From time to time, we all change browsers. It’s either to experiment with something new or flee from something distasteful.

This week I fled from Safari.

It’s because I visit hundreds of Websites and their links everyday. I go into uncharted territory. My favorite RSS reader, the free, open source Vienna, doesn’t care what the selected Website is going to do to my browser, and for too long now I have had just too many crashes with Safari. Of course, that’s a real pain in my line of work because my tabs are my queue of stories. After a crash, I have to get back to the state I was in so I can continue to work. As a result, a crash is just plain unacceptable.

For the last week, I have been using OmniWeb 5.7, and it’s hasn’t crashed once. Nada. Zero. It’s been a joy to use thanks to the thumbnail tabs that give me a visual reminder of the pages I want to re-visit and perhaps work on next.

Safari is a great browser, don’t get me wrong. Both OmniWeb and Safari use Webkit as their rendering engine, so I’ll guess that OmniWeb is just a little better coded. Whatever the case, I’m using OmniWeb and loving it. YMMV.

Last week my wife attended JavaOne in San Francisco. I mentioned a few things in last week’s blog, but there’s one more item to attend to. At WWDC last year, Apple told developers that there would be no 64-bit Carbon. Only Cocoa would be converted to 64-bit. I was in that session, and wrote about it obliquely at Hidden Dimensions. Basically, you would have thought Apple had executed Al Gore. Apple speakers were cornered, and there were harsh words.

The same thing happened at JavaOne last week in a session devoted to Java and Mac OS X. The two speakers were from Oracle and accompanied by a rather young fellow from Apple who clearly didn’t have the authority to speak for Apple. What came up in the session was the fact that, a year after Java 6 was released, Apple finally got around to Java 6 for Mac OS X, but only on Intel and only on 64-bit Intel. That irked a lot of people in the session, and they let the poor Apple and Oracle guys have it.

In my mind, the issue is embracing a community as a partner instead of setting one’s own agenda. That’s important because Apple has a lot at stake in the Java community. It’s a preferred platform for development (Nimbus, for example), a lot of the computers on stage and in the audiences were Macs, and Apple loves to cite how Java just works on Mac OS X.

Back in the days of Classic, it took Apple a year to certify each major release of Java. With the introduction of a UNIX OS, Mac OS X, the gist was that getting new releases of Java certified on the Mac would be a no-brainer. But, regrettably, we’re back to a one year delay.

Now, Java 7 is out with some very exciting new capabilities.

So. Back to the partnership issue. When a company works with a community like Java, it’s important to assume some responsibility and leadership. Abandoning one segment for inscrutable reasons embarrasses all concerned. You don’t just go your own way and lamely say that you don’t have the time or resources. You pick your partners and support them. In this case, Apple has made a visible misstep in the Java community, and when that happens the community looks for a new bride, a new champion who works with them instead of acting selfishly.

Did I mention there were more than 15,000 attendees at JavaOne? WWDC has never dreamed of being that big.

There wasn’t a lot of secondary news this week, stuff I call debris. However, I did see one article that I really liked that discussed the future of LTE and WiMax. Both standards are available for long range, wireless, high speed communication. Sprint has already rolled out WiMax, but the major carriers, Verizon and AT&T are looking to use Long Term Evolution (LTE) a 4G technology. The prospects, issues and performance of each technology was looked at in detail. For those who have an iPhone and monitor the developments of wireless technology, this Computerworld story is a great read.

Yesterday, Jacqui Cheng at ars technica wrote a story about an incident in which NBC turned on a broadcast flag and kept Vista customers from recording prime-time TV shows. It may have been an accident since DIRECTV customers were apparently not affected. The story serves to remind us that a lot of the invisible code in Vista is geared towards DRM and that the studios are always balancing their own quest for totalitarian control against the screams and howls of customers.

In related event, I had to complain to the CBS affiliate in Denver about NCIS not being broadcast in HD when it should have been. It turned out, according to a KCNC spokesperson I contacted, that on election nights, CBS does what’s called a squeezeback to preserve bandwidth and make room for election coverage that rides along in the same bandwidth. As a result, there was none left for NCIS in HD! As in the case of NBC, I think it’s a good idea to develop a list of contacts and yell when stuff like this happens. If you don’t, the networks have to conclude that no one notices or cares when they cut corners and we keep on paying.

OK. Time for the debris and dust to settle.

This week, there was some discussion of what might be Apple’s name for the next version of Mac OS X, 10.6. According to one writer who investigated last year, trademark filings show that Apple has only two names left: Lynx and Cougar. The hypothesis was that Apple wouldn’t have two successive releases that start with the letter “L,” but I don’t really believe that. I also doubt that Apple would pay much attention to the current use of the term Cougar as an older woman in search of younger men.

Lynx has two possible connotations. The first is that it’s not a big and powerful as the other cats and names Apple has used. On the other hand, small, fast, and lightweight (compared to Vista) might be a favorable comparison.

JavaOne was held this week at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. My wife attended and passed on her observations to me. First, in the 90s, Apple’s WWDC was very emotionally driven — because the company was desperate for success and survival. About the year 2000, when Apple’s success was modest, yet assured, things got down to business with a more mature atmosphere. However, at JavaOne, my wife still felt that sense of excitement, all things possible, and emotional hype created by Sun. Next, there were a lot of attendees at JavaOne. I don’t have the exact numbers, but from what I heard, the attendance was much higher than WWDC, yet Sun managed to provide decent, edible food. Ever since Apple departed San Jose’s McEnery Convention Center, the WWDC food has been, well, not so great. The photo below summarized how a lot of us have felt recently.

