Autotest, which is part of ZenTest, is a very handy testing application. It runs tests as changes are made to the code. When using it, I would accidentally leave it running and then notice something using up CPU cycles. It would turn out to be the autotest process that was still scanning files for changes every so often. I would then stop autotest only to be bothered to start it up again when I was working on the project again.

Awhile ago, I ran across autotest-fsevent for the Mac. It uses the Mac's FSEvent core service to determine which files have changed (or to be notified when they are). This appears to have really helped the CPU cycles especially when nothing has changed. It is immediately notified when a file has changed.

I would also recommend upgrading to the latest autotest-growl as well. I was using an older version and there have been improvements.

While playing sports (namely basketball) for a number of years, I played on a number of different teams and had a number of different coaches (2 main coaches in high school and college). Looking back, it was very interesting to see the different styles in coaches and players. I was pretty lucky for the most part, the majority of my experiences were on teams that understood the concept of "team play".

One thing I didn't completely realize was how important the coach's leadership was and the values they instilled. When a player first joined the team, they wouldn't completely fit in or at the very least they would struggle a litte. Having these core values, provided by the coach originally and promoted by upperclassmen, the freshmen (or new transfer) has a base to build from. As they grow as a player and person (going from freshman to sophomore and so on), their playing skills would develop, but they would also continue to 'buy-in' (or gel) to the team values. Of course, this happened at a different pace for everyone depending on the player.

I am starting to see that again in the agile software development. As teams shift and grow, you go through this process over and over. I think it is important to have those underlying values, but the overall appearance of the team will reflect the current players. I am learning there is a delicate balance between emphasizing values, letting the team gel and using the strengths of the new players. If too much emphasis is placed on values, it suppresses the strengths of new players. If the values are shifted too much, you lose the history that has brought you success in the past. I feel like it is somewhere in the middle that allows your team to gel the quickest depending on the number of returning starters you have from the previous season (or project).

This (home grown) blog is now running on Ruby 1.9. Since I wrote it using Sinatra and couch-rest, it was pretty easy to get working. The only real trick was adding a fake JSON gem to fulfill a dependency on JSON (which is now part of Ruby 1.9). I found this reference on the IsItRuby19 which came in very handy in determining which gems work on Ruby 1.9.

Last night, Esther Derby came and talked to the local Agile RTP group. Her talk was called "What's a Manager To Do?". With agile teams being self-organizing, what is the manager's role in this situation? An agile team can start to take on some of the items that a manager used to do. Task assignment and tracking are two items that seemed like good candidates for the team to take over. There are some things that require a manager that aren't going away. HR related issues and budgeting are two examples.
There are several grey areas that could go either way depending on the maturity and organization of the agile team. For instance, conflict/friction issues might need to be handled by a manager, but for the health of the team, might be best addressed at the team or individual level. If someone reports to their manager that someone on the team isn't performing and the manager goes to this individual and says 'I heard you weren't performing (doing or not doing X)', this isn't going to be good for the team. Who can they trust on the team? If the team has been letting an issue fester for a long time (not addressing the issue with the other team member), this can cause even more issues. From Esther's experience, it sounded like 1) openness between the team members is critical and 2) the manager should really fine tune their observation skills so they can catch issues as they come up.

Another grey area is the decision making process. If the team assumes they have the right to make decision X and the manager vetoes this right, that can really discourage the team. It can also work the other way where the team is assuming the manager is going to make a decision, but the manager is expecting that from the team. Esther's suggestion was to layout a decision matrix that helps clarify who is responsible for making decisions. Although it wasn't directly said (or I didn't hear), I suppose this helps with the transparency of the team which is a common theme in the agile space.

An underlying theme, from my perspective, was the reference to teams, in particular team sports, where it truly is a group of players working together (her example was basketball). Many of the agile concepts that appeal to me came from my experiences playing basketball. I am frequently reminded of how my experiences playing on a team were so similar to being on a team at work. Everything from how to interact with others to keeping a goal in mind and staying on target.

Overall, the talk was good and reaffirmed some of the ideas we were already using. Clarifying decision making, dealing with friction and the "team" concept were some of the key points I am taking away from last night.

Do you remember in school when you used to have the word problems in math? You had to read a paragraph and then pick it apart for certain key words. You might look for "of*" or "times" to indicate multiplication or "more than" for addition. I remembering doing fairly well at these *word problems (not that I enjoyed them), but I didn't really understand how much these were going to apply to me in the future.

