Quit your day job. Go on. I dare you.

Bored of Firefox running really slowly? I am. The same flash application on a PC on IE7, Firefox and even in Apple’s Safari browser runs twice as quickly.

It’s probably because I’m a flash developer, building and testing heavy flash applications, but Firefox 2’s slowness has been bothering me for a while.  But even if you’re not a geek  you might get frustrated looking at videos on Youtube in Firefox, or waiting for new tabs to open and sort themselves out. If so, I have something that’ll make your day.

Why is it slow? Because the official releases of Firefox for OSX are not yet optimised for the Intel based systems. They will be soon no doubt, but for the moment there is another solution…. A very nice ubergeek called Neil Bruce Lee, who obviously knows what he’s doing, has created an unofficial release of Firefox called BonEcho which IS optimised for Intel machines and can be downloaded from here.

It’s brilliant - it’s just the same as your other Firefox (with the exception of the icons etc because although Firefox is open source, the official branding can’t be used on un-official releases) - you’ll still have your favourites/plug-ins/whatever else you use, it’s just that your Internet browser will be twice as quick! Brilliant!

Now the pooter’s fixed I spent the day making the film I was trying to make on Sunday. It’s a much improved version of the All Mountain Performance promotional video. So much better. the editing, the sound, everything. It’s visually better too, with some newly learned techie tricks, but more importantly it has a better narrative and holds together more as a film. Well chuffed I am :)

I’m even in it! That’s me in the yellow trousers about half ay through. There’s work to do still, but I’m feeling like I’m starting to get the hang of this now…

After a very fraught 24 hours, I finally got the damn macBook running again. With a bit of help from my excellent mate Hutch who not only had a full generic Leopard installer, but also knew how to use it. So wallop - the machine is up and running and would you Adam & Eve it? The version of Quicktime that ships with Leopard is exactly the version I was trying to install when I broke the damn thing in the first place. Sweet!

Thank god. Or maybe thank Jobs. But definitely, thank Hutch :)

Argh. I’ve broken my MacBook. It won’t boot up. This is not merely annoying, it’s a bloody catastrophe. It was my own fault (of course). I bought some software which plugs into iMovie which didn’t work wth the current version of Quicktime I had installed. So I degraded my quicktime installation. I tried to do it by downloading and installing an older version and my mac told me I couldn’t do it because I had a more recent version. So I installed another program which would force it. Then I rebooted and it won’t go past the apple screen with the little loading icon. Doh!

I have another mackbook next to it and mine boots as a firewire drive, recognisable to the second. I bought DiskWarrior and have been trying that, using my macbook as the target drive, but the bloody thing still isn’t working. I tried installing Apple’s Leopard combo update onto my macBook and it now goes one screen further on before hanging. It goes blue, but doesn’t quite get to the login.

Are there any mac gurus reading this who can suggest what else I could try?