Good news from my local ISP, Cox Communications will be boosting their speeds in June.

Cox’s Preferred package, which is known as the company’s flagship product available across Fairfax County for under $40, will soon feature enhanced speeds of up to 5 Mbps per second download and 2 Mbps upload. The Preferred package is available to bundled customers (those who take video or telephone in addition to Internet) for $39.95 a month. Cox’s Premier package customers will also receive a boost in speed. With the new speed enhancement, the service will offer customers speeds of up to 15 Mbps downstream and 2 Mbps upstream. The Premier package is available to bundled customers at a cost of $54.95 a month.

Looks like the competition is heating up while Verizon is still digging in my front lawn for their FiOS service. Found via Brian’s Infinite Abyss.

Wow, this is a bit of a shocker: Apple to Use Intel Microprocessors Beginning in 2006. This rumor has been floating around the web for a while now and thus far I’ve chosen to ignore it since I, mistakenly, thought that it was false. But Steve just confirmed it at his WWDC keynote. Personally, I’m not too happy about the switch, but if Leander Kahney is right then this could be a good thing for Apple. Now that I think of it, more folks with Mac OS X installed will be much better for all of us — though with Apple presenting a bigger target to the virus writers and haxors, they’ll need to continue to focus on security. Obviously, Apple doesn’t want to see their HW revenues dry-up, so I suspect that Mac OS X86 will only run on Apple HW (it’s just that the Apple HW will have an Intel CPU inside instead of a PowerPC one). Thanks to NextStep’s support for fat binaries (the executables for multiple platforms stored in a single bundle), Mac OS X applications will have a single instance which runs on both PPC and x86, making it easier on Apple’s current customers (not sure yet how troublesome this will be for developers — Steve says that XCode will take care of it). Overall, this could be a monumental mistake or an amazing (and risky) gamble for Apple. I guess we’ll just have to wait and see. Interestingly enough, Apple’s stock is only slightly down after the announcement; atleast the investors aren’t spooked by the switch.

It looks like DHH was able to influence Dave Thomas into releasing a Beta version of Agile Web Development with Rails. I purchased the PDF+book edition to show my support and, frankly, I am not disappointed. Though there are some layout and typographical issues, the content is great. I feel like I’m finally getting up to speed on Rails. I’m currently up to Chapter 5, where the book dives into the development of an e-commerce web-app. I’ll post a review once I finish the book. But, as of right now, I recommend that anyone interested in developing web-apps with Rails definitely pick-up a copy.

Backpack is finally live and available to the public. I’ve already signed up for my free account. As I suspected it is quite a nice web-based PIM (personal information manager) that works quite well with email (both sending and receiving) and sends reminders to your mobile. Though as Russ has pointed out it’s not quite as useful as it could be for mobiles. Still I think that the AJAX interface is quite slick and it really shows off the power of building web-apps with Rails.

On Friday, FedEx delivered my copy of Mac OS X Tiger (the family pack since I have a few computers to upgrade). I spent most of Saturday backing up all of our photos, music and data to DVDs. It ended up being a total 5 DVD-Rs and 1 CD-R — it’s amazing the amount of stuff you accumulate in only 18 months! On Sunday morning I installed Tiger then restored our files. So far, no issues to report of. The 15” Powerbook neither feels slower or faster than with Panther installed. Spotlight is quite nice, though now I’m waiting for the next revision (hopefully, as this guy says, we’ll see GPS enabled Powerbooks and automatic tagging of our files with location-aware meta-data). Dashboard is neat, though it seems to me to be mostly a gimic. Though I definitely appreciate the built-in dictionary/thesaurus. I’ve only briefly played with Automator, but it appears to be a powerful tool for scripting actions (and much easier to use than AppleScript). Unfortunately, I hate the look of the new version of Mail. And it appears a bit slower for some reason — I’m not entirely sure why, perhaps it’s just my perception because I hate the UI so much. But Quicktime 7 is sweet, the new H.264 codec is amazing — the quality, the smart bandwidth usage, what else can I say other than it’s great! I haven’t used the new features of iChat yet (though one reason is that I don’t have a G5 to host video conferencing even though I do have an iSight). In particular, I was looking forward to some of the new developer tools like CoreData, CoreImage and CoreVideo. Unfortunately, due to work and home improvement tasks, I’ve not yet had a chance to check them out. Overall, I think Tiger is an excellent OS upgrade and well worth the money. Apple is definitely leading the way here — I wish KDE/GNOME would ‘borrow’ some of the ideas from Apple instead of waiting for them to by synthesized through Microsoft first.