It turns out that in the technical field (and probably others) I am constantly dealing with word problems. There are 2 ways that I see them represented:

1. in general email sent each day (applies to non-technical as well)
2. in specification, requirement or similar documents

I have updated the look of the blog as well as the underlying blog software. I have also switched from http://outten.net/weblog to http://blog.outten.net. I had been using a customized version of Typo.

The new blog is running my own combination of Sinatra and CouchDB. I have been using Ruby for a few years now (after starting with Rails). I was curious to see what some of the other Ruby frameworks had to offer. I have tried Camping, Ramaze and Merb. All had some really strong points and I started rewriting my blog in each of these, but did not finish with any of them.

When I first looked at Sinatra, I didn't have a great first impression. I went away and looked at some of the other frameworks mentioned. After dabbling in each, I ran across Sinatra again and really dug it. About the same time I had become interested in CouchDB and really wanted to give it a try. That's when I started playing with a Sinatra and CouchDB combination. They seem to be a nice fit even though I could have written the entire blog in Javascript.

I am planning to release the code in the future in case someone else would like to use it.

Features

• multiple blogs hosted by the single instance
  • each blog uses its own CouchDB database
• plug-in for protecting a blog by requiring users to identify themselves
• admin application separated into a different Rack module

I have run across this a few times in my career, but with a slightly different twist. With my current team, it doesn't really happen with the developers (we are pretty conscious about seeing things from each other's point of view), but it occurs more often with the people in the analysis/support role. They sometimes overreact to something just to be "firefighting" instead of maintaining a stable environment and understanding what is important to the larger set of users.

Still a very good article from the developer perspective.

Recently, I have tried several other version control systems to see what they were like as opposed to the normal one. After trying these, I have come to like Mercurial (or "hg" from the command line). It is a distributed revision control application. Why would I be interested especially when there is subversion? Let's take a quick look.

I have a scripts directory that is in "~/.bin". I wanted to version all the files in that directory and back them up somewhere. Here is what I did:

  $ cd ~/.bin
  $ hg init                # initialize the repository
  $ hg add .               # add all of the files in the current directory
  $ hg commit              # commit the file to hg

Now if I change any file, I can run hg status or hg diff with similar results as svn. Once I am done, I just run hg commit to update the local repository.

What about backing up the files?

  $ hg push ssh://someothercomputer.cam/backup_bin  # push the repository to a server

Pretty easy. No svn import and then checkout. Visit the site or read the book to see the other powerful features.

I thought I should post on what has been going on with me. It has been a busy summer. I attended two great conferences: Research Triangle Software Symposium and Ruby Hoedown. I got some good information from both of these.

I am giving the Dvorak keyboard a try. I have read about it a few times, but I didn't realize how easy it is to try. The latest article I read said go "cold turkey" for a month. I will give it a try.

My goals: improve my accuracy and speed

Recently, I setup openvpn so I could connect to a network remotely. I wanted to route traffic to that network via openvpn even through the machines on the remote network were public IP addresses. Here is what I did.

I ran across the Better Gmail extension for Firefox today when I saw this video. I was very impressed and it made me take a brief look at Greesemonkey. I have definitely heard of Greesemonkey, but I didn't think I knew of a real application for it. This was until today when I saw Better Gmail. I started thinking about all of the web apps that I use daily and how I could improve them with Greesemonkey. There are several that need improvements especially in navigation.

I have been using Think lately (handy tool for focusing on a Mac). Today when I was leaving work, it made me laugh to think that I quit Thinking.

I ran across MacFUSE a few weeks ago. I read the instructions for compiling it and I didn't think it was worth the effort. I recently found out that there are compiled versions and the instructions are in the Quicker Start Guide. The sshfs application comes in extremely handy especially when used with my favorite editor. I know this has been blogged about already, but I just ran across it. Make sure you checkout the video with some interesting ideas on how to use MacFUSE.

I have been using GNU Screen for a couple of years. It comes in very handy when accessing multiple terminal windows. Yesterday, I found this tip page in the Gentoo wiki. I was actually trying to figure out how to do something else when I stumbled onto changing the escape sequence section.

