Mac or Bust

Google Ad Spam?

2006-07-12T07:09:00.000-07:00

So, I get an email that looks like an ebay question from a buyer to a seller. The only thing is, I don't have anything for sell. I check out the auction number (by copying and pasting it from the email) and its a legit auction. Now, as I said earlier, I try not to do anything stupid with my email. So, before clicking anything in the email, I hovered the links. To my surprise, the links are all http://www.google.com/pagead/... links. A couple of days later, I get another one. As if click fraud is not bad enough, now spammers are getting into the game.

So, beware. If you get an email from "ebay", it very well could be a click fraud spam. Hover those links before you click.

Technorati Tags: google, spam, email, ebay

NeoOffice for Intel

2006-06-30T08:45:00.000-07:00

I am a long time user of OpenOffice on Windows and Linux. It does more than I need it to. I have installed it on several friends PCs and they have had no problem using it either. So, I knew that would be one of my big problems on the Mac. You can install OpenOffice for the Mac. It uses X11 though. That means its slow and not Mac like at all.

NeoOffice has been around for a while for PPC Macs, but tomorrow, a public alpha of the software will be available for Intel Macs. Last week, I decided to go ahead and pay the very low $10 to get a copy ahead of time.

It's everything I hoped it would be. Its fast and gets the job done. It uses all the Mac keyboard shortcuts and uses the standard Mac menu. The long time Mac users may not like it as well as I do. The dialogs do not look and feel like a Mac. They are the standard OO.org widgets. As a long time user for OO.org, I have no problem using it. In fact, its good to be home again with my office suite.

Technorati Tags: apple, mac, macbook, os-x, office, openoffice, neooffice

macally icestation

2006-06-27T08:09:00.000-07:00

I recently got a macally icestation for my MacBook Pro. It works quite nicely. Their site markets it to work with Powerbooks and other laptops. The only problem I see is that the CD slot is on the front of the MacBook Pro and therefore putting in CDs when it is on the icestation is a bit of a hassle. I don't use a lot of CDs though. Overall, it's much better than having the MacBook Pro just sitting on the desk.

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

Matias USB 2.0 Keyboard for Mac

2006-06-06T21:15:00.000-07:00

Matias is well known these days for their Tactile Pro Mac keyboard. Its uses mechanical keys and kind of addresses a lot of the problems that some users have with the Apple keyboard. Things like the function keys not being spaced into groups.

However, their web site is pushing this new USB 2.0 Keyboard. They have a Mac only version and a Mac/PC version. Its closer to a full size keyboard that I have been using for years now. I also liked the idea of a USB 2.0 hub on my keyboard. So, I ordered two. One for the office and one for the house.

I got them, unpacked one and hooked it up. Well, at this point, I see the funky dual USB cable. One is a USB 1.1 cable and the other is a 2.0 cable. I then realize that the keyboard nor its hub is 2.0. There is a single port on top of the keyboard that is USB 2.0. So, basically, there is a USB 2.0 cable embedded to the keyboard. That's it. I looked at the web site and sure enough, at the bottom of the page it mentions all this. However, both there and in the docs, they show a little more hospitable cable. So, on that I was willing to live and learn.

So, I started typing. The first thing I noticed was that the keys were a little small. The number pad and other keys like the F-keys were normal sized. My hands did not find the cursor keys or the page up, page down group very easily. I chalked all this up to having a new keyboard. The more I used it however, the more I felt the quality of the keys was not what I was used to. Still, I pushed on.

A day went by and I noticed that one "feature" of the keyboard was really starting to annoy me. Their innovation on this keyboard was to move the caps lock key from the normal spot and cram it on the lower right side with the command, option and control key. In the place of the normal caps lock is an extra control key. WTF!?!? This became very annoying. I am a programmer, so, I come across things that are all upper case more than say a writer or graphic designer would. This was the last straw for me. I am sending them back.

Technorati Tags: apple, mac, macbook, os-x, keyboard

Mac Security

2006-05-13T21:35:00.000-07:00

Seems a lot of folks are talking about security on the Mac these days. I read another switchers blog and he has ranted about it. Then I checked out Ctrl-Alt-Del today and found their latest comic. I have to admit I laughed.

Myself, I am following the same pattern I did on Windows. Don't do anything stupid ( I include running anything named Outlook in that ). Believe it or not, I never ran anti anything software on Windows. And I never ( I promise never ) had a virus or malware installed on my system.

Of course, I realize that most people can't or won't follow that head. They will click that email from someone they don't know to see a picture of their favorite celeb in the nude. And they will pay the price.

Technorati Tags: apple, mac, macbook, os-x, security

I must be comfortable

2006-05-04T21:13:00.000-07:00

Well, its been a while since I posted. That must mean I am getting comfortable. I figured I would post a list of the last few things that are still on my mind about my mac.

Clicking a window does not register a click on the window. This is unique to Mac OS X. If my browser is in the background and I click a link on that window, it does not click the link. It only brings the window to the front. This has a good side. You don't accidentally click stuff. If I had only used the Mac, I would like find Windows/Linux odd.
Command Button does it all. I am still getting finger tied with the command button. Its mostly when I am wanting to use the Home and End keys on my PC keyboard. What was one key stroke is now two. CMD + R Arrow is not as quick as End.
The lack of tabbed/dockable applications. The Windows and Linux world are tab crazy. Most Mac apps are still one window per item. Terminal, X Code, and even apps that while not tabbed, were contained like Fireworks have all these windows everywhere. Its tough to get used to it.
A good office suite. OpenOffice really spoiled me on Windows/Linux. I have it installed on my Mac via X11. But, to anyone that has used X11 apps on Linux, its not really much fun. I just don't want to use MS Office. I am hoping for NeoOffice to release an Intel version soon.

On the other hand, I had to set up my old laptop with Windows XP Pro this week. Someone else at work is getting it. Boy, that sucked. The wireless was a pain. Windows Update is annoying and takes forever to download 400 little patches. The wireless on the laptop keeps dropping now too. Good old Windows.

Technorati Tags: apple, mac, macbook, office, os-x, OpenOffice

Intel in a PPC world

2006-04-20T13:05:00.000-07:00

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

2006-04-15T21:44:00.000-07:00

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

2006-04-12T13:43:00.000-07:00

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

2006-04-12T10:49:00.000-07:00

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

2006-04-12T09:32:00.000-07:00

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?

2006-04-11T17:48:00.000-07:00

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

2006-04-11T17:23:00.000-07:00

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

2006-04-10T10:04:00.000-07:00

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

2006-04-10T08:39:00.000-07:00

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

And so it begins...

2006-04-09T17:26:00.000-07:00

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

2006-04-05T12:36:00.000-07:00

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

2006-04-05T10:48:00.000-07:00

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!

2006-04-04T12:54:00.000-07:00

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