Sliced Orange’s posterous

I finally got my hands on my new hardware, namely:

Apple iMac 24" 3.06GHz, 500GB HDD, 4GB RAM.
G-Tech G-Raid2 500GB External HDD.
Apple Wireless Keyboard and Mighty Mouse.

As you can imagine I'm over the moon! My last adventure with MAC hardware was an iBook (which incidentally I loved), thankfully they still impress with their high standards and design ethic.

My Desk :)

More importantly I should mention the migration and it's progress, well thankfully, everything I planned worked perfectly.  Not having loads of settings and personal files to migrate was a godsend.

A few notes:

1. My contacts were migrated from Outlook 2007 to do this I selected them all (in contacts view) and chose to send them as vcard email attachments.  Once I'd received them I simply dragged them into the Mac Address Book and hey presto!
2. In terms of music, I opted to store this on the built in HDD (whereas before I've used an external HDD), this involved copying all of the files to a music folder in the user directory.  I then copied my Windows iTunes folder replacing the Mac iTunes folder with it, finally, once I'd restarted iTunes I changed the location of the iTunes library in preferences and everything worked.

My other files were handled by SugarSync which is now replicating files across my Mac and my Windows Server 2008 machine.

The only other subject to discuss is software, I've added a few applications to the Mac to help enhance my productivity, they are:

1. Spanning Sync - this application syncronises your Google Calendar and iCal, the beauty is the fact that it will sync multiple calendars so I can split things out into work and personal calendars for example.
2. Google Mail notifier - this application gives me a visible and audiable alert when I get mail at Google Mail.
3. Flickr Uploadr - this is a neat application that streamlines uploading photos to Flickr.
4. Aperture - Apple's photo editing and cataloguing application.
5. NetNewsWire - this is an RSS reader, I'm using this as it has a companion application for the iPhone.
6. VLC - this is a brilliant video player that will work with nearly every codec going.

*Update*

I left this post in draft mode for a few months so the above information is slightly out of date, however, I can confirm that everything is running perfectly.  I'm still perfectly happy with my setup and have no problems working on the PC platform (for SharePoint development) through the Mac.

Additionally I bought one of the new MacBooks on a trip to New York, basically, I'm hooked!

I'm pretty close to finishing the first step of the Migration from Windows Vista to Mac OSX with a Windows Server development environment.

This step involved taking all of the essentials of my life and moving them online.  Although this could be seen as a risky move with multiple security and privacy issues, I weighed up the pros and cons and decided it was worth doing for the sheer convenience it would give.

I now have the following in place:

1. Email powered by gmail, all of my POP3 email is accessed by gmail and stored on Google's servers.  This allows me to access my email from any location with an internet connection, the only limiting factor is the fact that I rely on having a connection.  This account is also integrated with my iPhone.
2. My calendar is synced from iPhone to Outlook to Google (http://www.google.com/support/calendar/bin/answer.py?hl=en-ie&answer=89955) and vice versa.  Obviously there is a reliance on Outlook here, this will be replaced by iCal on Mac once that environment is up and running.
3. All of my bookmarks are now held in Delicious (http://delicious.com).

This leaves my files and documents, at the moment I'm testing out SugarSync (http://www.sugarsync.com) which will hopefully plug this hole.

In terms of media (music, photos etc.) I store my music on an external HDD which is backed up to another drive using a simple batch command.  My photos are slowly (painfully so) being migrated to Flickr.

The above setup is perfect for me, obviously the big limiter is having an Internet connection, however, I find that modern life is so Internet dependant that you can pretty much find a connection point or WiFi access wherever you go.  Additionally as a fallback I have my iPhone, so as long as I have cell signal I'm good to go.

The solution I've chosen may not suit everyone, but I've had enough experience of reinstalling Windows to be sick of having to backup and migrate key files and settings, as well as all of my user files.  Storing all of my essential data in centralised online repositories should essentially mean I can work on pretty much any machine with minimal or no setup.

I'd like to hear from anyone who has chosen a similar setup or can recommend any software that might help or streamline my structure.

I've just found a brilliant application for the iPhone, point your browser at:

http://www.sugarsync.com/

SugarSync allows you to synchronise files on your home, work, heck any computer with an online account.  These files can then be accessed on you iPhone.

Another great feature is file versioning whereby the last 5 versions of any file are retrievable.

At the moment I'm trialling the service, but so far have been really impressed, definitely one of the more useful iPhone applications out there.

Aside from being a great iPhone utility it's also good for backing up files on your computer!

After years of using Microsoft technologies I've decided it's time to try something different. My main reason for change is lack of inovation by MS... and well... Vista.

My plan is to use my laptop purely for development, so I'm going to install Windows Server 2008 and Visual Studio 2008, and connect remotely to work.

My base machine will be an iMac running OSX, having used mac before I have confidence that this setup will suit my needs more than a pure MS solution.  I'm going to post my experiences during the transition.

More to follow.

Well I finally got my iPhone 3G here in the UK thanks to carphonewarehouse (a special no thanks to O2) - a few observations:

1. It's bigger than the original phone (now my LV case doesn't fit... doh).
2. The build quality isn't quite as good, there's an imperfection in the case, sounds picky but it's an expensive piece of kit so I expected better.
3. The call sound quality is much better even in low signal situations.

I've yet to test battery life and 3G performance as I'm on my WiFi network at the moment.

Overall I like the new design but it could've been better, I'm looking forward to the 3G speeds though :)

iPhone obsessive over and out.

Is it wrong to want an iPhone 3G?  Here in the UK they're apparently in very short supply, a problem compounded by O2 (the UK iPhone carrier).

I received a text message from O2 at 7:30am on Monday inviting me to order my iPhone 3G online (at 8am).  Already being an iPhone user I assumed the early sign up was exclusively for existing customers... WRONG, they actually invited everyone to go online and order, new and existing customers alike.

Consequently the website that handles upgrades crashed, personally I couldn't believe the whole situation had been handled so badly, a few points:

1.  02 had a "sign up for interest" form on their site, they therefore knew how many people were likely to hit the site.
2.  The site was built in such a way that it would never have coped with a high volume of users (there was no session management and lots of flashy graphics).
3.  The fail over page (designed to show if the main site was overwhelmed) in fact resulted in an error when the form on it was submitted.

Coming from a web development background I find it hard to believe that O2 went to market with such a poorly designed system. Granted the site may well have been developed and deployed in a rush (most web development projects are, but that's a different rant), however, if you are aware of shortcomings (which any kind of load testing would have revealed) why then send a text message and email to all potential users telling them to visit the site.  A situation made worst by the "first come first served" propaganda, ensuring panic amongst the masses.

I hope lessons were learnt, however, I doubt they were, if only my clients had such low standards, my job would be easy!

A bit nerdy, but I hope posterous expose an API, I'd love to use this functionality for micro blogging and updating my site on the go.