I am trying out a new picture gallery site called SmugMug. I was pretty impressed with their service and the features they offered. One of my main reasons for using them, the pictures will be backed up in 3 states (see first paragraph). As we take more and more digital pictures, I saw the need growing. Photo sharing, keywords and cost were also high on the list of things that helped me make my decision.

Last week, my brother shared this article about Best Buy's strategies for the work environment. The "results-only work environment" (ROWE) is extremely interesting. I have wondered before why more companies didn't offer employees the option to telecommute, but ROWE seems to take it to another level. They say you can work when and where you want to work.

I was checking out my Dad's Mac Book and noticed he had a cool vertical view of his email. After searching around the menus, I realized it wasn't something standard. I found that my brother installed Letter Box for my Dad. I must have missed it in my RSS feeds. So far, I really like it.

This is a handy script to get Internet Explorer running under Linux. I had it up and running in Ubuntu in no time at all. Now I have a computer that I can test how a website looks in IE again (maybe I will actually fix this blog sometime).

Someone told me about the Gmap Pedometer the other day. It is a nice tool. I mapped out a few of the common paths we walk. I also mapped my drive to work the few different ways I drive it. Then I was curious to see what other applications use Google Maps API and I found this blog. It is cool to see how the API is being used.

I ran across this article talking about the technical setup of Lingr (basically provides chat rooms in the browser). The interesting thing about Lingr is it uses a technology that keeps a connection open from the browser to the server. With this connection open, the server can push content to the browser without requiring a browser refresh or a "polling" of the server. This lead to comments about whether servers could handle that many open connections.

I learned tonight that if all of the stars that make up the Milky Way were a grain of salt, it would be enough to fill up an Olympic size swimming pool.

I signed up late for BarCampRDU and I am pleased to say I am off the wait list and will be attending the un-conference. If you are not familiar with an un-conference, you can read about it here. I am looking forward to the event although I had kind of given up on it since I was number 31 on the wait list at one point. Hopefully, I will have some good information to blog about afterward.

I have written before about Web RSS Readers. I thought I had found the one I liked in Netvibes, but I just didn't stick with it. I went back to a few different RSS clients. Over the weekend, I ran across Newshutch. They had issues all weekend, but now they are up and running. I am very impressed with my initial usage. It keeps track of what I have read and updates when there are new articles.

Over the past several weeks, we have been meeting on Fridays with the application owners of our latest application. We mainly did this since we are under a tight timeline, but it was also a way to start working Agile Software Development into our environment. Some say you have to follow a process completely, but we haven't quite done that.

I have definitely become a Mac person, but after reading this story on Slashdot, I think I should give Ubuntu a try. I would also like to try a few of these applications as well. Of course, I would miss at least one application.

I ran across this handy monitoring program tonight. It is called monit. It says you can have it up and running in 15 minutes. It took me about 30 minutes, but most of that was me reading trying to decide if I wanted to install it or not.

In Andy Hunt's presentation at NFJS, he mentioned the benefits of having a "dual monitor" setup. According to this NY Times article, you can be 20-30% more productive. The reason being is you are not context switching (not directly in the article more in the presentation). By switching programs or hunting for the one you are looking for on a small screen, it can reduce productive drastically - this is context switching. Context switching isn't just finding programs on the screen. It is answering the IM or the email you just received. It removes your concentration from what you were currently working on and this really hurts productivity.

Now, if I can just convince my wife I need a pair of 30" displays.

Yesterday at NFJS, I went to a talk on Testing Strategies for Web Applications by Ramnivas Laddad. It was a good talk, but the main point I retained from it was using Selenium for user interface testing. I had heard and read a little about the tool, but I had not really looked at it (thinking it would be difficult to setup). After seeing the demo, I was really kicking myself for not looking at it sooner.

Last night was the largest Raleigh Ruby Brigade meeting I have been to (of course, I have only been going since February). Each time I have gone, I have come away with a little something. Most of the time, it is not directly Ruby related - although there is usually a tip or package discussed (after last night, I want to look at RSpec).

I have looked a couple of times at the new Intel Macs at the local Apple Store. Last night I got a little demo of one while at the local ruby brigade. The power adapter is a great little feature that I had overlooked. I don't know how many times I shift my Powerbook and if the plug shifts slightly, I am running off the battery. A power cord with the magnet appears to be a great idea.

Next, I got to see Parallels in action. It is very cool. I don't use Windows much (mainly for testing that other browser), but it would be handy just to switch over to it. The idea of running Linux on it also sounds appealing. Just the fact that there is no emulation makes it so much faster.

