Switching to the Mac at home

Even though my job is as a Windows Software Developer, I am switching over completely at home to Macs and using MS Remote Desktop Connection on the Mac to get to my work desktop or use my work provided laptop. I never develop on my home PC, and the experience on the Mac has been so good for all the things that are important to me, digital photos, music, home movies, that I am just going to completely switch. As for games, one of my big leisure time activities, since I got an Xbox, I hardly ever play PC games. Doom 3 is the first I have played in a long time, and it is going to be the last because my hardware has already fallen behind the curve for the best experience. I intend on posting me experience here, as I have already started, about the switch. I hope you enjoy.

Framed My First Comment

When I started the blog, I didn't know what to expect with regard to number of visitors or people commenting. I was happy to receive my first comment the other day from the Blog Bloke In the tradition of businesses framing their first dollar, I have "framed" my first comment. Seeing this comment also spured me to add Site Meter stats to my blog. Thanks Blog Bloke

I want to invoke the right of parley, or: how MS missed an opportunity with SP2

The title of this article was insprired by the excellent article on Daring Fireball XP SP2 is absolutely an essential upgrade, everyone should install it, even though there might be some problems with it (more on that later). The opportunity MS missed was shipping the .NET Framework standard with SP2. The redistributable installer is on the SP2 CD, but the SP2 installer does not install the framework. As a developer, I have given up all hope of seeing Windows Forms as a viable deployment platform. This was the last best opportunity to push these bits onto the client platform and they just didn't do it. I would love to know why we ended up in this mess. And I just don't buy the arguement that this is because of the legal stuff with the DOJ, Europe, and Japan. If that were true, why does SP2 update my media player to Windows Media Player 9? A sad day for .NET developers. The platform may rock, but if I can't depend on the bits being on the client, and I want to minimize my installers size, I am stuck in VB6 or Win32 for client apps...*sigh*

.Mac iDisk Synchronization in Panther

When I got my iBook, I signed up for Apple's .Mac service for my wife because we wanted drop dead easy photo publishing of our, at the time (Dec '03) upcoming son. We love that functionality and it works beautifully from iPhoto. iPhoto uses your iDisk to store the photos and HTML pages that are visible from http://homepage.mac.com/[membername] This weekend I pushed .Mac and the Panther synchronization capabilities to the limits and I am not impressed. I added a large, 47.5 MB file, to my iDisk. With my other stuff and the default limit of 100 MB, the iDisk sync with my local copy basically ended up in an infinite loop. OS X 10.3.4 would try and synch the file, fail with an out of space error which was very pretty, and then just keep trying again. The out of space error was particularly frustrating, since I should have had 13.3 MB of free space after I uploaded the file. I pushed out over 1.26 GB of data as of my last attempt. Even more frustrating, since I have a local copy of the iDisk, I can't see if the copy on .Mac is out of storage, OS X just redirects me to my local version (using the Finder -> Go -> iDisk -> My iDisk). I hope they fix this stuff in 10.3.5 or Tiger, but this is a disappointment.