Ramblings of a web guy (Tag: apple)

What is the problem? AT&T or Apple?

brianlmoon — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 14:20:59 -0500

So, I told you how AT&T messed up my account when I ordered the new iPhone. Well, I go the new one on Friday via FedEx. I then left for Velocity in San Jose, CA on Sunday. The phone was not activated when I left. So, I had to take my old iPhone and my new iPhone 3GS with me. Grrrr. On top of that, I had to keep them both on me because afaik, as soon as the new one started working, the old one would not. Double Grrrrrr.

I was blaming AT&T for this over and over. I tried calling them on Saturday and the guy on the phone said he was instructed to tell me to go to an AT&T store or an Apple Store. I did not have time to find an AT&T store. I tried the Apple store as we were having dinner right near it. But, the wait was an hour!!! Triple Grrrrrrr.

So, on Sunday night, I got this email from Apple:

Dear Apple Customer,

Thank you for your recent Apple Store order. We appreciate your patience and apologize for the inconvenience caused by the delay in your iPhone activation.

We are still resolving the issue that was encountered while activating your iPhone with AT&T. Unfortunately, due to system issues and continued high activation volumes, this could take us up to an additional 48 hours to complete.

On Monday, you'll receive an email from Apple with an iTunes Store credit in the amount of $30. We hope you will enjoy this gift and accept our sincere apologies for the inconvenience this delay has caused.

Thank you for choosing Apple.

Sincerely,
Apple Online Store Team

So, whose fault is this? Is it Apple or AT&T? I had been assuming AT&T all along. But, Apple is giving me the credit.

On Monday morning, at about 11:30CDT, my phone was activated. That is about 62 hours after I hooked it up to iTunes. The phone is great.

I guess I should listen to Louis CK says and just be happy that the future is here and quit bitching.

AT&T is a bleepity bleeping bleep

brianlmoon — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 00:29:38 -0500

So, on June 19th, the new iPhone comes out. I have a first generation iPhone. I have loved it. My area is not well covered by 3G so I did not bother upgrading. But, my two year contract is up next month and just the other day I dropped and cracked my iPhone screen. So, this is a good time to upgrade.

I ordered my new phone via the Apple web site. It took me through a wizard that checked my AT&T account and showed me the options for upgrading. That all went smooth. This all took place on Thursday, June 11, 2009. Well, at 11AM on Saturday, June 13th, something happened to my account. On my account are 4 phones. Mine, my wifes and my two oldest kids. My daughter says from the back seat (did I mention we are on our way to the beach for a week?) "That took them long enough. I got a welcome text from AT&T." She has had her phone since Christmas. Later I noticed I had no data connection. Just bars. I was getting calls. Then later my wife commented that no one was returning her SMS messages. So, we tried sending some to each other. Nothing. My son sees he got a welcome SMS too. OMG, wtf did AT&T do?!?!?!?

We are driving (I mentioned that I think) and have time on our hands, so my wife calls them about it all. Sure enough, they claim that "someone" removed our family unlimited text message plan from the account. Well, that someone would be AT&T. See, I had reduced my iPhone to the lower plan a while back because I was getting the family unlimited text messaging plan when I added my kids phones. But, the new iPhone only has one data plan available. It's a $30/month unlimited data plan. Apparently, me changing the data plan for the new iPhone that is not even shipped yet removed all text messaging for my whole family. The lady claims to have it fixed so we hang up.

Time passes and I still don't have and EDGE connection. My daughter tries to send a MMS picture and is blocked. We call back. Apparently the brilliant person my wife talked to the first time added a pay per SMS feature and NO MMS OR DATA! ARGHHH!!!! We tell the lady, "Look, just put it back like it was on the last bill." That worked, we were happy with that. A few minutes later I had data and we could send pictures again.

So, you would think it is over. But, apparently I don't have voice mail. And now I am really wondering what will happen when I activate my new iPhone this week. Be thinking about me as I am sure it will hose my account again. And I leave town on Sunday to attend Velocity.