Maybe if I don't drive for a month, I can save enough money to purchase one.

The ZIP Code Boundaries Database is a cool site that maps the boundaries of a zip code using Google Maps. It is also fun to put in random zip codes like 23456.

I know there is more to Productivity and Happiness than what is in this article, but he does make some good points especially from the developer perspective.

Apple Intel

I played with a few of the new Apple Intel base systems last week. Wow, definitely faster. Of course they will have issues, but I am sure Apple will get them worked out. Needless to say, I think Intel was a good move.

Prototype Tutorial

Good write up explaining the many features packed into the little Javascript library called Prototype.

Tech Books

This is an interesting approach to writing tech books. We have purchased several electronic copies of technology books at work recently. Of course, a hard copy is also nice to have.

New Camera

We recently purchased a Canon SD600. The Canon ELPH series usually has good reviews (although I didn't find many reviews for the SD600). This one had a couple of new features (compared to the SD450) which include Widescreen mode (16:9) and ISO 800 for shooting indoors with no flash (as I understand it). I am sure you will see pictures from it in the future.

Steve Uzzell gave the keynote presentation this morning as part of Alliance 2006. I was very impressed and I enjoyed his presentation style. Of course, it doesn't hurt that he is an excellent photographer and had some superb photos in his presentation. Actually, his entire presentation was photos with almost no words on the screen (kind of made me think about photography as a hobby again).

The unique part to me is that one of my daughter's favorite songs right now is On the Open Road from A Goofy Movie. A theme throughout Mr. Uzzell's presentation was on the open road and the possibilities that are out there. To say the least, I thought about the many times I had sung the Goofy song with my daughter.

This is a slightly older article, but it has some good tips for Quicksilver. There is just so much you can do with Quicksilver without even touching the mouse.

This is an interesting article explaining why Apple is going to switch to using MS Windows as their operating system. I don't think I buy it, but it does have a few interesting points. Apple has put way to much time and effort into migrating from OS 9 to OS X PowerPC and now to OS X Intel. There would be a lot of upset users and developers - I know I prefer the UNIX underneath. Maybe the Linux desktop will have improved enough by then to try it again.

Today, I was emailed the link to FireBug. It is a very useful Firefox extension if you are a developer working with HTML, CSS or Javascript. I would highly recommend it.

See the creator's website for more information including how to log to the console.

A few days ago, there was a posting on the Ruby on Rails blog about a new memcache-client and cached_model. The instructions seemed straight forward so I thought I would give it a try. I added the CachedModel to a Rails application and had it working in no time. The application wasn't spread across multiple servers so there wasn't much point to it other than to test it. I decided I wanted to write a standalone ruby script to interact with my memcached server. While trying this, I ran into the following error:

memcache.rb:305:in `socket': uninitialized constant MemCache::Server::Timeout

Recently in the web development arena, there has been more talk about using "dynamic" languages for development. One of the most popular is PHP. Don't take this wrong, I have done PHP development, but it can get complex and difficult to be DRY (maybe one of the frameworks will help solve this).

I recently watched the December 3, 2005 presentation at Snakes and Rubies. The one common theme between the two presenters is that PHP didn't meet their needs (to say the least). The two projects discussed were Ruby on Rails and Django Framework. I have used Ruby on Rails, but this was the first time I really looked at Django. It looks interesting and there are many similarities between the two frameworks.

I didn't know a Singleton in Ruby would be so easy. I am more impressed with Ruby the more I learn about it.

One thing I like about using a Mac is the number of small shareware applications available. Of course, there are a number of these available for Windows as well, but they don't seem to have the same usefulness or flair (or at least they didn't used to).

For about the past month, I have been using TextMate as my primary editor. I found this entry in the TextMate blog very interesting. In it, Allan looks back at the year and reflects on becoming an independent developer. He references Gus Mueller's blog entry about his journey (the creator of several applications including VooDooPad). Both interesting readings from two successful shareware application developers.

In the past year, I was talking in a meeting and mentioned "refactoring" code is important. Most articles I have read cover why you should refactor or what you can do to make it feasible (automated unit testing, etc). In the meeting, someone asked what is refactoring. I was surprised since it has been such a hot topic in software development. The question came from a knowledgeable person, but their view was limited to developing and supporting a large ERP system. Unfortunately, this type of system doesn't lend itself to the concept of refactoring.

