MacBook Pro reflections

It’s been almost two months since I switch my work machine to a MacBook Pro. I’ve been asked a few times what I thought after having used it for a while. Honestly, I’ve got mixed feelings. First the pros:

• Ergonomics – the hardware is very nice. The size and feel of the aluminum uni-body is great. There’s lots of little touches like the auto-dimming and the track pad. I’ve even found myself trying to use two- and three-finger gestures on a PC touch pad when I happen to use one.
• The general thoughtfulness that goes into features like the widgets, Finder, and overall ease of use

However, there are still things that I don’t like or agree with:

• Insistence on a single-button mouse. Even after using a Magic Mouse for a while I still find that my two button, scroll wheel PC mouse is much more useful – perhaps it comes from almost two decades of using a PC-style mouse.
• Lack of consistency in keyboard shortcuts. Generally the basic keys like Command+A, Command+C work okay but apps tend to be different enough that it’s annoying. Sometimes its Control+ and other times its Command+.
• Price.

I just priced out a full Dell XPS 17 with upgraded bells ‘n whistles and still came in at $2K while the MacBook Pro is $3K loaded. That’s a full 50% premium above a high-end PC! I’m also finding that it is…well, a machine – a computer. I can be productive and useful with either one but I just don’t get the rabid fan boy, bash a PC whenever possible, pry-it-out-of-my-cold-dead-fingers feeling. Now, I’m not a graphics designer – just a corporate business user so I have Office 201x on both the Mac and Windows 7 as well as the same browsers, chat programs, and pretty similar utilities.

MacPorts - a slick system for easily installing OSS

It's been a month since I moved from a Windows-based laptop to a MacBook Pro and I'm just now getting around to playing with development toys..err, tools. First order of business was to grab Ant and Maven. Knowing that OS X is built around Linux meant it should be pretty easy. Of course, nothing ever is and it turns out there's lots of advice going back several years in the 'Verse. After seeing several references to MacPorts (formerly DarwinPorts) I checked it out. In a matter of minutes I had the two projects installed, configured and running.

Want to install Tomcat? It's as simple as...

$ port list tomcat*
tomcat-native  @1.1.20  java/tomcat-native
tomcat5        @5.5.25  java/tomcat5
tomcat6        @6.0.29  java/tomcat6

sudo port install tomcat6

Voila. There's 7,434 ports available at this time.

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Cross-Platform Developer's Tools Comparison

One of the first things with moving to or even evaluating a new platform is figuring out what is "there" on the target OS. This answers the question "What can I still do" or better yet "How do I...".  Here's my comparison list of tools across Linux, OS X, and Windows. Yes, I know that OSX is Linux under the covers, however it is enough of a "standoff-ish" platform (IMHO) with regards to user experience, development platform/tools (used to build the software I'm talking about), etc. that I categorize it separately.

Tool	Linux	OSX	Windows
Blog Writer		Qumana	Live Writer
Database Tool	DbVisualizer	DbVisualizer	DbVisualizer SQL Server Management Studio Express
Development IDE	Eclipse MonoDevelop	Eclipse MonoDevelop	Eclipse SharpDevelop Visual Studio
File Compression	7-Zip	7zX	7-Zip
File/Folder Comparison	Beyond Compare	Delta Walker	Beyond Compare
Instant Messaging	Pidgin	Adium Pidgin	Pidgin
Source Control	Subclipse	Subclipse Versions	AnkhSVN TortoiseSVN
System Tray Status/Tools		iStat Menus	SysInternals
Text Editor	Beyond Compare	Text Wrangler	Notepad++
Video Player	VLC Player	VLC Player	VLC Player
XML Editor	<oXygen>	<oXygen>	<oXygen>

Note that this list is what I've found for software that is comparable and gets the job done for me.
Tags: Apple, Linux, Tools, Windows

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Thoughts on moving from Windows to Mac

This past weekend I migrated my laptop world from Windows to Mac OS X. As I'm bring apps and data over I'm discovering things that I didn't expect and having difficulty finding things...