At JavaOne, one would expect to see a sizeable fraction of Apple MacBooks, and there were. Perhaps one in four was the casual, non-scientific count. Who wants to be seen at the JavaOne conference with a dreaded PC notebook? New and important technologies like JRuby and Groovy, scripting for Java, were prominent. Sony Erisscon appears ready to embrace Java for a new mobile phone.

Don’t let anyone kid you. While Apple developers work with Objective-C, out in the enterprise, military and government communities, C++ and Java are the object oriented languages. Why there’s aren’t more native Java applications for Mac OS X and why it has taken so long for Apple to deliver a limited version of Java 6 for Mac OS X go to cultural and historical issues with Apple that are worth exploring.

This week, I ran across an interesting bug in Mac OS X. I launched some trial software from its .dmg file after it mounted. After it ran nicely, I copied it from the mounted dmg volume to /Applications. Then I right-click quit the application from the dock. CRASH. I’ve been told by a major developer that this is a bug in Mac OS X.

Oh, my.

After seven years? Mac OS X 10.0 shipped in March 2001. How many years does it take to attend to a bug like that? Apple engineers should be embarrassed.

On Thursday, it was reported that the FBI tried to demand information from a non-profit digital library, that operates the Wayback Machine by using a National Security Letter. One problem. The archive’s founder, Brewster Kahle, is on the board of directors of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). Oops.

The EFF and the ACLU sued the FBI under the amended Patriot Act which protects libraries from having to disclose what their members are reading. Its a good story.

On Friday, ITWire carried a story about how, in the UK, if you play music so that someone else can hear it, that’s a “broadcast” and you could be breaking the law. That’s according to the Performing Rights Society. So the next time you’re in the car on the way to work, playing the radio, make sure your carpool buddies hold their hands over their ears. That’s in the same league with the spokesperson a few years ago who said that getting up to go to the bathroom, and missing TV commercials, is a violation of your implicit contract with the TV show.

Finally, if you thought software is the only threat to your privacy on the Internet, think again. The FBI is investigating whether some counterfeit chips, made in China, may have made their way into some Cisco routers. It isn’t clear yet whether the hardware was designed to have a backdoor or to allow snooping and stealing design secrets of the hardware or both. In any case, now we have hardware to worry about.

I really believe the TV networks are clueless when it comes to communicating with their viewers. If Steve Ballmer throws a book, let alone a chair, in his office, I hear about it. If Apple has something to say to its millions of customers, sending out a mass (opt-in) e-mail is not a problem. Intuit, which has millions of TurboTax customers, has no problem reminding me that it’s time to purchase this year’s tax program. But poor, whinny FOX TV. They move “House” from Tuesday to Monday, no one knows about it, and viewership is down 22 percent. They only have themselves to blame.

Here’s an idea. Each network sets up a single opt-in page where I can identify my favorite shows with a check box. (Good data to have, no?) Then, if the TV show changes its schedule, I get an e-mail or a message on my iPhone. TiVos can adapt to this, but not everyone has a TiVo. NBC would rather spend millions on Hulu so I can watch old episodes of Hill Street Blues, with commercials, than let me know that Heros is a new episode this week.

On Monday, Tamir Khason took a look at the relationship between computer languages and the facial hair of the developer(s). No hair — no future!

For those people who just love to fire up Numbers (or Excel) and mess around with Apple’s Gross Profit Margins, I saw a story on Tuesday at Barron’s that goes over the top and looks at every little percentage contribution to the GM numbers from Apple’s Q2 earnings report. If this doesn’t make your head hurt, nothing will.

Also, on Tuesday there was a story about how a judge, in an RIAA case, Atlantic v. Howell, decreed that merely putting a music file in a shared folder on one’s own computer does not constitute the act of distributing copyrighted material. The core of the case goes to understanding how one’s computer works, and this couple apparently did not. They won an appeal on that basis. In that light the defense, which sounds dubious at first blush, actually works: The defendant claimed that “he was not the one sharing the files, but that it was the computer that was sharing the files.” Also important was the argument by an EFF attorney: The case “amounts to suing someone for attempted distribution, something the Copyright Act has never recognized.”

I saw a story on Wednesday that speculated Apple is going to become more involved with WiMax (IEEE 802.21) and promote it, along with Intel, the father of WiMax, just as it launched Wi-Fi at Mac World New York in 1999. WiMax is a technology that has gotten off to a rocky start, but Apple combined with Intel could make it happen. This was an interesting read, but still speculation.

On Thursday, I saw a story dear to my heart. Apparently, Plasma TV sales in the U.S. are still suffering from myths about severe screen burn in, and that has made LCD HDTVs the darling of Americans. However, Plasma TV sales are growing by leaps and bounds outside the U.S. I will admit, I had my own concerns about Plasma TVs, and it took a lot of research and a trip to CEDIA to alleviate those concerns. Advertising is the key, and I think it may be time for Panasonic to get on that bandwagon. Modern Plasmas don’t have much problem with short lifespans, high altitude, buzzing and burn in. I hope they start telling that story before Plasmas die a premature death in the U.S.

Finally, this week I saw this picture and story purporting that Steve Baller gave a presentation with a Mac. But I didn’t run it because Mr. Baller wasn’t in the picture and there was some discussion about it being leftover from a previous presenter. In this case, a picture does not tell the whole story, and I ignored it.