An iPhone

I bought an iPhone.

Giving the Mac editor Textmate a try for source code, html, css, etc.

I did most of my program editing in the IDE/editors that came with the language.  Visual Basic v2,3,4,5 & 6 came with a fairly productive environment.  I liked Turbo C before that.  Visual Studio combined Microsoft’s languages into one environment.  Delphi was pretty cool.  And the VBA editors in MS Office were functional.

UltraEdit was and is the best text editor I’ve used in Windows.

I tried E- TextEditor for Windows.  It uses the cygwin shell on Windows but it just didn’t feel quite right for me.  I tried Intype also but it has a way to go.

I am using Vim more and more.  It works across most platforms that I find myself using.  Vim installs with the Linux flavors that I use.  For that reason I learned to do basic editing in Vim since it was always there.  Over time I learned more features and climbed that steep learning curve in Vim.  I’m almost surprised to say that I miss Vim’s features in other editors.

After reading the book Texmate looks promising.

My first Apple, a 13″ MacBook

The first Mac.   A white polycarbonate Macbook.

Actually not the first since I’d been playing with OSX on VMware for a little more than six months.

Also picked up “Mac OS X Leopard: The Missing Manual”.  It was a lot of help.

Why did I spring for a Mac —

• The improved quality.
• The Intel processors — with their switch to Intel the fanboys admitted how the much PowerPC processors sucked 🙂
• Leopard includes features that help get along in a Windows world — Windows makes up my day job.
• When I picked up a Macbook for the boss a few months ago there was time to play around and kick the tires.
• While Bootcamp allows you to run Windows on a Mac it was a bit too inconvenient.  VMware Fusion is quicker.
• I spend a decent amount of my system administration in Linux and BSD.

Moving the self-hosted netsnbytes.com to Google Apps

The netsnbytes domains are test environments.  Before using software or other technology at work it is tested here.  The email gateway was and is the biggest project.  I have been able to send and receive email with different configurations and systems.  There are risks to implementing technology solutions without thorough testing first.

I knew the time would come when servers would start rejecting email sent from the DSL line netsnbytes lived on.  Too many spammers use cable and DSL networks.  The number of rejects I’ve logged spiked up recently.  It is time to do something.

I’ve done the research into Google Apps for Domains.  The Standard plan will handle the email needs for myself and my wife.  Following Google’s help the setup was smooth.  The domains are still managed through another registrar and email and the website are through Google.  I hope Google spam filtering is close to what I had.

I still need to maintain at least an incoming email server locally.  That should be good enough for tests.

fsWatcher – a server to watch and process folders

The problem —

• Ricoh/Lanier scanner cannot save PDF files on the domain server.
• We went through creating various user accounts and tweaking the security permissions on the server without luck.
• The Ricoh dealer sent several technicians to work on the problem.  We also worked with Ricoh’s phone support.
• The scanner could not save to a shared folder on a Windows XP computer either.

The solution —

• Configure scanner to save PDF files to a VMware virtual machine’s folder.  The virtual machine is running Windows 2000 Pro.
• An IronPython script was created that watches the virtual machine’s scanner folder.
• The script copies PDF’s to the scanner folder on the domain server.