Is Java's usage on the decline? From this article, it might be. Since so many larger companies have converted (or in the process of converting) their applications to Java, this would make sense. They tend to be behind the curve - some more than others.

Netvibes made the Best Web 2.0 Software of 2005. Too bad I didn't find it earlier in the year. It is a good "Start Page" for reading news and more.

Here are a couple of different projects I ran across this weekend:

• Password Generator
• Symfony

Password Generator is an interesting little javascript project that tries to solve the problem of having a single password for multiple websites. They use an MD5 hash of a master password and the domain name. I originally found it on Signal vs. Noise blog in the comments.

Symfony is an "open-source PHP5 web framework". After viewing the online tutorial, it looks pretty interesting - like Ruby on Rails for PHP. PHP is much more readily available than Ruby on Rails/Fastcgi so it might prove useful. They are also posting a set of 24 tutorials for each day between December 1 and Christmas.

If anyone has used "irb" (ruby interactive shell), this is the web version of that. The tutorial looks pretty cool as well.

After reading my brother's article about bloglines, I was curious what web RSS readers were out there. I had tried Google's Reader, but I wasn't impressed with the interface. I did some searching and found Netvibes. At first, I thought it was just another site like My Yahoo, but it had a couple of features I really like.

Looks like Burt Rutan is up to it again. This article has some insights to what he is working on next although it doesn't have many details. He is also looking for people with "fire in their eyes" to join their team.

Recently, I needed a way to load data into a database. The trick was using a Spring+Hibernate model to load the data since I already had that written. I decided to give JRuby a try. I have been using regular Ruby the last couple of weeks and I liked how easy it was to learn/use. I am no Ruby expert, but it hasn't taken much to pick it up.

I need a HFI system for my truck. This article talks about Great Plains Trucking using it in their 18-wheelers. Very interesting. My preference would still be to telecommute, but this would be nice if I have to continue to drive.

I have been using gvisit.com to track visitors to my website. This is just for fun and I like to see where visitors are coming from - plus gvisit integrates with Google Maps API which is pretty cool. I just ran across an article about Google's Analytics. It looks like Analytics has a number of reports and features included with it. I might have to give it a try. Hopefully, it integrates with Google Maps.

This is a handy command I ran across today.

lsof -Pni

Great for troubleshooting network connections on Linux or Macs (probably others). I have used lsof before, but without these switches.

This is where I read about it (I haven't tried that script yet).

I ran across this article talking about PHP vs Java and in particular, how WASP addresses the issues with PHP. It points out some of the negative and positive aspects for both languages. I agree with most points in the article. I have written websites that used PHP for the dynamic pages and the more complex they got, the harder it was to maintain. I know of one scripting language framework that addressed most of these issues early and maybe that is why they have gained so much momentum (and others are copying it).

This is an interesting article on engineering students and why the higher education system isn't working in the US. I have to say, that where I went to school, I didn't run into most of these problems (courses were taught by professors not T.A.s). Although, I didn't stay in the aerospace engineering field mainly because of the fear of being laid off (for example from the article, "...getting laid off from a great job at General Electric.")

I help maintain a fairly large Java application written using EJBs. At the time it was written, we using some of the latest techniques for cache information on the application server itself. This has really proven useful and has decreased the load on the database server. During peak loads, this has proven beneficial and even necessary.

So, has this caching had any negative side affects?

This is a very interesting article written by Bruce Tate. He points out some of the limitations of the Java language and how those are being addressed in Java. It also covers some other possible languages like Ruby, Python, etc.

Secrets of lightweight development success, Part 7: Java alternatives

He mentions at the end of the article that he is going to look beyond Java in future articles. Those should be interesting as well.

At work, we are coming to the end of 3 development projects. All 3 projects seem to be sitting in a good position and we have been fairly agile with our development. With 3 primary members on the team, we overlap and help one another out. To be able to do this, you have to work with quality people. This was something that I was reminded of numerous times while I played basketball in college (maybe I will compare those another time).

I am very optimistic about the results from these projects. If nothing else, we should remain agile throughout the process even when the unexpected happens.

There are many debates as to the best language and environment to develop in. Most of my primary development in the past 3 or so years has been in a J2EE environment. For the first several years developing in this environment, I thought it was a great environment and provided many of the necessary functions in the provided APIs. As I used it more and more, the limitations became more obvious.

