Pinging stuff I care about.
The holiday commercial for Macs (vs PCs) made me laugh, because it has some nerd cred: one of the things that sucks about programming for PCs is you typically need to do it in C++, whereas on the mac you get to use tasty Objective-C. (Unless you’re me, in which case you are stuck in a C++ API anyway because you use a cross-platform toolkit which happens to be done in C++…)
The embodiment of the PC, by the way, is comedian and author John Hodgman, who uses a Mac.
UPDATE: I found out that the enV is crippled too, to the degree that it does not allow file transfer. Screw that. It has a nice camera but eh. I first grabbed myself one of those LG Chocolates, a kind of mutant phone/ipod, slick and mysterious, but one day of use left me hating it with a passion. It was constantly doing things I didn’t want to do because of slips of the touch-sensitive interface. I took it back and settled for the LG 6300, a simple, unprepossessing phone, which I didn’t have to pay anything for after my outrageous discounts. I’m very happy with it so far.
END UPDATE
I just talked to my Verizon Wireless folks and found out that assuming I’m up to commit to two more years of service with them (I am), and I’m willing to order online rather than go to a store (I am), I can get some outrageous discounts. Apparently I’ve had my phone for 2 years and am up for a New Every 2 Program discount. (This sort of thing works better for us people getting on in years, because the years seem to fly by to us.)
I probably won’t drop the $ on it till after Christmas is over and done with, but this is what I want: the enV. Muchos thanks to Jason for pointing me in its direction.
What completely wins me over is the extremely functional Bluetooth stuff. Macs these days have bluetooth, but historically Verizon’s bluetooth offerings have been deliberately crippled. This one doesn’t seem to be.
There are a lot of cool things about the phone I could totally do fine without. But for a small investment after the discount, it seems to be a phone which will stay looking very good for a couple years.
Right now I have the Motorola V710, which is awfully nice, but I’ve always had terrible problems getting it charged. You have to balance the charger cord at some crazy angle to the phone to get it to connect, and possibly because of that, possibly for other reasons, charging is a very iffy business — it thinks it’s charged but dies quickly, stuff like that. This has persisted through two phones and four charger cords, so I’m pretty sure it’s not just that I got a bad phone or charger.
Anyway, looking forward to that crazy enV. Anyone with strong opinions for or against it as a phone drop a comment eh? I haven’t placed the order yet…
HollenbackNet – MuttOnMacOs provides a good solution (via this mailing list post) for anyone who wants to use Aquamacs as an editor for a command-line-based application. To wit: don’t use emacsclient directly; create a little script like this:
#!/bin/sh # script to force Aquamacs to open in front of terminal open -a Aquamacs\ Emacs /Applications/Aquamacs\ Emacs.app/Contents/MacOS/bin/emacsclient "$@" # Now make sure the focus goes back to the terminal when we are done open -a Terminal
in a file called, say, emacsclienthack.sh, and reference that shell script instead of emacsclient itself. Makes things quite pleasant.
I just downloaded a 15 day free trial of Parallels Desktop for Mac. Man, this is NOT going to make it any easier for me to escape servitude to the non-free software of Steve for the happy lands of Linux. Not now that Bill can move in with Steve. And heck, Linus can too.
Seriously, this is wonderful. More wonderful to me than VMWare, just because it’s easier to use and much cheaper. (On the upside, VMWare doesn’t seem to care how often you keep requesting a 30 day trial license key, while Parallels is more persnickety. I grabbed a 15 day free trial key weeks ago and didn’t have enough memory to do much with it at the time, and I had to go scrub config files to get it to accept a new 15 day trial license. But Parallels I can afford to buy now that I’m confident in how it works with the trial license and all.)
Oh yeah — I finally found myself in a financial position to upgrade the memory on my memory-hungry macbook — from a barely adequate 512M to a much more pleasant 1.25G. That’s what inspired me to make a go of Parallels.
And it’s hitting me that developing windows software with a mac running Parallels is potentially a totally different thing than just developing on Windows. I can stay in one environment to edit code — just edit it in a shared directory, and edit it in Aquamacs or Carbon Emacs. I don’t need an email client or jabber client installed on my win machine. I don’t need to synchronize my bookmarks between browser installs on my win machine and mac machine, because I only really need to use the browser in one. I have been using cvs and ssh on cygwin on my windows dev machine for code checkout and synchronization, but I don’t need that either. I can check out code using the cvs/ssh stuff on my mac, right into a shared directory. I can probably get away with mingw for compiling the C/C++ portions of software there.
The number of things I still do need to install on that machine for it to be good for work is surprisingly, surprisingly small.
And of course I’ve made a copy of the VM/HD with my basic install of winxp on it, so I can create a variety of VM’s for special purposes, like if I ever get into that whole crazy “PC gaming” thing that the kids talk about these days.
Man, that’s a lot of links. Maybe I’m feeling giddy about the links because I’m typing this all up in Ecto and it’s just a few keystrokes, I don’t have to type <a> and all that jive. Get the link on the clipboard, select the text, and command-shift-u.
Damn you, Steve.
For a non-giddy-fanboy estimation of the glories and perils — mostly perils — of going the way of Apple, see this apple hate rant. And Mark Pilgrim’s bailing out of Appleville. I love me the Linux, and if it weren’t for good fortune in my employment which allows me to justify a purchase like Apple hardware, I’d probably be happy to muddle through on low-end PC hardware and a nice install of Ubuntu Linux. But hey, this is where I happen to be right now.
Did you notice I bothered to put categories on this post? That’s cause I’m editing in Ecto. On my Mac.