Please, please, two years from now, when my contract is up, please let Verizon have the iPhone. Our accounts payable people at dealnews don't like their billing practices, but I have never had a customer service issue with them and their network is the best ever.

Some interesting things to note:

You can't buy or activate an iPhone without a data plan. But, clearly they had mine working without one.
They turned off SMS for my whole family, but, the first thing my kids got after they turned it off was an SMS that I bet they would have charged us for.
We could not send MMS at all for our whole account after the new iPhone was purchased. It is well known that AT&T is not allowing MMS on the new iPhone yet. Guess they control this at the account level?

Building PECL/memcache on Mac OS X

brianlmoon — Sun, 31 May 2009 22:23:29 -0500

My coworker Rob ran into an issue building the PECL/memcache extension on his Mac. He did find the solution however. You can read and leave comments on his blog.

Amazon MP3 Store has holes

brianlmoon — Tue, 06 May 2008 11:03:04 -0500

A coworker found out how secure Amazon's MP3 store is. Even big guys like Amazon make errors in their web site security.

So, I clicked purchase and the album immediately started downloading. It was at this point that I had the thought cross my mind: "Did I update my credit card info?"

Well, no, I didn't. Before the album finished downloading, I was trying to change the method of payment. Turns out, for a digital purchase, you can't do such a thing. So, I waited and wondered was was going to come of this...

Sleeping with an iPhone

brianlmoon — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 11:11:58 -0600

You know those NyQuil commercials where the guy tells his wife "You will sleep like you did before you had kids." Well, that is so true. Before I had kids I laid my head down, slept and then rose in the morning fresh. I only needed about 5 hours sleep. But, after I had kids and started worrying about them all night long, I could not do that. I can still do it when I am away from home which is odd.

Now, after all this time with kids (I have 5 in case you don't know) they hardly ever wake in the middle of the night. But, my mind is conditioned to wake on the slightest noise. We moved out into a quieter (aka more rural) part of the state 3 years ago. Hardly any traffic on the road late at night. I find myself waking at the slightest noise: the icemaker, a dog barking, our dog getting up and stretching, or that very rare car.

So, after a restless night, I got the kids up and ready for school at 6AM like usual. But, I was determined to get some more sleep. So, I stuck in my ear buds and turned on my iPhone's iPod. While it was not solid uninterrupted sleep, it was better than what I had all night. I need to find some soft music or soothing sounds that will run for several hours. That may provide the best sleep. That and some more comfortable earbuds for sleeping. It is either that or take down our nice quiet Hunter ceiling fan and get the cheapest, loudest one I can find. That always worked in our older houses.

MacBreak missing a demographic

brianlmoon — Fri, 02 Nov 2007 23:32:25 -0500

I listen to the MacBreak Weekly podcast every week. I have liked Leo Laporte ever since The ScreenSaver days. He has several good regulars on the show and mixes in topical guests as well. However, I think there is a demographic of Mac user that the show is missing.

There is a growing audience of new Mac users in the tech sector. Just to the O'Reilly Open Source Conference and take a count. Mac OS X and the switch to the Intel platform has brought about the most stable, easy to use *nix based desktops and laptops the world has ever seen. I was a long time Windows user. I made fun of Mac users. I even ran Linux on a Dell laptop for a while. Boy, that was fun. Nothing like waking up and having to edit X configurations so you can work. Apple just got it right. I can run my AMP stack on my MacBook Pro with no problems. And the Mac UI is wonderful. I am becoming a fan boy.

So, on this weeks MBW, Leo and the panel were talking about Leopard. The subject came up about the best new feature for home users, power users and mac software developers. There was neither anyone on the show that fit into my demographic of Mac user nor did anyone mention us. No mention of Apache 2.2 or PHP 5.2. No mention of a much improved Terminal.app. No mention of a built in SSH Agent that works with your keychain. If you work with Linux/BSD server, you use Terminal almost as much as any other application.

So, Leo, please include this growing Mac demographic into your discussions. There has to be someone out there in our space that is as knowledgable as Andy Ihnatko and Scott Bourne are about their topics. Merlin comes close when he is there, but I think he is still and old school Mac user that happens to have gotten into the geekier parts of Mac OS X.

