I see this mistake so often online, I wonder what causes it. I mean, really, it’s endemic. Usually “loose” is used when “lose” was meant, but I’ve seen the opposite mistake as well. For the record:
Ok, both words have a whole lot of meanings, but they don’t overlap.
As I sit here, I’m listening to my newly acquired Simon & Garfunkel boxed set. This has been a long time coming, as I finally gave up my plan to borrow and steal my sister’s copy of “Collected Works”, which is now out of print. For some reason, I had failed to research and actual find the replacements for the “Collected Works” release, and, for whatever reason, I couldn’t handle buying all the albums separately.
Well, because grumpy suggested it, I thought I would post some digested thought about this new Mac-on-Intel thing. I don’t claim that I’m really the original thinker here by a long shot, but here goes: What is really driving Apple to Intel is not the long awaited 3.0 GHz G5 chip. What is driving this is the Pentium M. More than half of Apple’s computer sales are laptops, and, apparently, IBM doesn’t have a very promising roadmap for laptop-friendly chips. Intel is the leader here with the Pentium M series. While Apple’s high-end server line gets press and attention, moving to Intel isn’t that big of a win for that platform. Not that it will hurt, either–Intel does have some fast parts. But, it seems to me, what Apple really needs is a fast (and growable) line of laptop processors that it can get in volume. Intel fits that bill. Don’t feel bad for IBM – every new gaming console will apparently use IBM processors of some sort. That should account for a little volume.
A mystery was solved today! The current build of SCPlugin (v.269) causes the search field of the System Preferences application to not work under Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger). Specifically, the preference pane for SCPlugin, not the actual extension.
SCPlugin add a contextual menu to Finder for
Subversion. It also is able to “badge”
files in the Finder to show their subversion status. It is a nice tool,
but hardly required. In any case, if you want your searches to work
again, just remove the preference pane for it from
/Library/PreferencePanes. SCPlugin will still work, but you won’t be
able to change the location of the subversion binary or disable the
plugin easily without restoring the preference pane.
As part of my final migration to all things Macintosh, I needed to get my text editing situation under control.
After developing on various X windows based platforms for the vast bulk of my career, I’m very comfortable with using the command line to navigate around a programming project. My work pattern is typically to move around on the command line until I need to edit a file. Then I have a command line tool that will bring that file up in my chosen editor. Users of BBEdit on Mac OS X might be familiar with this, as BBEdit includes a nice command line utility that you can use for this. If push came to shove, I could probably live with using BBEdit as my main editor.
This week, I took the plunge. While I’ve been using macs for years now, all this time my main work environment was Linux. I was very used to developing on Linux, and it was hard to justify changing. This week, I finally switched to full-time mac use (a feat that Grumpy accomplished some time ago). I’ve been exclusively traveling with my personal powerbook for a while, so I was probably 80% here already. I’ve been browsing, reading email, blogging, etc. on the mac for years. What I hadn’t been doing was developing (not necessarily for the mac, just on the mac). My main Java development environment has become eclipse, which runs on OS X, so not much of a problem there. My main perl/python/C/etc. development environment is emacs, however, and I needed to tweak that a bit (more on that later). I had three factors that encouraged me to jump: