Digg, Dugg, Dugg

The perils of being Dugg:

At around 4am PST today, the last of the Firefox 3 Beta 1 release candidate builds appeared on our public FTP. This was mistakenly reported on Digg as the official release of the first Firefox 3 Beta. It’s extremely flattering to get this sort of attention, and we know that it’s motivated by the very best of intentions, but it does cause us three major problems:

1. The release candidate builds have not been thoroughly tested by our QA group,
2. we haven’t completed all the steps required for a beta release (see below), and
3. these builds aren’t being mirrored properly on our servers.

Perhaps they should give would-be downloaders a little coding test before giving them access to ensure that they are *really* serious hackers.... (Via Linux Journal.)

Let Us Now Praise Filezilla

FTP doesn't get much respect these days, when most people equate the Internet with the Web. But for uploads and offline storage, you can't beat FTP. And that means you need a good client. Filezilla is my preference, not least because it's cross-platform (well GNU/Linux and Windows) - a must for me. I recommend it highly.

Here's a rare interview with Tim Kosse, the bloke behind it, and someone who deserves to be better known for his generous contribution to the software commons. Thanks, mate.

Welcome to the Era of Personal Genomics

I've been wittering on about personal genomics for some time: well, it's here, people. If you don't believe, me, take a look at this site (note, it's one of those old-fashioned FTP thingies, but Firefox should cope just fine).

Not much to see, you say? Just a couple of boring old directories - one called "Venter", the other "Watson". And inside those directories, lots of pretty massive files - some 35 Mbytes, some double that. And inside those files? Oh, just some boring letters; you know the kind of thing - AAGTGGTACCATTGACGCACAGGACACAGTG etc.

Nothing much: just the essence of the first two people to have their entire genomes (or nearly) sequenced - and all made freely available.... (Via Discovering Biology in a Digital World.)