Still, love the show. Keep up the good work.

My editor of choice

brianlmoon — Wed, 10 Oct 2007 00:57:25 -0500

So, I was listening to the Pro PHP Podcast on the way home from work today. They were talking about Komodo a lot. I figured I would give my favorite editor a plug. Believe it or not, it's jEdit.

I keep trying all the latest and greatest editors out there. I fought with Eclipse and have tried the newer more PHP centric offerings built on Eclipse. I recently tried out Komodo Edit for a week. I had tried the Komodo IDE when it came out for Mac a while back. But, I just keep coming back to jEdit.

What I like about it

The main thing that I like about jEdit over the other top contenders of the new generation is that it has a simple file browser. It does not have the concept of "projects". Eclipse and Komodo both have these concepts. But, when I really got to looking at the projects in Komodo, you basically set a point in your filesystem and tell it that everything in this dir is Project Foo. So, really, you have to have your code organized on disk anyway. It also bugged me (in Komodo Edit at least) that my project file had to live in the same dir with my project's code. That just seemed awkward. Not everyone that shares my SVN is gonna want that and its gonna be sitting there in my svn status as an unknown file.

Another thing I like about jEdit is the rather large plugin repository. Now, it's an older project, so that is something that you would hope any established application would have. But, if I am thinking about switching today, I have to give the nod to jEdit here. The list is a bit Java-centric of course. It's a Java application after all. But, there are some good ones in there like a PHP code structure browser. I can't live without that. Makes finding functions or methods really easy in large libraries.

What I don't like

Its Java so its not quite like working with a native application. The dialogs are funny and the UI is just a bit off even with the Mac plugin that makes it more Mac looking. Having said that, I don't want a truly "Mac like" editor. BBEdit and XCode are not my kind of editors. I like tabbed interfaces vs. multi windowed UIs.

Its not an IDE, its an editor. There is no debugging, at least, not easily. There looks to be some ability to hook in debugging tools, but I have not gone through the trouble. Of course, that could be said of many of the IDEs out there. PHP has never had the ease of debugging that say Visual Basic had (still has?) back in 1998 when that was my full time job. That was one thing about VB I loved. The language was "eh". But the IDE was really nice.

Things I don't care about that you might

jEdit does not have an SVN plugin that I can find. I like my command line. I know one coworker is addicted to the Eclipse real time SVN diff highlighting. There is a CVS plugin, but I don't know how good it is. I am not aware of any PHP code completion, but it may be there. I have an odd knack for remembering stuff like that and those little pop ups just annoy me. Oh, and did I mention its Java? That put me off for a long time. But, it won me over.

dealnews.com is hiring

brianlmoon — Fri, 11 Aug 2006 13:00:33 -0500

From our jobs page:

As a dealnews web developer, you will help maintain our current stable of deal and price-tracking web sites, and build new features and new web sites as we continue to grow. You'll be part of a small, fast-moving team of developers that are involved at every stage of product development, from concept to rollout.

We use Gentoo, Apache, PHP and MySQL. While that does not need to be your expertise, it is a plus. We have a little Perl and Python thrown in as well. You will need to code on a non-Windows system as we run our development environment on our local machines. Currently, we all use Macs.

A big plus, however, is disc golf. We play weekly as an um, team building excercise. Yeah, team building.

OSCON 2006

brianlmoon — Tue, 01 Aug 2006 13:30:43 -0500

Well, I am back from OSCON 2006. Portland is a really nice city. I hope they keep this conference there forever. I hosted a BoF on memcached. That was fun. There were a lot of people there. I did not expect that. They had something this year that was either new or I had not seen before. It was called OSCAMP. They fall below a BoF in terms of plans and organization. A neat idea. You just go in the room, post on the wall what you are interested in and what time you will be back to talk about it. Other folks show up and you kick it. No approval, no rules. I tried to set one up, but I got in there too late to get my topic noticed.

