eastowners

Current Mood: Esctatic

I look nothing like the advertising material Apple has so ubiquitously spread around the airwaves.  I am neither a hip and cool twenty-something with no responsibilities and a distaste for everything “business” nor am I a fourty-something stodgy business type.  I am an overweight, not particularly stylish thirty-something who works all day holding down a desk in a manufacturing and engineering company.

I have growing distaste for Microsoft’s OS business, but I am particularly fond of products like Office 2007 and OneNote from them.  I have no particular love for Apple, but I’ve come to respect their OS, and now that I own one of their flagship products, their really slick and useful hardware.

I work in IT and I work with Windows machines all day long.  In fact, I’ve worked with what amounts to pretty much the same GUI since 1995 and Microsoft has asked me to spend what precious free time I have doing exactly the same thing into the foreseeable future.

Microsoft expects that I will continue to do my blogging, music production, social networking, and very little else on an OS that constantly gets in my way, is difficult to customize, lacks modern window management that even free software has managed to implement pretty well, and generally has the look and feel of that radical departure that Windows took with Windows 95.

Everything else has been evolution in design; great for business which relies on not having to re-educate user bases of the barely computer literate on new paradigms.  Hey… I can dig that.  I face these issues every day in my day job.

The problem for me is exhibited in a simple activity that I participate in at least once every couple of weeks.

A few months ago, I bought an Axiom 61 MIDI controller so that I could start practicing piano again and so that I’d have a keyboard to adding parts to tunes and building percussion loops.  To do this in Windows took me no less than an hour of prep to get the keyboard working and then a $100-$300 piece of software to get a convincing enough piano to want to practice with it.

On Friday, I got the Macbook Pro.  On Saturday, I took it downstairs and hooked up the Axiom and turned it on. Nothing happened; no pop-up, no “I need to install a driver for this”, nothing.  I figured what the hell and started GarageBand, an app that is bundled with the Mac.  Within seconds, I was playing a reasonable sounding piano sound through the headphones.

So what does this mean?  To me, it’s that OSX is purpose built for folks exactly like me; folks who want to be able to get their creative job done with as little trouble as possible in a convienent and stylish package that actually works.

And work, it definitely does.

The touchpad and new “chiclet” style keyboard are worth the cost of admission alone.  The new Macbook has what would say is the single best keyboard and “mouse” input hardware of any laptop ever.  The unibody build is very solid, the laptop is unbelievably thin, light, and powerful compared to the Dells that I previously used.   The screen is really bright with excellent contrast compared to other laptops I’ve owned and used.  The headphone circuitry is excellent.

As I work more with the Mac, I’ll probably write more with my experiences in the realms of computing that mean the most to me.

Please share any thoughts you have on alternative operating systems to Windows and what effects they’ve had on your work process.

Current Mood: Meh

Most of you won’t care, but since the server is about to be decommissioned, I figured I’d make a post with a screenshot (the usernames are blurred). This is our network monitoring box at my place of employment. I’m not sure, we should be proud of this, or it’s a statement about the robustness of a minimally loaded, securely configured Linux box, but the box hasn’t been rebooted since Tuesday, July 8, 2003 and just last month showed it’s first vulnerability on a remote scan.

Very cool stuff.

Current Mood: Waking Up

I have yet to get my coffee this morning.  I got the water for the Senseo before I sat down to my weekday breakfast ritual of a Clif bar and yogurt.  I’ve been working on other things, so the importance of coffee has slipped.  Now it’s time for that important lull that happens right before there’s a kick into a higher gear… and time for coffee.

I had two major things I wanted to accomplish this week at work and both were completed before I went home yesterday.  It’s odd.  I was actually worried I wouldn’t get them completed at the end of the day on Tuesday.  Guess I shouldn’t doubt myself so much.

I’ve been messing around with what’s called application virtualization;  specifically Microsoft’s SoftGrid (formerly Softricity).  It works by “packaging” an application into a special thing that can be run by a small client that runs on the PC.  This makes it so applications can be deployed to workstations without installing them.  There are tons of advantages in the corporate world for this and it’s an interesting idea that I think can work here.

SoftGrid is as easy as it is cheap.  It literally took me a day to get it installed, configured, and to get an application packaged and deployed.  All without a book or guide.  It seems super simple to admin and could really reduce the amount of testing required to deploy a typical application; even one from Microsoft.

We’re big on virtualization here.  We consolidated over 120 servers into 8 servers last year.  That project has been wildly successful and we’re expanding its usage.  We’ve also consolidated disk into virtualized SAN, which has reduced our disk usage overhead and made administration and maintenance a breeze.

As network security gets more and more commoditized, I think the future of IT is headed down the various roads of virtualization and consolidation.  Thankfully, I have a manager who shares this vision.

Well… back to the mines (and my coffee is ready).