From this slashdot article, you can read this blog about the survival in New Orleans. It talks about some of the challenges they are having in the aftermath and trying to keep their systems online. There are even links to some pictures.

I know Alpha 2 of Deer Park has been out for over month, but I just tried it a couple of days ago. I have to say that it seems much faster especially when using the "Back" and "Forward" buttons. It is supposed to have "Better support for Mac OS X" which is a definite positive. I was also surprised that a number of the extensions I use still worked with it. The only one that didn't was Bookmarks Synchronizer, but I use Simpy now anyway.

Today I got "Ruby on Rails":http://www.rubyonrails.com/ working with mysql (version mysql-standard-4.1.13-apple-darwin8.1.0-powerpc from the "mysql.com":http://www.mysql.com). I got it to compile yesterday, but when I tried to run typo I got the following error:

dyld: NSLinkModule() error dyld: 
Symbol not found: _sprintf$LDBLStub Referenced from: 
/usr/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/powerpc-darwin8.0/mysql.bundle
Expected in: flat namespace

Trace/BPT trap

I found this "blog":http://www.pjhyett.com/articles/2005/06/04/setting-up-ror-in-tiger about setting up mysql and ruby. After reading the comments, I saw that someone recommended that you download the latest version of "mysql/ruby":http://www.tmtm.org/en/mysql/ruby/ and compile it using gcc 4.0 on the Mac. Once I did that, it worked. I only had to jump through a few hoops to get it to work.

Apple is switching to an Intel based architecture. The move should be completed by the end of 2007. Very interesting move and it is even more interesting that they have had an i86 version of Mac OS X running for the past 5 years. Check out MacRumors for more information. Maybe this will help drive down the cost of the current Mac hardware.

I guess we will find out on Monday if Apple is really going to switch from IBM's PowerPC chip to Intel's chips x86 chips. This would be huge.

After running the latest release of Mac OS X (Tiger - 10.4) for about a week, I thought I would comment on Tiger. I decided to do an erase and install on my Powerbook at home. The install was straight forward and no surprises there.


The first few times using Spotlight, I thought it was pretty cool. I thought it would be much more useful when I got my documents back on my machine. My initial thought was the Spotlight would replace Quicksilver. After using Spotlight, I realized it did not "learn" what items I select and move them to the top of the list. I will be sticking with Quicksilver for a while longer.

Tiger also seemed a little sluggish running on my Powerbook with the default 512MB of memory. From the sound of things, it was reading the hard drive often. Later in the week, it seemed to stabilize so maybe it was indexing my email or files I had just transferred back to it.

I am enjoying the improvements to Mail the most. It now has saved searches and it works across multiple IMAP accounts. The search interface in Mail is also much improved. I am not sure if I like the toolbar icons or not, but the functionality is better.

Other Random Features: Safari RSS is nice, but the only real option it has over Sage in Firefox is the Search option. Dashboard comes in handy. The weather is the widget I refer to most of the time. The built in dictionary is nice and there is even a Keyboard shortcut for it.

Overall, Tiger is an improvement, but I just don't think the improvements are as beneficial as Expose was in Panther. Just my initial thoughts...

I have been using nfs for a while, but it isn't the best for mounting remote filesystems from anywhere. I have also tried to use samba, but I have run into problems with that. I have also looked at webdav, but it didn't work quite how I had hoped. Anyway, shfs seems to be a good solution.

Go to shfs web site

I don't normally post programming stuff, but this is one I didn't want to forget. The XML HTTP Request object is a method for client side Javascript to make HTTP requests. This might not be that new to some people, but I just ran across it reading about how Google's new email service works (GMail). This site provides some good examples. It also doesn't look that difficult to fall back to regular requests if the browser you are using doesn't support this functionality. I am sure I will be using it in the future.

I was looking through Macworld tonight and ran across a couple of good applications. I had been using LaunchBar for a while, but I think I like Quicksilver better. Anyway, I am just getting used to it, but the builtin clipboard manager is nice.

The next useful application is WinSwitch. Since my wife and I switch between users, we liked this added functionality in the latest version of OS X(10.3). The only problem is the long username takes up too much space in the top bar. With WinSwitch, you can change the name into an icon or short name of the user.

