has_many :thoughts

I remember when desktop “widgets” first appeared in Windows 95. I think they were called “channels” and you could subscribe to bits of info that would appear on your “Active Desktop”.

I tried then to get some usefullness out of them and couldn’t. I don’t know many other people that did and that feature faded away in Windows.

But they never really did go away. Konfabulator, now Yahoo! Widgets, Google widgets, and now Windows Vista and OS X all provide the same functionality. Little apps that sit on your desktop for all sorts of uses. I just never found them useful. They take up space and they just seem so useless. If I want to know the weather, I’ll open up weather.com.

I knew I could get some widgets to appear in OS X if I hit F12 but I never used them. It wasn’t until I looked at my Activity Monitor that I realized that even if I’m not using them, OS X widgets are still sucking up system resources. So I found this handy article that explains how to disable them completely.

Hurray, I’ve reclaimed 20 MB of RAM that I didn’t even know was taken by something I never even used.

I just came across this list of bundle installer shell scripts for TextMate.

Being new to TextMate, I had no idea how to install the HAML bundle I wanted to try out. Luckily, this page provides a handy link to a shell script for each bundle that does all the installing for you.

Simply curl the file down to your machine, make it executable, and execute it. Bang, bundle installed.

So far, TextMate has been pretty neat and a refreshingly lightweight to my former environment of RadRails. Admittedly though, I haven’t had much opportunity to a lot of development since switching to OS X / TextMate so I have a lot to learn about it.

I just came across this handy dandy list of essential FOSS for Mac OS X.

OpenSourceMac.org is a pretty succinct list of essential tools.

As I try to adjust to OS X, I’ve found myself wanting to use more free/open source software wherever possible. Not just because it’s cheaper, but because it feels better.

So far, NeoOffice is working just fine. I tried OpenOffice.org under X11 but the interaction with OS X was a bit clunky. NeoOffice is great!

I finally bit the bullet and began the switch to Mac. Good job, Apple. All those silly commercials worked and I am now the proud owner of a 15” MacBook Pro.

Actually, it’s mostly due to:

• Parallels
  At a couple of PhillyonRails meetings, I’d seen folks running Windows applications side-by-side with OS X apps. This was a huge selling point, as there a number of applications I have, and absolutely need, that don’t have OS X versions.

• Free BSD
  Becoming more comfortable with Linux, I found myself lured by OS X’s familiar command line capabilities. Finally, I can forget dir and just use ls.

• Everybody’s doing it
  It seems like all the good Rails shops use Mac. Damn peer pressure.

• Out with the old
  The straw that broke the camel’s proverbial back was the touchpad on my Dell basically ceasing to work Friday night. Rather then try and fix it, or to order up a new Dell, I figured it was time.

Only a few frustrations so far:

• The dude at the Apple store told me that I had to get a MacBook Pro if I wanted to have dual display. So $2,000 later, I find out that’s completely false.

• I wish that the OpenOffice.org Cocoa version was finished. I’m using the X11 version right now and it seems fine, just not as pretty or as tightly integrated as a Cocoa version.

• The normal, time-intensive process of moving all of one’s personal digital life from one machine to another.

So I think now I am officially ready for RailsConf!