It's Not Rocket Surgery » Leopard http://blog.craiglpatterson.com This is what is distracting me right now. Wed, 04 May 2011 17:02:48 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.2.1 No More Sad Mac! http://blog.craiglpatterson.com/2008/03/14/no-more-sad-mac/ http://blog.craiglpatterson.com/2008/03/14/no-more-sad-mac/#comments Fri, 14 Mar 2008 18:34:50 +0000 craiglp http://craiglp.wordpress.com/?p=56 Two and a half years ago I popped into the Apple store in Des Moines and walked out with a 1.5ghz G4 Mac Mini. It wasn’t a rash purchase. I had planned on buying that particular model. It took over desktop duties from my SUSE 9.x Linux box I had built a couple of years prior. I needed something that could run the photography software I wanted to run, and I wasn’t willing to go back to Windows. It has served me well for two years. It has been run hard and put away wet frequently. A memory upgrade to the max 1Gb in the first year gave it some breathing room, and two external Firewire drives provided backup and archive space. I had been weighing the idea of replacing the mini with a new Intel Mac for many months. I was torn between a MacBook Pro and a low-end Mac Pro. Finally, in December ’07 I purchased a 15.4″ 2.2Ghz MacBook Pro. Portability won out over raw power. The day after I brought the MBR home, my mini died. Unwilling or unable to boot up. I took it to the local Kansas City Apple store and they confirmed my worst-case scenario: dead logic board, $450. I couldn’t justify spending that much money to fix a $600 computer. So, I took it home, still dead, and starting looking for alternatives. I found a company, DT&T Computer Service, that advertised $225 logic board repairs. I boxed up the mini and off it went. Weeks passed. And finally, 5 weeks and $240 (with shipping) later, my mini is back and running! In over 26 years of owning a large variety of computers, this was the first time I have ever paid to have one of them repaired. That alone was a strange feeling. But, stranger still was how much I missed having my mini on my desk. I had backups of everything on it, so there was no danger of data loss. I had a new Mac that was faster, portable, and sleeker looking. I guess I just wasn’t quite ready to give up on the mini. Now it’s home, getting a Leopard upgrade, preparing to become my wife’s ‘new’ computer, replacing her worn out HP laptop. Hopefully, it will live a long life and serve as force for good against Windows.l

]]> http://blog.craiglpatterson.com/2008/03/14/no-more-sad-mac/feed/ 1 Hand cart on the (Ruby on) Rails http://blog.craiglpatterson.com/2008/01/13/hand-cart-on-the-ruby-on-rails/ http://blog.craiglpatterson.com/2008/01/13/hand-cart-on-the-ruby-on-rails/#comments Sun, 13 Jan 2008 05:49:55 +0000 craiglp http://craiglp.wordpress.com/2008/01/13/hand-cart-on-the-ruby-on-rails/ In my previous post I detailed my problems getting NetBeans 6.0 to use the native Ruby installation on OS X Leopard. So, we pick up the story with that issue resolved.

Ok, time to create a new Rails project and get started. I go through the standard steps in NetBeans and am informed that there is a problem with my gems directory, and NetBeans thinks I am using Rails 1.2.6, instead of the 2.0.2 I installed. The error message sends me off the NetBeans wiki for details. So, off I go to figure out how to add GEM_HOME and GEM_PATH to my environment, so NB will recognize my gems directory. After about 30 minutes of surfing for answers I find the right combination of pages that allow me to piece together the answer.

I’m now running with a freshly created Rails project, complete with a database, with tables.

NOW, I can start coding. So far, the NetBeans/OS X combination has been more frustrating than it should be. Hopefully, I’ve completed all of the initiation rites.

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