My wife and I went for a hike the other day. Before we left I grabbed my camera, my phone, and my iPod. It occurred to me later that I take those three devices with me just about everywhere I go. I'm really looking forward to the day when they converge into one device that performs all three functions well. The iPhone is getting close, but it doesn't have the capacity of my 30GB 5G iPod or the resolution of my Canon SD 450. On the other hand it does have a bigger screen than my camera, iPod, or phone and strongly out performs my RAZR in phone functionality. I'd guess that the second or third generation iPhone will fulfill all three of those roles satisfactorily.

So far I'm not asking for anything radical. However, what I think would make a truly brilliant device would be if Apple stuck a 500GB hard drive in the iPhone and made it work as a backup location for TimeMachine. Then, go one step farther and make the data stored in the TimeMachine backup accessible/viewable - at least the important bits - through the iPod/iPhone interface. Think about it, my iPod already contains a majority of my music, pictures, and movies (which is the bulk of the data on my laptop) and it's accessible - I can look at pics or play music and movies. Why not go one step further and back-up all my data to my iPod and make all the important bits accessible/viewable?

Every time you connect your iPod to your computer you're essentially backing up all your digital entertainment. Then when you plug in your USB/FW drive for use with TimeMachine the same thing is happening, except that it's a different drive and you can't access any of the data stored on the drive without connecting to an OS X machine. I think Apple should modify the iPod/iPhone OS so that it can read TimeMachine backups, stick a 500GB HD in the device, and call it the iPod/iPhone LifeMachine. So maybe the name's not real hot, but I would pay serious coinage for this device (whatever it got called) if Apple released one.

So please, Apple, let me do away with my camera, phone, iPod, and external TimeMachine drive and replace it with an iPod LifeMachine.

MarsEdit!

This is a test to see how the whole MarsEdit thing works.

It was a real hassle getting xmlrpc working.

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class foo
  def init
    puts "Got inited"
  end
end

Code highlighting seems to be a pain in the rear, with no definitive answer on how it's supposed to be done.

Since around the end of 2002 I haven't had a computer of my own. Every computer I've had (a series of Thinkpads) was provided for me by work, which means the MacBook Pro is the first computer I've purchased since 1998. That's pretty remarkable for a guy who makes his living writing code :-)

After my first ThinkPad I was sold on the benefits provided by laptops. I could work from home, the coffee shop, or halfway across the country with nearly the same efficiency that I had at work - and sometimes more efficiently due to fewer interruptions. However, one of the problems with laptops is that their harddrives don't seem to last as long as those of their desktop cousins, probably because of the frequent bounces, bumps, and jars they experience as they get moved around. At work I use FolderShare (now owned by Microsoft and free to use) to sync all code between my workstation and my laptop and it works great. But, for home use, I wanted something I could back up to from both my Windows and OS X laptops (without it being a third computer), so I bought a little NAS device.

After doing some research I decided on the 250GB SimpleTech SimpleShare. I found this very helpful review that provided a lot of details with an OS X bent, which was important to me. I'd looked briefly at the Buffalo TeraStation, but it provided a lot more storage than I needed and some reviews seemed to indicate it didn't play well with OS X (a show-stopper for me).

Setting up the SimpleShare consisted of plugging it into my DSL modem/router and then navigating to the management interface in my browser. To connect from Windows you just map the drive. In OS X you can use SMB or NFS to access the drive; I opted to use NFS. Setting up NFS requires a little more work than using SMB. I ended up digging around on google until I found this page, which describes how to set up the mount point using the command line and a text file editor. The other alternative is to use NetInfo, a GUI provided by OS X. However, I fiddled around with that for an hour with no luck while the command line version worked the first time for me.

Once the SimpleShare was setup transferring files was a breeze. I was able to copy over all my pictures and music at a relatively quick clip, though I'm sure it would have been even faster if I was using a wired connection instead of 802.11g. Overall, I'd definitely recommend it as a storage/backup solution if you have a laptop. It could easily old the entire contents of both my laptop harddrives and still have room left over. The best part is that all I had to do was plug it in and connect it to the router - no trying to configure an NFS server or an SMB server. It's also quiet and small, about the size of my dsl modem/router, so I can put it just about anywhere.

Last night and tonight I've been playing around with my MacBook and getting it configured the way I want. This mostly involves learning how things work on OS X and finding a few pieces of software to compliment what comes with OS X.

Last night my goal was to install everything necessary for Ruby-on-Rails development. After some googling I was able to find this link, which does an excellent job of detailing how to install/set-up a RoR dev environment. I opted to install LightTPD 1.4.10 which caused some problems until I found a bug report which detailed a work-around. If you're like me and prefer a GUI for MySQL you can download MySQL Administrator, which runs fine using Rosetta.

After the RoR environment was set up I pulled down the latest Typo code and set it up locally so I can test themes and/or take a crack at developing my own. Looking at the Typo code seems like it would also be a good way to learn some more about Rails.

One of the things I've noticed is that Mac people still pay for software. On the PC, whether it's Windows or Linux, for the most part it's easy to find open-source/free tools (notepad2, SmartFTP, RSS Bandit, Reflector, etc, come to mind) while on the Mac most of the tools people recommend are shareware. So, after playing around with TextMate for a little bit I bought a license for it. I think one of the reasons that people pay for software in the OS X world is that the prices are more reasonable. I'll gladly pay ~$45 for TextMate when the alternative is $284 for SlickEdit.