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Got my Mac Book Pro at work
Many of us at work are migrating to OS-X. It's logical since our deployment environment is a Unix variant, Solaris, and most of us on Windows run Cygwin to create a developer environment that resembles a Unix-like environment.
Now I'm not a stranger to OS-X. I've been convincing my family to switch for the past four years and now they mostly run iBooks and Mac Books, decreasing the time I used to spend helping fix problems. Fact of the matter is, if you are using a PC mostly to send email, surf the web, manage photos and video, it is a great all round choice.
The irony is that within minutes of getting my laptop I froze it! Turns out it isn't all that smart to run Parallels, out of the box, the way I did, and run, oh, 8 or so programs simultaneously outside of it!
Anyways, in less than an hour I had my favorite web browser, Firefox, my organizer, Wikidpad (which required me to run it from the Python source - but it worked!), my encryption software TrueCrypt, my IDE of choice Eclipse, my favorite OS-X free text editor, TextWrangler, all up and running. With Maven, SVN, Java and Python pre-installed made it easy to checkout my current work and get a build going. I won't be needing Parallels all that much since so much of the work I do can be done in OS-X, but it will be convenient to be able to test websites in different browsers, on two of the three primary desktop OSes, with little effort.
Karl at Wednesday, April 16, 2008 | Comments (5) | TrackBack
Charles Rocks
For most Web-tier development the following Firefox plugins provide me a great set of tools to get my job done:
Lately however, I find myself needing to trick out my local hosts file for more and more work, in addition to needing to change JavaScript script behavior, on the fly, loaded from various hosts.
Charles lets you do that and a whole lot more. It's become am integral part of my toolbox. It's worth the license fee.
And its written in Java so your investment is cross-platform. I'll be migrating to OS-X soon and not needing to find a replacement for this is great.
Karl at Tuesday, March 11, 2008 | Comments (2) | TrackBack
