilla's Firefox 3 is out. Firefox 2 became a disappointment for some people (incuding me) because of memory management and stability issues. A lot of hope was placed in...

Mozilla Firefox 3

So, now it's out and I am NOT upgrading my production desktops and notebooks (Windows and Mac) from 2 to 3. Here's why...

The popular Java-based Azureus Open Source bittorrent client has a new name and mission.

Vuze 3.1

...was just released with a social-networking aspecct that lets you share a download with a friend and gives them a Friend Boost to help them download the file faster. I only use torrents to download Linux distros, so I'm probably out of luck. Let me know if you are able to take advantage of this social torrent feature though.

I tried Sun's VirtualBox 1.6.2 on an Apple iMac running Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) first. So, today, I installed it on an old Athlon-64 PC running Windows Vista Ultimate Edition. I downloaded the 64-bit Athlon binary first. However, it told me that I wasn't using the correct platform. I assume that what this version requires running the 64-bit version of Windows XP or Vista (which makes sense). So, I installed the Windows 32-bit version next.

Sun bought the VirtualBox open source virtualization project a while back. The project just released a maintenance update (version 1.6.2) today. It can be found at...

VirtualBox