Intel in a PPC world

Well, I am mostly converted over. There are a couple of apps I use that don't have Intel/Universal binaries yet. One is X-Chat Aqua and the other is eSVN. Both are ports of *nix applications. X-Chat is a full port to Cocoa. eSVN uses the QT toolkit.

The other frustration was fink. My PPC coworker uses it daily. I am not so lucky yet. Gentoo's packages are for PPC also.

MySQL has presented a challenge as well. We are still using 4.0 on our servers. There are some backwards compatibility issues that are keeping us at 4.0. MySQL has a nice Mac package. But, because 4.0 is not a current release, they only offer PPC binaries. So, I will have to build it myself to get 4.0. I have been working around the problems for now and using 4.1. Maybe this is a good time to bite the bullet and change our code to support 4.1+.

Technorati Tags: apple, intel, irc, mac, macbook, mysql, svn

Color Picker

When I was on Linux, I used a tool called KColorEdit. It was a standalone color picker that was part of KDE. It would allow me to input a hex color code, adjust via RGB or via HSV (Hue, Saturation and Value).

I was dismayed when I starting looking for a Mac equivalent. Most things I found fit one of two categories. They were either a plugin for something else or they were a "web safe" color picker. Now, sure many of the latter were old, but some were not. Web safe colors are so 1998.

I enlisted the help of some Mac friends. They pointed me here and there. I found a nice trial-ware application called Color Schemer. But, its $50. All I need is a color picker. They do have a cool web page though that lets you do some color matching.

Along the way, I also found a hex plugin for the Mac OS X color picker from Lucky Software. But, there seemed to be no way to invoke this from within jEdit.

Then, a buddy found this post on MacOSXHints. It describes how to make the OS X color picker into an application. W00T!!

Thanks Finney.

Technorati Tags: apple, html, mac, macbook, os-x, applescript

iSight and my hat

My kids got me a hat for my birthday. I think it fits me. Took this with the built in iSight. I have been happy with the iSight's quality. I figured it would suck.

Technorati Tags: apple, macbook, isight

Networking works

Windows networking is a little mysterious. Sometimes, you just have to reboot the machine no matter what control panel or even command line stuff you try.

Linux is much more geeky. But, you have awesome control. You know exactly what is going on.

However, on my Mac, you just don't worry about it. The wireless works, I changed the static IP on my router for the Mac today. I use one local IP here so I can route stuff in and out of the network for my development. I then with to the Network Preferences to refresh my DHCP lease. Well, crap, its already updated. And, I never lost connection to IRC, IM, email, anything. This is the kind of thing that made me swtich.

Technorati Tags: apple, mac, macbook

Power cord woes

When I saw the power cord connector in the keynote, I thought it was cool. After having one, I don't like it. It comes unplugged all the time. My Mac regularly warns me that I am on reserve battery power. I look down and the cord has come unplugged.

On a related note, having all the connectors on the sides is inconvenient too. When I sit with my MacBook, I regularly sit with my legs crossed. The connectors on the side hit my legs. This of course knocks the power connector out. I am afraid I am going to damage the USB port.

Maybe I will get used to it.

Technorati Tags: apple, mac, macbook

Fink + Intel = huh?

Coming from Gentoo Linux, I was quite used to a good package manager for system tools. I had heard good things about fink. So, I grabbed the package from their site and installed it. That seemed to go just fine. The first thing I wanted was wget. wget is a great command line tool for downloading files. Its especially useful when you are already in the shell. The install of wget failed. (I did later discover that curl is on the system.) At first it was problems with compiling (see below). I got the compile issues worked out. It still failed. I got an error complaining that the package was for ppc and the target was i386 or something along those lines. I started digging around on the fink site and Google and discovered that fink is not quite ready for the Intel Macs. I had to compile it from scrap (as they call it, boostrap). No biggie, I was used to that. This process took a while. But, after that, it still will not install stuff. fink now reports that it can not find a package for wget. WTF?!?! I am kind of stuck on fink now. I could dig more, but one of my goals for moving to the Mac was to get away from fighting with command line stuff all the time.

If anyone is running fink on Intel Macs with success, please let me know.

Technorati Tags: apple, mac, macbook, intel

Trouble in the terminal

So, today was the day I started working on getting my development environment up and running. I needed to install Apache, PHP, MySQL and memcached. MySQL was a breeze. I just used the prebuilt package from mysql.com. The others were a whole other story.

