MacPorts

I started looking into MacPorts today and it looks like it would save a lot of time in the future when I start looking into porting my C# ASP.Net to Mono. I don't think that mono would be that hard to deploy, but I think I would definitely enjoy something closer to debians apt-get package management solution...

So I went to install the release for Leopard and I got an error that (after some googling) I found was because rsync appeared to be blocked by a firewall. I haven't looked at it long enough to determine if this firewall issue is at the router level or on the local machine (more what I suspect).

Suppose when I need Mono support I'll play with it long enough to get it all figured out....

Mac convinced me to buy things I never would have before

I do think its a little odd that iTunes would not have built in functionality to remove duplicates. (I'm guessing its an effort out against music piracy) Either way its always been a pain in the butt to manage all of my music collection amongst the multiple machines that I've laid it out across. Now that I'm working primarily off of my macbook, I imagine it will be a little easier to do, but there's still the big import process of transferring all of that music from my other machines to this laptop... So I bit the bullet and bought some software that will sort out all of my duplicates and make it easier to manage all of my music file duplicates. It was 15 bucks which might be a little steep for some, but it just saved me about 30 minutes in just transferring all of my music off of my old laptop alone...

Normally I would have been interested in this as a side project (and I still might in the future). I just don't have the time to take on any more code projects at the current moment. Something about working for all the benefits a computer has to offer is starting to get to me, to say the least. These things are supposed to make life easy right?

I'm probably going to be upgrading both the hard drive and the memory in this new little toy of mine soon enough. Its a nice machine, don't get me wrong... I just have a ton of media that I like to listen to on demand. I found a 500GB laptop hard drive on Newegg for around $150 so I hope switching that out isn't going to be that big a deal... (never has been on any of my windows machines) That along with the fact that I will costantly have vmware fusion running my Visual Studio for .Net development means that I'll be using all of that maxed out 4gb of ram I'll be throwing in here.

That's the latest mac update... I think the more time I spend on this thing, the more I love it.

Things I'm learning this weekend...

I've got plenty of NSIS and C# to go over this weekend, but its been a while since I've had some time to take up something new in programming land. I've been wanting to get into Python for some time, since there's such a huge following from Google (with their app engine), django python web framework, and a general sense of adoption by the science community.

Anyways so I've been reading through some beginner tutorials and running through some code with textmate. (Textmate makes things really nice by the way)

http://wiki.python.org/moin/SimplePrograms - a list of simple applications to code in order to get a feel for the language. I went through and coded them all out by hand (I've learned that I pick things up easier with a hands on approach)

I'm sure I'll have more to rave about Python at a later date. It's pretty much the big deal in CS right now...

a late night work ramble...

I have been developing a set of installers for quite a large amount of data for the past year now. All of the releases have been stable for some time now, but there's always going to be that extra feature, or the data itself gets updated from our vendor... Anyways, through testing I've found that the installers themselves compile faster and with fewer complications after I configured a virtual machine (vmware) for NSIS development.

I have two vm's on a single machine: one I use for development and the other for testing purposes. Between the two of them I have run through an entire 500gb drive and am no longer able to shutdown the vm's and back them up so I can throw an archive backup on our file server. So I've got a 1TB drive coming in from Newegg that I'll be installing early next week to remedy this. In the meantime I've kept all of the NSIS code itself version controled in a series of SVN repositories.

I'll have to update the C# data deployment application (just a windows form app that is kicked off in NSIS as part of the installer). I've got two versions of this data deployment application: one for the installer (cleanmapcopy runs off of registry settings) and another (mapcopy offers a full gui for our technical support to use for installation troubleshooting).

We are fully 64bit OS compliant now, so the next thing to do is to figure out the difference in the way I'm successfully installing fonts in Windows XP and what has changed as far as installing fonts in Vista and Server 2008.

I'm starting to lose interest in scripting languages. It's probably just because I've been working in NSIS and PHP for I don't know how long. I just miss the feel of a full C# or Java or C++ to work with. (something general purpose that I can do whatever I set out to do in) Freedom if you will... I think Zack and I both are kind of spent on Web programming at the moment. I don't mind it as much as he does probably, but it just seems like there's so much bloat out on the web of redundant features for "this" SaaS app that are also found in "that" one too.... Kinda feels like this type of programming has lost that zeal of personal application or useful touch I once saw in it.