Today I started using xfce 4. I guess I am still looking for a Desktop Environment that is fast, but is realizable. I switched to GNOME from Fluxbox because some strange things were happening in Fluxbox. GNOME initially seemed to be as fast, but really seemed to slow down over time (just my option). I decided to give xfce a try. xfce is very fast and has a nice user interface.

I have been a KDE user for probably a year now. Recently I tried Fluxbox again. I was very impressed and used it for a few weeks. I started running into problems with the focus behavior when I realized I was using mostly GNOME applications within Fluxbox. I decided to give GNOME a try again (I had tried it in the past). Now I am using it at home and at work as my desktop. It is nicely laid out and consistent button layout.


I am sure I will switch back to KDE in the future, but for now I am using GNOME. I haven't tried the latest version of GNOME (2.4), but I am sure there are improvements there.

We had to ship the powerbook out again. This past week we took the powerbook to the local Apple Store and they tried to fix our latch not latching problem. Well, they were able to get it to latch, but the problem was the lid didn't line up with the base. Basically, they said we needed a new base and lid.

Today we took it to the store to have it shipped out for repair. Hopefully it won't take too long. Let me say that the guys at the store did a great job and I have been pleased with their level of service.

We are waiting to have the Powerbook fixed again. This time we didn't have to send the Powerbook back to Apple to have the latch fixed. The only problem is we have been waiting over 2 weeks to have the latch part delivered to the Apple store so they can fix it. Hopefully it will come soon.

I also had the remote go bad on my iPod. I am beginning to wonder about the reliability of Apple products. Luckily, it is still under warranty and they replaced the part.

The other night I was on the computer and my brother was on at the same time. We ended up voice chatting over iChat. It works extremely well. My brother was able to hear me and hear his niece in the background laughing and playing. I tried to get the video chat going, but I wasn't able to get my camera to work. I didn't try hard so I probably could have gotten it working.

I have been using Mozilla Firebird since it was called Phoenix. It has undergone another name change and is now call Firefox. That is the only change. It is much faster and seems to be much more stable (at least in the Linux environment). There are many more appealing features. Anyway, check it out if you get a chance.

There is also a new version of Thunderbird which also has improvements.

I have made good progress with FreeBSD. It is like a combination of Linux distributions Gentoo and Debian. I can download either the binary package (pkg_add -r {name}) or build it from the source using the ports collection (/usr/ports). So far, my experience has been a good one.

The Powerbook was returned to us last week sooner than we were told. The white spots on the screen were fixed. We had dropped the Powerbook off at the Apple Store on Saturday and it was delivered to our house Thursday morning. We also had a problem with the LCD creaking while opening it. This was fixed also. Hopefully we are good to go now.

Last week, I picked up an old Dell computer from Sports Tours and loaded FreeBSD on it. It was a pretty easy install, but I am still getting familiar with it. The ports system is pretty nice and is what some Linux distributions are based on. My biggest problem is getting Java to run on it. I have compiled a version of the JVM, but I haven't had a chance to really try it. I should be able to get it working.

Today we took the powerbook to the Apple store to have the white spot issue fixed. The problem has been reported in a number of places (here and here). We took it in and without a hassle they agreed to have it shipped off to have it fixed. The major problem is that it will take 5-7 days for them to fix it. I guess there are a lot of problems coming in. This is the second time we had a problem with the powerbook and have had it shipped off. It isn't much fun. Hopefully it will be fixed this time.

This was a hint that I had been looking for. I found myself from time to time looking at the menu bar to see what the current date is. It wasn't there and I didn't see anything in the setup to turn it on. Someone figured it out and posted it here:

http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20031113121905276

Great little trick if you were looking for that.

This past weekend we got our copy of Mac OS X Panther (10.3) and let me say it is slick. Suzanne and I can now have our own desktop and setup. I find myself using Expose quite often and I have even made a corner by my screen activate it. Overall, Panther seems to be a little peppier than Jaguar (10.2.8).

I am still working out some sharing issues. I was able to share our iTunes library between Suzanne and I, but I haven't got the iPhotos library shared yet. This shouldn't be hard, but I haven't done it.

We ordered Mac OS X 10.3 (Panther) this past weekend. It looks pretty impressive and has some nice features. I ordered it from the Apple Store and it should be here sometime earlier next week.

