Personal
XAMPP – Where have you been all my life?
Jun 11th
I love Wordpress. Really there isn’t a better blogging platform on this platform. It’s that good. And I’ve been using it to self-host my blog for the past year or so. For awhile, I hosted it using II6 on WHS v1. That was a real pain as it took several days to find a URL rewriting solution that worked with IIS6. The past few months I’ve been hosting it on my Windows 7-based media center. Since that runs IIS7, URL rewriting was easier using the standard URL rewrite module.
A few days ago I decided to test out WHS “Vail”. After installing it, I wanted to move my blog onto it so I downloaded the Microsoft Web Platform Installer. It promptly let me know that it couldn’t find any products in my selected language. Huh? This is what drives people crazy about Windows software. Crap just doesn’t make sense sometimes.
I googled and found several links describing how to manually setup Wordpress on Windows Server 2008 but each of them had about 30 steps. Sheesh. I was about to punt back to media center when I remembered trying out XAMPP a few months back.
Man, this thing is beautiful. I downloaded the installer, double clicked it, and watched it dump Apache, MySQL, and a bunch of other stuff into c:\xampp. It then brought up this nice UI where I could enable Apache and MySQL as a service and start them.
A simple file copy of my wordpress folder to the c:\xampp\htdocs, a copy of my wordpress mysql database to c:\xampp\mysql\data and create the proper username in mysql and I was set. That only other thing I had to do was to open the appropriate holes in my Windows firewall. Five minutes and I was done! Windows may be pretty awesome but XAMPP is pretty awesome too.
My month on OS/X is finished
Jun 1st
Well, I’ve finished my month on OS/X. It wasn’t really a month but rather a couple of weeks here and there. To be honest I didn’t really hit too many situations where I felt like I needed Windows. I didn’t have good luck with Chicken-of-the-VNC and the Mac version of remote desktop is not nearly as good as on Windows. That being said I love the fact that iCal and Contacts sync with Google.
I’m writing this under Windows 7 but I’m typing it into the web UI. I’ll likely hang out in OS/X a bit more as I have some video editing I need to do and iMovie just blows away any free products on Windows.
Loving me some mint!
May 10th
I’m not sure if I manage my money like most people but I’m sure falling in love with Mint. To be fair I’ve only been seriously using it for the past week of so but I’ve but with a key workaround I’ve managed to replace Money with Mint. Yes, I know Money has been discontinued by Microsoft so I could move to Quicken.
I signed up for Mint several months ago but they just recently added my bank so I can manage my checking and savings accounts. The charts are great. The quick links that show my spending in a given category are nice. And the budget tracking and alerts are awesome. They also recently added a feature that allows you to manually add a “pending” transaction. This is part of what I needed to fully move. The other thing was the ability to “reconcile” transactions against the bank. This is where the workaround comes in.
The way mint works is that you login and then it downloads transactions from your bank and shows you all non-pending transactions along with your current balance. Seeing my current balance is nice but I also want to see money spent on things that have not cleared yet such as bills paid or large expenditures I just made. This is where the manual add comes in.
To reconcile your receipts to the bank you have to be a little clever. You have to use the tags feature of Mint. First, create a new tag called ‘Checked’. You can call it whatever you like but I thought ‘Checked’ sounded good. Then you need to apply the ‘Checked’ tag to all of your transactions that you are satisfied are correct. My guess, at this point, is that is all of them.
The next thing is to understand that when new transactions come in they have no tags applied. So, to see all transactions that are ‘not checked’ then you simply need to do a search. Enter this in the search box -tag:Checked. That means find me all transactions that are not checked. Then, compare each one with the receipts you have and apply the checked tag appropriately.
It’s actually very easy. Now you have the power of mint with the ability to add pending transactions and reconcile your account with your receipts. Nice.
My 30 days on OS/X – day 6
May 6th
Well, I’ve only had to run back to Windows once. I have VNC installed on my Windows 7 Media Center computer but somehow I just couldn’t get Chicken of the VNC to work right and we were having a volume issue.
So far what’s the verdict? Well, there are some things I really like and some things I don’t. Here’s a breakdown of the software I was using on Windows, what I’m using on Mac, and if it’s better or worse.
- HydraIRC is a great Windows IRC client. On the Mac I’m using Colloquy and I must say I prefer Colloquy. It’s faster to connect and has a better default profile for notifying you when things happen. With HydraIRC you could easily miss a PM. Not going to happen with Colloquy.
- Skype is skype
- I use Digsby for IM, Facebook, and Twitter on Window. On the Mac, I’m using Adium for IM and Facebook and Twhirl for twitter. This is a push. I prefer how Adium handles conversations but prefer Digsby for twitters.
- Use Chrome for browsing on both but I have to say that I prefer Chrome on Windows.
- I love how Apple Mail handles mail. The keyboard interface is great and the find is awesome. Much better than Thunderbird. I also love the LDAP integration with Address Book (seeing my co-workers pictures in mail is great)
- iMovie is GarageBand is better than anything at the same price on Windows
- iPhoto is ok
I still plan on finishing my 30 day experiment. Will I stay on OS/X after the experiment is over? I doubt it. There’s simply not enough ‘can’t live without’ features on OS/X to justify the pain. Ok, back to work.
It’s time for something fun
Apr 30th
So, a few years ago I had this rule that about every 6 months I would use a version of Linux for a few weeks just to see how it had progressed and compare that to Windows. I can’t really recall when I stopped but I do remember that I really enjoyed having a better understanding of other systems. I think it’s time to do it again. However, this time I won’t be using Linux.
I have access to both Windows 7 and Macs. I’ve been a Windows developer for a long time but with the improvements made in virtual machine solutions I’ve started doing most of my development work in vms. I find it refreshing to keep all my development work sandboxed in a system that I can easily take and rollback snapshots as needed. I recently ran some winsat checks on my native box (a Core i7 rig with 8gigs DDR3 memory) and a virtual machine configured to use all 8 cpus. The results were nearly identical with the virtual machine turning in 95% performance on cpu tests and beating the host system in disk tests (the vm was using a 80gig file as a disk).
So, since the VM is giving me enough performance to do my work I am really free to use whatever I like as a host system. So, here I am preparing to embark on a fun adventure.
I”m going to use Snow Leopard (in 64 bit mode) for 30 days while doing my Windows work in a VM. I don’t intend to run back to Windows for anything during that time as I really want to force myself to use OS/X. During this time I’ll blog frequently about issues I’m facing, things I like, things I don’t like, and work arounds I’ve found.
So, to get started here’s what my day normally looks like on the computer.
- Lots of development work on Windows (Visual Studio 2008 and 2010)
- IRC/Skype chatting with friends and co-workers
- Email with co-workers
- Using Google calendar to manage my day to day activities
- Editing Word/Excel/Powerpoint documents (these are more rare these days but they do happen)
- Watching recorded tv shows from my Media Center HTPC
- Watching shows from NetFlix and Hulu
- Listening to music from Pandora, Slacker, Sky.FM, and personal music collection
- Blog reading/writing
- Facebook and twitter’ing
Well, wish me luck.