Ok well its time to get some rest. Going to test out this http://sleep.fm/ alarm clock I setup.

Mac Convert update

I wouldn't consider myself an Apple Pro quite yet, but I will say that I took the laptop down to the city to work at Appian in office and everything worked out just nicely. Its still a great machine and I love the way everything feels about it.

Something I've noticed: I think my fingers got a little too used to the smaller keyboard on the older laptop and I can feel my fingers stretching outside the normal typing zone to hit keys. (This isn't necessarily a bad thing, I just need to figure out what the best way to go about typing in all the key combos for all the menu shortcuts and I'm sure that it will go unnoticed in the near future...) Also the home and end keys are a little different... On my macbook pro the home and end key functionality (at least what I expect when on a windows machine) can be attained by command + (left) or (right) arrow keys... Again, little different, but definitely something I could get used to.

I went in the office today and got a stack of software that I will be working on for the rest of the year... At least I know what I'm going to be doing. ...I guess. It was refreshing getting a taste of the quasi professional environment. I really did enjoy the break from the college scene to get some real work done and feel a little appreciated. I've kind of learned that people have their own ways of showing appreciation. (I think one of my bosses shows it by stacking more work on top of me...)

After work today, we headed out over to the Cross Eyed Moose and had a few pitchers 'o beers. (Been a little bit since I've had some wheat beer) Tonight was an awesome combination of world series baseball (wasn't up for anyone to win in particular), hot tub, beer, and cigars with some of the guys from the office. Gotta wake up for class in the AM and I'm spent...

Vmware vprobes: a way to run dtrace on OS's without dtrace support

http://blip.tv/file/950760

This video from vmware is about debugging vmware guest OS's with dtrace through vmware itself without dtrace having to be explicitly supported on the OS itself. This makes things very interesting for testing almost any application in virtual environments...

Me, the new Mac kinda guy...

I purchased a MacBook Pro (no not one of the newest ones, but rather an older model) Although it might have been nicer to save up a little longer and get the latest and greatest from Apple, I decided that I would not fall subject to the group-think that is "get the newest one"...

I can say that I'm happy with what I've got. It might not have the newest gpu from NVidia, but it does have a 512mb video card anyways (which is the best card I've ever had in a laptop to date). Seeing how this new machine will be primarily used for development purposes it might still be a little bit overkill...

Now onto my thoughts of switching. So far all of my applications that I've used to develop on Windows either already offered Mac versions or were easily replaced by other Mac software (all of it open source up to this point. Hoping to keep it this way...)

I've already got vmware fusion 2.0 installed with windows xp. Suppose I could have ran Vista, but I know that XP takes up less resources and this is still a laptop...

The best thing about this laptop is what I initially feared the most: the deviant one button trackpad. I absolutely love the way this thing works. Scrolling is simply amazing and I find myself not even wanting to use a regular mouse because I cannot use the scroll on the trackpad as easily.

Another thing that I find myself thinking about, is that I have been waiting for something bad to happen, as though I was answering to a heavy backend windows kernel or something. I really like the way that this whole OSX feels like I'm making it do what I want instead of bending to the will of the machine. (it could also have something to do with the difference in the way the main menu bar is translated to whatever the current application running needs...)

Not everything turned out as great as I had expected it to. I was extremely disappointed that my new MacBook Pro is having issues displaying a proper picture on my 24" Samsung SyncMaster 245BW monitor. Not sure exactly what the issue is; the only thing I found in a quick google search was that SyncResX was a possible solution (this was courtesy of youtube, and like many, I'm not very fond of any user submitted "knowledge" gained there)

I might try the mighty mouse to see if its something I would like to work with more. (I was just so extremely impressed with the scrolling of the trackpad, I don't think I would feel right missing out on that feature by going back to a regular mouse)

So there you have it: my very short, humble opinion of my first day's encounter with my MacBook Pro.