I started writing this post some months ago back in September but never got around to finishing it. At first this post was going to be me singing my praises for Ubuntu and how well Ubuntu supports the Macbook Pro. Unfortunately in that time I’ve now moved to Mac OS X…

I ran Ubuntu on my Macbook Pro seemlessly for just under 3 months before upgrading to Intrepid Ibex. The upgrade went smoothly, except for my office printer no longer working. This lead to Ubuntu’s demise on my MBP. After re-installing the driver 3 times I decided I’d remove CUPS in case there were left over configuration files causing issues. Unfortunately I stupidly marked all CUPS components with ‘remove completely’ via synaptic. I then watched synaptic systematically remove nearly all my system packages… nautilus, firefox, gnome, the lot. My bad.

After 3 days of recovering my data and failed attempts to re-install, and have my Macbook boot Ubuntu without live CD assistance, I gave up and installed Mac OS X. This in itself is no fault of Apple or Ubuntu. Apple never meant for Macbook’s to run Linux.

Two issues arose when I moved from Windows Vista running on Bootcamp to native Ubuntu.

1) Rewind to mid-August, after reading up on hardware compatibility, and how to put Ubuntu on my Macbook Pro, I wiped my Windows Vista and OSX partitions and installed Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy). That was a whole lot of fun – only realising Apple had crippled my “Superdrive” with a firmware update, I couldn’t read my Mac OSX Leopard DVD (I’m not the only one – £400+ for Apple to fix it, no thanks!) and only able to occasionally read the Ubuntu installation CD.

I managed to overcome these hurdles with a trusty 16GB Rally 2 USB stick and a WD Passport external USB hard drive. I even splashed out on an external DVD-RW to make future re-installs easier.

2) In early September I noticed when running on batteries my Macbook Pro would switch off after only 5 mins. No prompts about low battery, no shutdown sequence, nada. Just power off immediately. At the time I put this down to poor power management by Ubuntu. Just last night however (running OS X) it did exactly the same thing. So it looks like another hardware fault on my £1350 (with academic discount) laptop.

The firmware upgrade happened some months ago, possibly autumn 2007 but having no reason to use the DVD drive for months, I never noticed until I switched operating systems. The instant-power-off-issue-with-no-warming issue has only manifested since August. Co-incidentally just as my 1 yr of Apple Care expired.

So despite it’s low profile form factor and decent performance, I vow never to purchase another Macbook again. It’s a regular PC laptop for me next time…

I am still alive but I’ve not really dedicated much time to blogging this year. Last Friday was my last day at Evolving Media. I enjoyed my time at EM, and they produce some quality work but I really want to move on to using more robust development practices. Namely using a versioning system again, when I first started there it felt a little bit like walking a tight rope without a safety net with no CVS.

I was also in denial about how much of an OO zealot I’ve become, the trouble is I’m not writing enough OO code to progress as quickly as I’d like. Not employing OO was basically a huge road block for starting test driven development, automated testing (continuous integration) and automated deployment. All of which are nice to have but come at the cost no one could afford at EM – time; victims of their own success in that regard.

As I’ve mentioned before, one thing I never really settled with was working on a Mac. It was doing my head in going to work on Mondays and hitting CTRL instead of the Apple key and pressing those retarded page up and down keys that aren’t (they only scroll your screen and not the cursor).

I’d have the reverse situation at home where I’d keep hitting the ALT key instead of CTRL in Windows, ALT + right for End, ALT + left for Home and @@ for “”. As developers we use # symbols more than most and ALT+3 just isn’t convenient dammit. Apple keyboards, pha!

I think a six month run on OSX was long enough for me to decide I’m still a Windows fanboy, there’s some dev tools for Windows I’ve grown up on. I never found a decent replacement for Regex Coach (I even made a long over due donation the other day as a thank you!).

So where am I off to next? On May 21st I start at Alexander Street Press, an academic publisher with US roots who focus on the humanities. I’m looking forward to it; the two guys I’m working with, Paul and John, seem really knowledgeable, I’m sure I’ll learn a lot.

I’ve a week to myself this week to tie up some loose ends (private work namely). I’m hoping to get some more posts up here this week. In an ideal world I wanted to:

• Push my new blog layout live (3 columns tagged up with microformat goodness)
• Make a start on Groovy in Action
• Read more of PHP in Action
• Ditto for Agile Web Development with Rails
• Finally get Zend (PHP5) certified

But I can’t see me squeezing that all in…

This post is somewhat overdue since I’ve never been so busy. I don’t post much in the way of personal happenings on here but it’s not every month you move out of home.

It’s been a long time coming, and for years I swore to myself I’d always buy and never rent a property, but since no one really has any idea if house prices will keep going up or crash, I bit the bullet and moved into rented accommodation with a friend on March 1st!

It’s a nice feeling to have your own place, even if I don’t actually own it. Right now I can’t actually envisage getting the free time I had back. Hopefully in a month or two I’ll have sorted things out and got into some kind of routine.

I write this sitting on the floor at the end of my mattress while I wait for my new desk and bed to arrive (several weeks away, sigh).

I do have a couple of posts saved in drafts but I’ve spent more time washing up in recent weeks than I have on my PC. What time I do have I’m trying to spend revising for my Zend Certification which I’ve got to get around to taking, seeing as I paid for it last August!

I finished at River Island yesterday. I wasn’t at River Island long (12 weeks) but pretty early on I realised I’d made a mistake.

As the saying goes we’re supposed to learn from our mistakes but on reflection I think I’d make the same mistake again. I don’t think many experiences are truly bad, and in hindsight I think this last job was a worthwhile experience that helped me clarify what I want to do and where I want to be professionally.

The things I know I won’t miss were my 6am alarm (which typically only allowed for 7hrs sleep a night) and commuting 3 hours a day!

For the second time this year I’ve rebooted my Linux box only to have it “kernel panic” on boot with a load of unrecoverable disk errors, bah! (just as I got subversion up and running again too)

So I hopped on to Dabs this morning and ordered myself a new hard drive (taking the opportunity to sample Seagate’s latest offering, with perpendicular storage no less!). Every time I buy a new hard drive I’m amazed at how much storage you can get for your money, I went for a 320GB drive for a mere £70!

Of course with a new disk I’m greeted with a new OS install (and recovering what data I can from the old drive!). I think I’ll give Debian another run as that’s the distribution of choice at Evolving Media.

I also wanted to play around with Creole, having read up on code generation a fair bit recently I stumbled across Propel (which uses Creole as a DB abstraction layer). However with no Linux machine I’ll take the time to catch up with some reading while I wait for my new drive to arrive…

I’ll get down to actually writing some code again one of these days!