How did I miss the Web Standards Project’s open letter pleading with Netscape to withdraw Navigator 4 from the market? It’s a well-written letter, and expresses many of the same feelings that I’ve vented here. At the hospital, I’m stuck using Netscape, and it pisses me off how terrible it renders and how much it crashes.

This day appears to be a very Windows 2000/Internet Explorer-centric kind of day around here. (Mainly, I’m on call, but don’t have a big patient load, so I’m catching up on my technical reading for the month.)

It appears that Windows 2000 Service Pack 1 is out, and ready for download. There’s no notice on Microsoft’s website about it, but Win2K News (a newsletter I get) sent along three download URLs: one, two, and three. I’m on call today, so I haven’t installed it yet; if anyone does, feel free to pass along your experiences, either via email or in the discussion group.

There’s a Microsoft Knowledge Base article that points to the page on which Win2K Service Pack 1 will be released tomorrow, for those of you who want to wait for the official announcement. In the mean time, you can read about the changes in SP1 on the following three pages: 1, 2, and 3. What’s interesting to me is that I helped find and solve this bug, and when they sent me the hotfix privately (four months ago), it was “being checked into SP1.” It doesn’t appear in the change log, though, so I don’t know if it’s actually part of SP1 or not. I guess I’ll find out…

I never knew that there was a neat Recovery Console option available in Windows 2000; it looks to be another way to recover your computer if you run into problems. (Note that if you do have it installed and you upgrade to SP1, you have to upgrade the Console separately.)

I knew I wasn’t crazy when IE 5.5 kept closing windows on me as I was downloading files. Their proposed workaround is silly, though — how am I supposed to know if the window that’s created with “Open In A New Window” will have a download URL in it?

Hey, I’ve got a great idea — let’s wade into the Niagra River just upstream from the famed Niagra Falls. Darwin was right; this dink is just lucky that he found a rock to cling to.