We run a pretty customized setup for Apache and PHP. My coworker that has been on the Mac for almost two years advised me to install them from scratch and to ignore the versions already on the system. Compiling on the Mac was not as easy as on Linux. I had installed XCode, but something was not right still. I was getting linker errors when I tried to configure Apache. Had trouble with fink too, but I will post that in the next story.

So, I spent a good part of the day hunting all over the internet. The answer that kept coming up was to install XCode. I had done that and starting the installer showed all the default checked packages would be "upgrades" meaning they were already installed. Finally, I just started the XCode installer and checked every box, 2.2GB of stuff. Something in there did the trick.

The other thing that slowed me dow was having to adjust to the BSD way of things. Things did not install where I was used to them being. apachectl was in sbin for example. On Linux, it goes into bin. Those are no big deals. I will have scripts to start and stop my whole dev environment.

At the end of the day, I got it all working. Luckily, this was a one time annoyance. My annoyance with Linux had become day to day.

Tags: apple apache php mysql macbook

Mouse Tracking

I have had some trouble getting used to the mouse in Mac OS X. Both windows and Linux offer two settings for mouse movement, speed and acceleration. OS X only offers Tracking Speed. It seems to be a combination of the two. I am sure I will get used to it, but for now, its a bit difficult to get used to.

Blogging from my Dashboard

Cool, there is a Blogger Dashboard widget. That makes updating the blog from the Mac even easier.

And so it begins...

Well, this is my first post from my new MacBook. So far so good. I have already been noticing the little mac things. Like no page down button on the keyboard, no right mouse button on the track pad, etc. I knew what I was getting into though.

I have already installed Firefox, Thunderbird, Adium and jEdit. Those will be my core applications. I was using all of those but Adium on Linux. I have heard from several sources that Adium is the best multi-network IM client available. I may look at others, but I will start with that. I will be able to bring over eSVN and X-Chat from Linux as well.

I will post more after I have been using it for a day or so.

Boot Camp, nuff said

There is so much in the blogosphere about this already, I am just gonna link to the Technorati search for it. Needless to say, its a huge deal.

Tags: apple microsoft

Another fellow switcher

I found another blog like mine today. Its http://macnewbie.wordpress.com/. I have put a link to his site in my sidebar. He has been at it longer than I have.

Tags: apple switchers

It's in Indiana!

So, this is my intro. Like most of the free world, I have been a Windows user for most of my life. I was lucky enough to find Linux when I got into the world of building/running web sites. My early attempts to use it as a desktop OS were unsuccesful. I always felt I could do my job with Linux, but I could do it better with Windows.

Two years ago, it was time for me to buy a new laptop for work. Our CEO is a Mac user and wanted me to try a Powerbook. I took one home and used it to work for a week or so. There were so many things I liked about it. The intuitive interfaces, the simple application installation and other things were very attractive. However, at the end of the day, I still felt more productive in a Windows environment. Also, the Powebook G4's were not powerhouses. Even my CEO used a Windows machine for some things that were not fast enough for him on his Mac.

About a year ago, after having some problems with coliding code bases, I plunged with my coworkers into using Linux as our desktop OS of choice. This had its advantages for us. Our servers are Linux. Using Linux on our desktops made developing on our local machines much easier. We no longer overwrote each other's changes and everything was much smoother. One coworker however decided to take the plunge. He moved cold turkey to a 12" Powerbook. He could still do the things we were doing. He could run Apache/PHP/MySQL all on the Powerbook.

So, fast foward one more time to January 2006. Steve Jobs announces the MacBook Pro. An Intel based Mac. I found myself acting like a school girl over this announcement. After a year on Linux, I had started to wonder about moving to the Mac. We had been at the O'Reilly Open Source Convention in 2005 and the number of Powerbook's we saw was staggering. The market share for Apple in the portable, open source world is much higher than the general market.

So, as of April 1, I ordered my MacBook Pro. I checked today and its in Indiana. The other Linux users on our team will soon follow. In fact, soon, only 3 of our 13 full time employees in our once Windows dominated company will be running Windows full time. Our IT department (3 people) will all be using Mac OS X exclusively.

OMG, I can't wait for my Mac to get here.
( what is wrong with me =)

Tags: apple mac macbook switchers