1. Keyboard navigation - the home, end, and paging (up/down) keys are missing. Paging is the most missed as I do more browsing, reading and searching than I do filling out forms. I suspect that only a subset of PC users actually use these keys - probably those of us who are more technically proficient. This leads to my first observation: applications that automatically select all text in a field (name, address bar, etc.) are appreciated. Firefox and Chrome do this but Safari and "native" Mac programs don't seem to which makes me think it's either a philosophical difference or perhaps there's a shortcut keystroke I haven't discovered.
2. Menus and system tray along the top. I know that both OSes can be tweaked and customized but I tend to keep the customizations "down". I learned long ago that you can make your whole computing world "just so" only to go to another machine and be lost because it's not your machine. I like the tray in the upper right of the screen as it's more at eye level. I didn't realize this until the Mac when I realized I wasn't crouching over and squinting down in the corner to see the icons and the context menus. Of course, that's also a hazard of age and tired eyesight. I'm still finding that I'm looking for the application menu at the top of the window rather than the top of the screen.

Tags: Apple

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A nasty OpenSSO configurator “bug”

After lots of trial ‘n error, I found that when configuring a new, first instance you must use the FQDN when launching the configurator. In addition, your machine’s hostname must be in a FQDN with AT LEAST TWO DOTS in the name. The only reference I found on the web was buried in this thread that’s two years old: http://markmail.org/message/35rfpbayvrjzjuvg. Also in the thread is mention that the default linux machine name of ‘localhost.localdomain’ isn’t supported and doesn’t work. What drives you crazy is the only error you see either through the JSP-based GUI or through the command line tool is “invalid hostname”.

Expanding horizons

After many years of working primarily with Microsoft tools I've been expanding my horizons. From using OpenSUSE and CentOS as development machines and servers to using an Android-based phone to building sites in Drupal I've found renewed interest in discovering alternate points of view.

Anatomy of a Drupal-based Home Page

Technorati Tags: drupal

We are close to launching our re-designed website for the church I attend. To gain a bunch of functionality and enable easier updating we picked the Drupal CMS as a framework. The past three months have been a journey of discovery into its features that is reflected in our home page shown on the right.
The default Navigation menu has been enhanced by including the Nice Menus module. This gives us cascading sub-menus for “free” by simply installing and configuring the module. You simply need to edit the left-sidebar block and replace the Navigation block with the Nice Menu module then choose “Configure” next to the Nice Menu and select the <Navigation> menu as its Source Menu Tree.
We used the Simple News module to handle weekly emails and exposed it as a block shown on the lower left. Simple News enables user-controlled subscriptions and handles batched sending from the web server. Previously our administrative assistant used Outlook and had to divvy up the distribution list into several chunks to stay beneath her email host’s restrictions for bulk emails. Now it happens “magically” using cron features on the server – a fire-and-forget approach.
The main content area started out as a simple Page node-type however we wanted more granular control of the content layout so we added Panels. Originally we had a welcome message followed by the photos/writeups of our two locations and the two Views blocks for announcements and upcoming events at the bottom of the content area. As the page evolved, we decided that the announcements and upcoming events should be more prominently displayed between the two content areas. We also wanted to insert a flash video welcome message from our pastor between the two sections as well. One approach would have been to resort to coding a custom theme template peppered with PHP code however that would’ve limited its use and updating to…well, just me! By using Panels I was able to layout the page into four main sections and make it accessible to others right from the website without resorting to hand-editing files on the web server as shown below:

Notice that the two middle sections use Views as their content source. So far, the only coding I’ve had to do is a custom installation script for deployment to the live server and a custom theme for the sermons page. Drupal is impressive for the amount of features and maturity of the package that enables complex sites to be built with very little coding – all for the price of $0 and a little time and effort!