Rasmus Lerdorf gave a good talk about debugging PHP and making your life easy when using PHP. His title was different, but that was what I took from it. I was glad to see someone near the top of the PHP food chain say that speed matters to him. Having him work at Yahoo! helps too.

As usual, Robert "r0ml" Lefkowitz was great. His keynote compared Open Source to vegetables. He is a great speaker.

I did not have a epiphany at this conference. It's still good to go. There will not always be something to blow you away every time you go to one of these things. It was good to just get away and hob nob with other open source developers.

NeoOffice for Intel

brianlmoon — Fri, 30 Jun 2006 03:45:00 -0500

I am a long time user of OpenOffice on Windows and Linux. It does more than I need it to. I have installed it on several friends PCs and they have had no problem using it either. So, I knew that would be one of my big problems on the Mac. You can install OpenOffice for the Mac. It uses X11 though. That means its slow and not Mac like at all.

NeoOffice has been around for a while for PPC Macs, but tomorrow, a public alpha of the software will be available for Intel Macs. Last week, I decided to go ahead and pay the very low $10 to get a copy ahead of time.

It's everything I hoped it would be. Its fast and gets the job done. It uses all the Mac keyboard shortcuts and uses the standard Mac menu. The long time Mac users may not like it as well as I do. The dialogs do not look and feel like a Mac. They are the standard OO.org widgets. As a long time user for OO.org, I have no problem using it. In fact, its good to be home again with my office suite.

Technorati Tags: apple, mac, macbook, os-x, office, openoffice, neooffice

macally icestation

brianlmoon — Tue, 27 Jun 2006 03:09:00 -0500

I recently got a macally icestation for my MacBook Pro. It works quite nicely. Their site markets it to work with Powerbooks and other laptops. The only problem I see is that the CD slot is on the front of the MacBook Pro and therefore putting in CDs when it is on the icestation is a bit of a hassle. I don't use a lot of CDs though. Overall, it's much better than having the MacBook Pro just sitting on the desk.

Technorati Tags: apple, mac, macbook, os-x

Matias USB 2.0 Keyboard for Mac

brianlmoon — Tue, 06 Jun 2006 16:15:00 -0500

Matias is well known these days for their Tactile Pro Mac keyboard. Its uses mechanical keys and kind of addresses a lot of the problems that some users have with the Apple keyboard. Things like the function keys not being spaced into groups.

However, their web site is pushing this new USB 2.0 Keyboard. They have a Mac only version and a Mac/PC version. Its closer to a full size keyboard that I have been using for years now. I also liked the idea of a USB 2.0 hub on my keyboard. So, I ordered two. One for the office and one for the house.

I got them, unpacked one and hooked it up. Well, at this point, I see the funky dual USB cable. One is a USB 1.1 cable and the other is a 2.0 cable. I then realize that the keyboard nor its hub is 2.0. There is a single port on top of the keyboard that is USB 2.0. So, basically, there is a USB 2.0 cable embedded to the keyboard. That's it. I looked at the web site and sure enough, at the bottom of the page it mentions all this. However, both there and in the docs, they show a little more hospitable cable. So, on that I was willing to live and learn.

So, I started typing. The first thing I noticed was that the keys were a little small. The number pad and other keys like the F-keys were normal sized. My hands did not find the cursor keys or the page up, page down group very easily. I chalked all this up to having a new keyboard. The more I used it however, the more I felt the quality of the keys was not what I was used to. Still, I pushed on.

A day went by and I noticed that one "feature" of the keyboard was really starting to annoy me. Their innovation on this keyboard was to move the caps lock key from the normal spot and cram it on the lower right side with the command, option and control key. In the place of the normal caps lock is an extra control key. WTF!?!? This became very annoying. I am a programmer, so, I come across things that are all upper case more than say a writer or graphic designer would. This was the last straw for me. I am sending them back.

Technorati Tags: apple, mac, macbook, os-x, keyboard

Mac Security

brianlmoon — Sat, 13 May 2006 16:35:00 -0500

Seems a lot of folks are talking about security on the Mac these days. I read another switchers blog and he has ranted about it. Then I checked out Ctrl-Alt-Del today and found their latest comic. I have to admit I laughed.