We got our Powerbook back. We were a little worried when Suzanne called the Apple Store and they said it had just made it to Apple yesterday (when we sent it last Thursday). I guess they tried to fix it at the Apple Store in Durham.

Anyway, it is fixed and Suzanne is happy.

Well, we had to send the powerbook away. We have had a problem with the latch not working properly when closing the lid. Last night we took it out to the Apple Store to have them look at it and the latch defect is one of the few things they don't do at the store, so it had to be shipped back to Apple to be fixed. Evidently, this latch defect happens fairly frequently in the 15" model.

It normally takes them 3-5 business days to get it fixed and returned. They send it next day air to Apple and then next day air it back to whereever you want (to our house in our case).

I think Suzanne was more upset than I was. She can't believe I just let them take it back. They are going to start doing the latch repair at the store here, but they didn't say when. Suzanne thought I should have checked to see when they would start doing it here and see if we could wait. I just wanted it fixed. Anyway, my point being that Suzanne really likes the Mac and uses it quite often.

I found SideTrack on Mac OS X Hints yesterday. I decided to install it and give it a try on my Powerbook. It seemed to work most of the time although sometimes it wouldn't scroll right away. It might just take some time for me to get used to. This is a very nice feature and I don't understand why it isn't included as part of the standard Apple driver.

I made the Powerbook talk to Suzanne this morning. I found an interesting article on how to use AppleScript to make Powerbook say something. You can find the article here:

http://www.macdevcenter.com/pub/a/mac/2003/09/19/remote_control.html

I found a desktop manager that allows me to do multiple desktops(which my brother sent me as well). I haven't used it much yet, but it looked promising.

I also got a couple of other solutions from my brother for setting up Safari. Here they are:

http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20030110063041629

http://versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/17952

I haven't tried them yet, but I will.

I am still learning how to use the Powerbook. I had become accustomed to using Linux with multiple desktops and that it is an adjustment. Overall, I really like the Mac. My brother told me a couple of useful tricks for setting up the Mac. I have probably used this site the most to find out how to do things, but Google has been most helpful.

I still need to play with iMovie some more. There are a couple of things that I couldn't figure out how to do the first time I tried, but I really didn't look at it very long.

I really like Safari for web browsing. There are a couple of errors I have (pages being cached too aggressively is one), but overall it is slick. I am sure the next version will fix some of these problems.

My powerbook is working with the wireless network. I think changing the channel on the wireless router fixed the problem. My guess is that I was using the same channel as a neighbor. I am glad that is fixed.

Yesterday, we returned the 12" Powerbook and 20GB iPod and got a 15" Powerbook and 15Gb iPod. At this point, I have only opened the Powerbook and let me say that it is slick. Apple makes some good computers (they should for the price). Last night I spent most of the time trying to get it setup (downloading and installing programs).


I did run into some wireless network issues. The Powerbook comes with 802.11g which is supposed to be compatible with 802.11b which is what I have. At first, it didn't work at all, but then it worked for a while last night. Then it stopped again. I made some changes to my wireless access point (switched channels because I thought I might be competing with one of the neighbors). I ended up plugging it into the network to do a couple of things before I went to bed. This morning, it recognized the wireless network without a problem. I am interested in seeing if the problem continues.

I am new to the Apple scene. I have been a pretty heavy Linux user in the last couple of years. For the past 3 months (since my daughter was born), I have been considering getting a Powerbook from Apple. The problem is there have been rumors of new Powerbooks coming, but they haven't yet made it. There is also a special offer from Apple if you buy a Powerbook and iPod, you get a $200 rebate (educational).

Today, Apple introduced new iPods that are not eligible for the rebate. They have larger storage capacity. I am expecting the new Powerbooks to be introduced next week at the Mac Expo, but they probably won't qualify either. Do I go with the newest stuff or take the rebate and go with the older?

humm....

Tonight we purchased a Powerbook and a 20GB iPod. The 20GB iPod was eligible for the $200 rebate from Apple (educational). Suzanne and I really debated whether or not to get the Powerbook.

While we are at the Apple store about ready to purchase the Powerbook Suzanne asked Reia if she was excited and Reia let out a squeal. It was pretty funny and Suzanne turned a nice shade of red.

Now it is a waiting game. I am going to wait until next week to see if Apple announces new Powerbooks at the expo next week. There is a slight chance if Apple reduces the Powerbook prices (or if they stay the same), Apple will do an appeasement on the older powerbooks.