This week has been a relief after the last several weeks of back to back meetings. I don’t know when I’m expected to get any work done. But this week has been great 
I’ve had the new MacBook to play with, and getting it set up so I’m comfortable working with it has slowed me down a bit, but I’ve still done more work this week than in the three before it put together.
I can’t believe that of all the things I’ve installed on the new work MacBook, I forgot to install the Del.icio.us plugin. I just tried to bookmark site and there was no del.icio.us!
I also can’t believe how much I’ve gotten used to something which for the longest time I just couldn’t see the point of 
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I was just uploading some stuff in the background, and I was waiting for the little Growl notification to tell me it was done. But it didn’t come.
Then I remembered I hadn’t installed growl on the new work MacBook 
I thought I could live without it, but it’s just such a neat little app. I missed it. So it’s installed now
But now I have everything set up, pretty much the way I like it. Tomorrow I will see if I can finally get through a whole day without booting up the desktop machine. The only potential fly in the ointment is Visual Source Safe. There’s no Mac client and do need to access it from time to time. I don’t think I can get work to pay for Parallels. I could try bootcamp, but it’s still a fairly large chuck of my relatively small hard disk (a 49gb + a 25gb partition) to give up.
Let’s just see how we go tomorrow…
Here’s one to get involved in…
Let the games begin!
Webstock www.webstock.org.nz and WIPA www.wipa.org.au are extremely
pleased to announce the launch of FullCodePress www.fullcodepress.com, a
new and exciting series of web events.The concept is simple: national teams compete against each other to build
a website in 24 hrs, putting national pride and web prowess to the test.
And the real winners of the competitions? The not-for-profit organisation
who is presented with a stunning, fully functional website.The first competition will take place in Sydney, Australia on 18 August -
a trans-Tasman clash between the best of Australia and New Zealand.
Following that, on the 9th February, and just prior to Webstock 08, teams
from around the world will converge in Wellington New Zealand for a larger
international competition. Think geek Olympics!The competitions will be judged by a panel with a brief to look at such
aspects as:
- meeting client needs
- web standards and accessibility best practice
- visual design
- innovative codingTeams will consist of 7 members, covering all aspects of the web
development process.The process, from start to finish is explained here:
http://www.fullcodepress.com/how/Those interested in being considered for the New Zealand or Australian
teams are invited to register on the FullCodePress website.Register for the Australian team
http://www.fullcodepress.com/register-australia/Register for the New Zealand team
http://www.fullcodepress.com/register-newzealand/We’re also looking for people to take on the role of country organiser for
other countries around the world.Register as a Country organiser
http://www.fullcodepress.com/country-organiser/Both Webstock and WIPA are passionate about promoting a web standards
based approach to web design and development. They see FullCodePress as a
way of further spreading this message, whilst at the same time
strengthening ties and connections globally amongst the web industry. And
being able to help out a worthy not-for-profit organisation is the icing
on the cake.If you are a small to medium sized non-profit organisation that would like a
new website, you can register your non-profit organisation:
http://www.fullcodepress.com/register-organisation/Thanks
Russ
It’s 11.30 on the first day of my Mac only trial and I’ve already failed.
(It is improtant to note here that I’m doing all this testing on the SOE provided by Swinburne. This is *not* a vanilla OS X machine.)
The first problem was the proxy settings in Firefox. I still don’t get why Firefox has to use different network settings from the system settings. Safari worked just fine, but when I tried to connect to the web interface of the Groupwise system to check my email, the connection simply timed out. It only worked after I changed the Firefox settings to use the “wwwproxy…” address instead of the “proxy…” address. I’m blaming ITS for this. It’s their SOE *and* their proxy
So I needed to boot up the desktop machine to check my email to get the password to unlock Keychain, which is the next point…
For some reason, the Keychain Password is broken. I had to reset Keychain before I could use it. We are having the same problem with our MacPro (desktop beast). It also uses the SOE. It’s worth noting that neither Evan’s MacBookPro (not SOE) or my iBook (not SOE) has this problem.
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Yesterday I was issued with a new MacBook (2Ghz dual core intel. 1GB ram) as part of the great Mac experiment here at work. I *think* I have this beastie until November (the end? or the beginning of that month? I don’t know.)
But I thought I’d take this opportunity to write a few things about it. I’m going to see if I can do all my work from the laptop now and not have to turn on my desktop machine at all.
So what are the first things I did to the new machine?
* appreciate the wider screen
My 12″ iBook is nice, but I so get tired of the little screen sometimes. I think this one is 15″
* Install Quicksilver. This app launcher is great. I was skeptical at first. I mean, it’s not like the doc and Finder are that hard to use. Even Spotlight can launch apps. But after using Quicksilver for a while, I find it essential. Put me on a machine without Quicksilver and I get that same feeling you get when you try using a mouse without a scroll wheel. Know what I mean?
* Install iStat Pro. I just *had* to see how this beastie was performing.
* Install the Web Developer toolbar, FireBug and ScribeFire for Firefox. The first two are essential tools of the trade for any web developer. ScribeFire is an experiment for me. I’d normaly use TextMate for drafting and publishing blog posts. But I’m not going to buy it just for a machine I have to give back in a few months. So I thought I’d play around with some other blogging tools. Sure I could write my post right there in Wordpress, but I want to use something else for a change. I’m writing this post with it now. So far so good
* Install xCode so I get the developer tools. While 60% of my job seems to be having meeting these day, and another 38% is working on HTML/CSS/JavaScript/PHP, I have been working on some Java. So I need the compilers.
* Install CyberDuck. It’s goofy, but it’s it’s not a bad FTP client, and I still need one pretty much every day.
TODO…
I still need to find an SVN client. Probably SvnX. I hear good things about it, so I’ll give it a try. I know I could just use the command line tools, but I’ve been spoilt with Tortoise. Why, oh *why* isn’t Tortoise available on Mac?
I also have to install Dreamweaver. I’d love to get CS3, but work hasn’t negotiated licensing for it yet, so I’m going to have to install the old Dreamweaver 8 instead.
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