Myself, I am following the same pattern I did on Windows. Don't do anything stupid ( I include running anything named Outlook in that ). Believe it or not, I never ran anti anything software on Windows. And I never ( I promise never ) had a virus or malware installed on my system.

Of course, I realize that most people can't or won't follow that head. They will click that email from someone they don't know to see a picture of their favorite celeb in the nude. And they will pay the price.

Technorati Tags: apple, mac, macbook, os-x, security

Intel in a PPC world

brianlmoon — Thu, 20 Apr 2006 08:05:00 -0500

Well, I am mostly converted over. There are a couple of apps I use that don't have Intel/Universal binaries yet. One is X-Chat Aqua and the other is eSVN. Both are ports of *nix applications. X-Chat is a full port to Cocoa. eSVN uses the QT toolkit.

The other frustration was fink. My PPC coworker uses it daily. I am not so lucky yet. Gentoo's packages are for PPC also.

MySQL has presented a challenge as well. We are still using 4.0 on our servers. There are some backwards compatibility issues that are keeping us at 4.0. MySQL has a nice Mac package. But, because 4.0 is not a current release, they only offer PPC binaries. So, I will have to build it myself to get 4.0. I have been working around the problems for now and using 4.1. Maybe this is a good time to bite the bullet and change our code to support 4.1+.

Technorati Tags: apple, intel, irc, mac, macbook, mysql, svn

Color Picker

brianlmoon — Sat, 15 Apr 2006 16:44:03 -0500

When I was on Linux, I used a tool called KColorEdit. It was a standalone color picker that was part of KDE. It would allow me to input a hex color code, adjust via RGB or via HSV (Hue, Saturation and Value).

I was dismayed when I starting looking for a Mac equivalent. Most things I found fit one of two categories. They were either a plugin for something else or they were a "web safe" color picker. Now, sure many of the latter were old, but some were not. Web safe colors are so 1998.

I enlisted the help of some Mac friends. They pointed me here and there. I found a nice trial-ware application called Color Schemer. But, its $50. All I need is a color picker. They do have a cool web page though that lets you do some color matching.

Along the way, I also found a hex plugin for the Mac OS X color picker from Lucky Software. But, there seemed to be no way to invoke this from within jEdit.

Then, a buddy found this post on MacOSXHints. It describes how to make the OS X color picker into an application. W00T!!

Thanks Finney.

Technorati Tags: apple, html, mac, macbook, os-x, applescript

iSight and my hat

brianlmoon — Wed, 12 Apr 2006 08:43:00 -0500

My kids got me a hat for my birthday. I think it fits me. Took this with the built in iSight. I have been happy with the iSight's quality. I figured it would suck.

Technorati Tags: apple, macbook, isight

Networking works

brianlmoon — Wed, 12 Apr 2006 05:49:00 -0500

Windows networking is a little mysterious. Sometimes, you just have to reboot the machine no matter what control panel or even command line stuff you try.

Linux is much more geeky. But, you have awesome control. You know exactly what is going on.

However, on my Mac, you just don't worry about it. The wireless works, I changed the static IP on my router for the Mac today. I use one local IP here so I can route stuff in and out of the network for my development. I then with to the Network Preferences to refresh my DHCP lease. Well, crap, its already updated. And, I never lost connection to IRC, IM, email, anything. This is the kind of thing that made me swtich.

Technorati Tags: apple, mac, macbook

Power cord woes

brianlmoon — Wed, 12 Apr 2006 04:32:18 -0500

When I saw the power cord connector in the keynote, I thought it was cool. After having one, I don't like it. It comes unplugged all the time. My Mac regularly warns me that I am on reserve battery power. I look down and the cord has come unplugged.

On a related note, having all the connectors on the sides is inconvenient too. When I sit with my MacBook, I regularly sit with my legs crossed. The connectors on the side hit my legs. This of course knocks the power connector out. I am afraid I am going to damage the USB port.

Maybe I will get used to it.

