After a busy day of work I was rather happy to see that my copy of Emmanuel Goldstein's new book entitled "The Best Of 2600: A Hacker Odyssey" had arrived in the mail today.

I have been really looking forward to the book for awhile now and I must say that they were not kidding at all when they said it was going to be as thick as a Math book.

Now if you will excuse me... I have a bunch of reading to do. :)

I thought I would make a quick post on this since some people might be interested to know that first version of GNU IceCat 3, the GNU version of the Firefox browser, was released today.

If you are interesed you can also read the release discussion on the bug-gnuzilla mailing list.

I am compiling it right now and it will soon be replacing Firefox 3 has my default browser.

The latest version of the Phoronix Test Suite, an open source benchmarking tool, was released today and I figured that I would download it and give it a try.

The Phoronix Test Suite is packed with 57 tests that have been grouped into 26 suites which range from audio-encoding to gaming performance. The suite is quite easy to use although you should make sure you have a few gigabytes of hard drive space free because it will need to download over 2GB if you want to run all of the tests.

I have recently begun to seriously think about replacing my Sansa e250R v2 with another portable player that actually has support for Ogg Vorbis.

I really like the Sansa overall because it has great battery life and does what it was designed to do rather well.

However, my music collection gradually moved completely to Ogg Vorbis over the past year and Rockbox does not support the v2 model so I am now forced to re-rip my music to MP3 format whenever I want to add something new to the player (which can be a bit of an annoyance at times).

I browsed through the Xiph.Org Foundation's Portable Players wiki page earlier and noticed that the Cowon iAUDIO 7 looks like it just might be an excellent replacement.

Does anyone have any hands on experience with the iAUDIO 7 or have something else they would personally recommend?

I just realized that Arch Linux's newest install CD was released yesterday.

If you are interested in trying this great GNU/Linux distribution, this is the perfect opportunity for you to do so.

I'll probably download and burn a copy myself just in case I end up needing it at some point. Come to think of it, I might just install it on my sister's computer if she feels that she is comfortable enough with GNU/Linux to move away from Ubuntu.

Changes since the last 'stable' release: