I’ve been in IT for over 10 year, most of the time in some sort of break-fix role. It is refreshing to see that a company that trades on the strength of its IT staff is willing to be completely honest about what went wrong when things break. My web hosting provided, DreamHost, suffered what can only be described as an unfortunate confluence of events (a favorite expression of mine) that resulted in what we, in the industry, call downtime.
Archive for the 'technology' Category
Found a couple interesting stories from the Detroit Auto Show. GM showed a plug-in hybrid concept. Ford showed a hydrogen fuel cell concept designed by Airstream. Interesting? I think so…
Yeah, I lied. The truth is that I have not begun to code on the Mac. I have even removed all of the development tools from my system.
It’s not that I don’t want to code. It has more to do with two distinctly different things. First, I seriously lack the time and energy to sit down at home with my computer for any long stretch and program. Second, I really haven’t coded seriously in a long time. I am very out of practice, so much so that looking at anything besides a shell or Perl script, html or PHP looks very foreign.
I am preparing myself mentally and, well, technically to undertake a new project…
Coding on the Mac
You see, one of my favorite utilities in the PC world is Password Safe. Unfortunately, there is no OS X version of the software. There is a tk/tcl version called Password Gorilla that works (kinda) on the Mac, but since it is a tk/tcl program is not, shall we say Mac friendly. To this end, I am going to attempt (and I do mean attempt) to port Password Safe to the Mac. I can even do this since Password Safe is open source.
Tonight I have reached my first milestone – I installed Xcode. This might not seem like much of an accomplishment, something not worthy of a milestone, but let me explain. The last development environment I installed on any computer was Microsoft’s Visual Studio 2005. VS is a beast. It installs off of one CD, but it takes a couple hours to install. Oh, and did I mention that it really hooks itself into your computer? It seems to make everything much slower. And that is on a fairly powerful laptop with it’s memory maxed out at 2gb. Xcode has a much quicker and equally processor intensive install.
Next step – investigate Xcode and determine whether I can actually port this app over to the Mac.