everyday

My new MacBookPro! First let me start with, this thing is awesome. I haven’t been this excited about a piece of electronic hardware in ages. The look and feel of the MacBookPro is amazing. It just feels good! The operating system, OSX, is wonderfully intuitivel; it never seems to be in the way.

Now on to my complaints… My first MacBookPro would boot up with no problems, then the keyboard and trackpad would quit working after anywhere from a few seconds to a few minutes. This was very frustrating and I came very close to hurtling my $2,000 MacBookPro across the room in anger. I called AppleCare and we went through a couple of steps that I had already performed as a result of my online research regarding this problem, they then suggested that I return it to the store. This is where my biggest complaint lies. The nearest Apple Store to me is approximately a 1.5 hour drive, I had to go there twice to get a fully functional MacBookPro. When I took my first MacBookPro back to the store, they were very nonchalant and unapologetic about the hardware failure. I fully expected that they would throw in a free Mighty Mouse or at least a cheap case for my trouble, but no. So much for customer service!

Despite my troubles, I would fully recommend everyone in the world switching over to a Mac, they really are just better!

I got a Mac Book Pro!

Once every ten years a movie comes along that completely captures the essence of a generation, this is that movie, “Step Up”

HA!

I have been playing with Ruby On Rails for a while now. While it is super easy to use and brilliantly designed, the development tools on a M$ Windows machine are lacking (to say the least). That being said, through many hours of frustration and heartache, I have finally come to the following solution:

Development Machine

1. Windows Explorer - Navigating directory structures
2. Powertoy to “Open CMD window here” - simple right-click addition to open a command window from any directory (saves a lot of typing trying to navigate from within the command window
3. Notepad++ - Nice and simple text editor, fairly intuitive. Don’t use Windows Notepad, the line line breaks are in the incorrect format for a *nix server (which you will most likely be using at some point).
4. Tortoise SVN - Very easy to use Subversion client that integrates directly into the shell of Windows Explorer like it was meant to be there (how sweet would that be?).
5. MySQL AB - I use the included command line client, it takes some getting used to, but in the RoR world, command line is the de-facto standard for getting things done.

Server

1. Subversion! - An absolute must for development! I don’t know how I ever accomplished anything without it. For those not in the know, subversion is a version control system for anything. It is super powerful and I use maybe 10% of it’s feature set.
2. Shovel - this isn’t so much a program as a tool. Shovel is a recipe for Capistrano that makes deploying you subversioned RoR application dead simple.

That’s it! I tried using RadRails, and it works, but it is overly complicated. I tried a number of text editors, but Notepad++ seems to work the best (at least for me it does). I like tools that don’t get in my way. You will notice that there isn’t a big Integrated Development Enviroment (IDE) listed here. I don’t like them for the small projects that I am working on.

P.S. These are all open-source and FREE!!!!