NoteTab is undoubtedly my second most used program — after my operating system. I use it to draft and edit html, perl and php files, to manipulate csv file data, and for all manner of tasks I have automated via the clips ability contained in that program. It has been in a 4.x stage for several years now. 5.0 (available in either a standard or pro version) offers many improvements in speed and functionality. One of the big disappointments is that it still lacks syntax highlighting for any language other than html, but that is expected in a future release. Despite that shortcoming, it is still the best program around.

For anyone owning a 4.x version it is available for half price.

This version 5.0 has been through nearly 30 beta test versions and has been pounded on by some top end users time and again after each release. Therefore it should be relatively bug free. Notwithstanding that fact, a couple of minor issues have been spotted (mainly with regular expressions — which by the way now have a new engine making it identical to regex searching in other languages in most cases) and will be fixed I suspect quite quickly upon the August 18 return to work by the author after a brief holiday.

We have written before about the hazards of honest blogging. Some employers simply don’t have any sense of humor about such things. In the case of Catherine, however, the news reports seem to really say that she wrote in near anonymity. The best part is the response from her firm: “The Dixon Wilson partner for whom Catherine worked said the firm was unlikely to feel able to comment.” I wonder how much business they’ll lose in the end because customers won’t feel able to support such silly people. If there is more to the story, perhaps they should have commented.

Well earlier rumors reported here that Google was coming to Michigan turn out to be true … just not to the city we were hearing. They are building in Ann Arbor in south east Michigan. It makes sense as Larry Page hails from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and it is a wonderful area of the state to live with great culture and resources.