Jared’s Blog

Yesterday, thanks to Jason, I found out Facebook let’s you input an RSS feed to create notes. So if you’re reading this from Facebook, hi.

As I alluded to last week, my Macbook Pro came and it is wonderful. Like I mentioned in my previous blog post, I’m worse than an 8 year old on Christmas Eve when I’m waiting for new computer gear to arrive. Most of my morning at work consisted of me doing a task, then refreshing the tracking page to see if my MBP had been delivered yet. Finally, about 2 in the afternoon it showed up.

Now that I’ve had the chance to make my “the switch,” I decided to weigh in with my thoughts so far. Overall, it’s good. Very good! I will admit, I’m by far not your typical person who would switch from Windows to Mac. The primary reason for wanting a Mac was for virtualization. It’s the only piece of hardware that can (legally) run OS X, Windows, and Linux all at the same time; A web developers dream.

That dream doesn’t come true out of the box though. First you need to get Parallels, the app that does the virtualization. With it, I was able to get Windows XP (and Vista — just because I haven’t spent much time with it) installed and running in virtual sessions. Ubuntu wasn’t so easy though. I thought I got it installed a few times, but it would never boot right (it hung or would continuously reboot) or the install would fail before I even got to that point. I decided that was OK because we aren’t as quite concerned about our app looking good in Linux.

Being the good little Ruby on Rails developer I am, I decided to check out TextMate. My initial reaction was “that’s it?” I later learned that TextMate’s killer feature (besides being a lightweight text editor with synatx highlighting and project management) is it’s keyboard shortcuts. They’re modules of their own. That means, each language has it’s own set of shortcuts. Until I learn them, I’ll be sticking to RadRails.

Installing Ruby on Rails itself, however, has been quite the challenge. I followed the HiveLogic guide which was recommended by just about everyone and it got me going for the most part. I didn’t follow the pieces on installing LightTPD or the FCGI stuff because I’m using Mongrel and Webrick. Over the weekend I thought that was the problem, but I figured out today that part of my problem was not having subversion installed. Now, my problem is that Rails drops it’s MySQL connection every few requests. I’ve narrowed it down to Ruby’s MySQL bindings, but haven’t been able to get it all playing nice yet.

Overall, working with a Mac is pretty much working on a PC (at least for what I do) with a little better interface and some nice bells and whistles. It’s a pretty damn slick piece of hardware to show off as well! A PC just doesn’t provoke the same response. I can see where the “it just works” phrase comes from, but unfortunately, it wasn’t the case for me. I’m still a little ways away from my dream development environment, but after spending some time with it, I’ll get everything singing in unison.

UPDATE: I forgot to mention the best thing about my new Mac yesterday. It came with double the memory and 50% more hard drive than I ordered it with. Figure this one out. The order page said it had 512MB of memory and an 80GB hard drive. The packing slip confirmed this. The little sticker under the battery even has those same numbers. But shortly after pulling my little gem out of it’s box, I noticed it was sporting 1GB of RAM and a 120GB hard drive. I don’t mind one bit because it would’ve cost the company another $100 for the upgrade. The only problem is the 2GB of additional RAM we ordered from a 3rd party already showed up. That means it’s going to cost us a 15% restocking fee to send back the extra RAM.