Technorati Tags: apple, mac, macbook

Fink + Intel = huh?

brianlmoon — Tue, 11 Apr 2006 12:48:23 -0500

Coming from Gentoo Linux, I was quite used to a good package manager for system tools. I had heard good things about fink. So, I grabbed the package from their site and installed it. That seemed to go just fine. The first thing I wanted was wget. wget is a great command line tool for downloading files. Its especially useful when you are already in the shell. The install of wget failed. (I did later discover that curl is on the system.) At first it was problems with compiling (see below). I got the compile issues worked out. It still failed. I got an error complaining that the package was for ppc and the target was i386 or something along those lines. I started digging around on the fink site and Google and discovered that fink is not quite ready for the Intel Macs. I had to compile it from scrap (as they call it, boostrap). No biggie, I was used to that. This process took a while. But, after that, it still will not install stuff. fink now reports that it can not find a package for wget. WTF?!?! I am kind of stuck on fink now. I could dig more, but one of my goals for moving to the Mac was to get away from fighting with command line stuff all the time.

If anyone is running fink on Intel Macs with success, please let me know.

Technorati Tags: apple, mac, macbook, intel

Trouble in the terminal

brianlmoon — Tue, 11 Apr 2006 12:23:00 -0500

So, today was the day I started working on getting my development environment up and running. I needed to install Apache, PHP, MySQL and memcached. MySQL was a breeze. I just used the prebuilt package from mysql.com. The others were a whole other story.

We run a pretty customized setup for Apache and PHP. My coworker that has been on the Mac for almost two years advised me to install them from scratch and to ignore the versions already on the system. Compiling on the Mac was not as easy as on Linux. I had installed XCode, but something was not right still. I was getting linker errors when I tried to configure Apache. Had trouble with fink too, but I will post that in the next story.

So, I spent a good part of the day hunting all over the internet. The answer that kept coming up was to install XCode. I had done that and starting the installer showed all the default checked packages would be "upgrades" meaning they were already installed. Finally, I just started the XCode installer and checked every box, 2.2GB of stuff. Something in there did the trick.

The other thing that slowed me dow was having to adjust to the BSD way of things. Things did not install where I was used to them being. apachectl was in sbin for example. On Linux, it goes into bin. Those are no big deals. I will have scripts to start and stop my whole dev environment.

At the end of the day, I got it all working. Luckily, this was a one time annoyance. My annoyance with Linux had become day to day.

Tags: apple apache php mysql macbook

Mouse Tracking

brianlmoon — Mon, 10 Apr 2006 05:04:00 -0500

I have had some trouble getting used to the mouse in Mac OS X. Both windows and Linux offer two settings for mouse movement, speed and acceleration. OS X only offers Tracking Speed. It seems to be a combination of the two. I am sure I will get used to it, but for now, its a bit difficult to get used to.

Blogging from my Dashboard

brianlmoon — Mon, 10 Apr 2006 03:39:00 -0500

Cool, there is a Blogger Dashboard widget. That makes updating the blog from the Mac even easier.

And so it begins...

brianlmoon — Sun, 09 Apr 2006 12:26:00 -0500

Well, this is my first post from my new MacBook. So far so good. I have already been noticing the little mac things. Like no page down button on the keyboard, no right mouse button on the track pad, etc. I knew what I was getting into though.

I have already installed Firefox, Thunderbird, Adium and jEdit. Those will be my core applications. I was using all of those but Adium on Linux. I have heard from several sources that Adium is the best multi-network IM client available. I may look at others, but I will start with that. I will be able to bring over eSVN and X-Chat from Linux as well.

I will post more after I have been using it for a day or so.

Boot Camp, nuff said

brianlmoon — Wed, 05 Apr 2006 07:36:00 -0500

There is so much in the blogosphere about this already, I am just gonna link to the Technorati search for it. Needless to say, its a huge deal.

Another fellow switcher

brianlmoon — Wed, 05 Apr 2006 05:48:00 -0500

I found another blog like mine today. Its http://macnewbie.wordpress.com/. I have put a link to his site in my sidebar. He has been at it longer than I have.

