kill vehicle

I’m installing WinXP on my MacBook.

I feel dirty.

But hey, at least I’ll be able to play the shiny new Windows games now.

When I started moving my programming workflow over from the stone tools Emacs+GCC approach I’d been used to for so long to something more Mac-like, I got pretty comfortable with TextWrangler and BBEdit, but I kept occasionally going back to Emacs specifically for dabbrev-complete mode.

It’s one of those tools that you just can’t do without once you get used to it — autocompleting arbitrary text and magically getting the completion suggestions right is pretty handy and great even if your codebase doesn’t have the addiction to super-long identifier names that my current employer does.

I sure wish I’d known about BBAutoComplete a long time ago. It’s almost exactly dabbrev for scriptable Mac applications like TW and BBEdit, and it’s free.

After eight years, the 233MHz Dell box I’d been hosting my mail and web stuff finally started making wheezy I-will-die-soon noises.

So instead of buying/building a new PC, I went to the Apple store and bought a Mac Mini. After a couple days of fiddling, it’s providing all of the old machine’s services (Postfix, SpamAssassin, Cyrus-IMAP, Apache, mod_perl, mod_php, MySQL, WordPress). It’s much faster, which pleases me.

It’s also smaller than some sandwiches I’ve eaten, which honestly kinda disturbs me.

I’m not sure I’m okay with a world in which I can walk into a store in the middle of a nice business district, plop down a couple hundred bucks, and walk out with a fully capable server that pretty much fits in my pocket. Isn’t buying a computer supposed to be, y’know, difficult? Shouldn’t it involve mail-ordering and waiting and irritation and not just “Yeah, hi, I’ll take that one in the middle. Thanks!”?

It’s all kinda neat and I like the runtime-typing freedom, but whoever decided that it was a good idea to end up with runtime exceptions because I accidentally implemented observeValueForKeypath:ofObject:change:context instead of observeValueForKeyPath:ofObject:change:context must be destroyed.

So, I’ve been using the PowerBook for a while. I’m getting sucked in.

The most recent part of that is reading Cocoa Programming For Mac OS X. I’m surprised at how much I like it — it’s a very different programming environment than the low-level networked systems stuff I do all day at the Decorative Soap Factory.

It feels a little dumb to come home from programming all day and read a book about programming, but it’s enough of a change of pace that it’s actually kind of refreshing.

It also helps that I’m a little frustrated with work right now, so something I can also spin as increasing my choice of different soap factories to work at really can’t hurt.