As reported at Gizmodo and elsewhere, the MacBook Pro has gotten a speed bump. The original announcement listed two models, 1.67GHz and 1.83GHz. Now, before even shipping the first one (they reportedly start today), those numbers have been bumped to 1.83GHz and 2.0GHz respectively, with a 2.16GHz configure-to-order option.

That makes the top about 18% faster than before; significant, but not exactly exciting (unless you’re easily excited by this sort of thing).

Today I updated my Django play/development environment to the new magic-removal branch, and migrated my proto-wiki as an exercise. Following the RemovingTheMagic instructions on the official Django wiki made it fairly easy. (I added some notes on dealing with custom template tags.)

This branch is about more than cleaning up some of the needlessly clever bits found in earlier implementations; it also has some really nice syntax refinements. Compare this:

reporters.get_list(fname__exact='John', order_by=('lname',))

to this:

Here’s a very cool little open source module for Cocoa application developers: Sparkle by Andy Matuschak. It allows applications to detect, download, and install new versions automatically. It apparently can be added to a project without any glue code at all. It supports Appcast feeds. It’s got handy features like Skip This Version and Remind Me Later. It can work with .dmg files or .zip archives.

During my brief stint with Cocoa programming I really wanted something like this. As a user, I like it because it makes life on the bleeding edge much more convenient.

Songbird, an open source would-be iTunes killer, was made available to the public for the first time today. Version 0.1.0. It builds on well-tested open source projects such as VLC and Firefox.

Since iTunes is free, and most consumers don’t particularly care one way or the other about open source, the success of Songbird will hinge on the things it can offer that Apple can’t or won’t. The most promising one is easy access to, and integration with, non-iTunes online music retailers like eMusic.com and CDBaby.com – and free sources like archive.org.

Seen on Flickr: this huge collection of Web 2.0 company logos. You can argue with the taxonomy but it’s still fun to look at.