It's in Indiana!

brianlmoon — Tue, 04 Apr 2006 07:54:00 -0500

So, this is my intro. Like most of the free world, I have been a Windows user for most of my life. I was lucky enough to find Linux when I got into the world of building/running web sites. My early attempts to use it as a desktop OS were unsuccesful. I always felt I could do my job with Linux, but I could do it better with Windows.

Two years ago, it was time for me to buy a new laptop for work. Our CEO is a Mac user and wanted me to try a Powerbook. I took one home and used it to work for a week or so. There were so many things I liked about it. The intuitive interfaces, the simple application installation and other things were very attractive. However, at the end of the day, I still felt more productive in a Windows environment. Also, the Powebook G4's were not powerhouses. Even my CEO used a Windows machine for some things that were not fast enough for him on his Mac.

About a year ago, after having some problems with coliding code bases, I plunged with my coworkers into using Linux as our desktop OS of choice. This had its advantages for us. Our servers are Linux. Using Linux on our desktops made developing on our local machines much easier. We no longer overwrote each other's changes and everything was much smoother. One coworker however decided to take the plunge. He moved cold turkey to a 12" Powerbook. He could still do the things we were doing. He could run Apache/PHP/MySQL all on the Powerbook.

So, fast foward one more time to January 2006. Steve Jobs announces the MacBook Pro. An Intel based Mac. I found myself acting like a school girl over this announcement. After a year on Linux, I had started to wonder about moving to the Mac. We had been at the O'Reilly Open Source Convention in 2005 and the number of Powerbook's we saw was staggering. The market share for Apple in the portable, open source world is much higher than the general market.

So, as of April 1, I ordered my MacBook Pro. I checked today and its in Indiana. The other Linux users on our team will soon follow. In fact, soon, only 3 of our 13 full time employees in our once Windows dominated company will be running Windows full time. Our IT department (3 people) will all be using Mac OS X exclusively.

OMG, I can't wait for my Mac to get here.
( what is wrong with me =)

Apple Safari reminds me of darker times

brianlmoon — Wed, 07 May 2003 10:01:59 -0500

Apple released their own web browser back in January. The Apple faithful were delighted. The good news IMO was that they decided to adopt and open source project for their base. The bad thing was they went after a project that they knew they could dominate and control. The result is a browser that takes me back a few years when you had to test and re-test and make small changes just so your website would work in all the browsers out there (at that time it was really just Netscape and Microsoft IE).

In the last year, both Microsoft and the Mozilla project (the open source project that powers Netscape's Browser and newer versions of AOL) had made huge leaps toward standards compliance. So much so that the recent redesign of the dealnews web sites required almost no special changes for one browser versus the other.

Well, enter Safari. It was released as "beta" which means, not ready for everyday use. But the Apple faithful ignored that and jumped right on it. I immediately started getting reports from our users of dealmac.com that our site "did not work" in Safari. The truth is that Safari does not work right. The problems ranged from cookie issues to small cosmetic flaws. One odd thing was that certain ads we displayed would cause the right side of our site to "hang" off the page to the right in Safari. Very annoying. There is nothing wrong with the page. I had to basically refuse to "fix" our page on the basis that it is still beta software.

Now it seems Safari has some problems on some interal pages. Well, I have just recently been able to slim down that code to not care what browser the user was using. We do require our employees to use a "modern" browser when using our internal systems. But, it now seems that even more hacks and exceptions will be introduced to handle the poorly written, beta software.

Maybe Apple will get it together, but I doubt it. I have already seen one quote from and Apple developer claming that the other modern browsers do some things wrong and he is doing them right. I find that hard to believe. If Microsoft and Mozilla agree on something it is likely the correct way as they like nothing more than to prove each other wrong. I did find this blog from one of the Safari developers. I will follow it and see what we can get out of it.

So, if you are an Apple user and you are reading this, I encourage your to not use Safari. For all reading this, I reccomend using Mozilla for web browsing. It is faster and more reliable than any browser I have ever used.