Fastest Mac Last?

Saturday, April 8th, 2006

The first Macs to get the Intel treatment were the low-end iMac and the High-end PowerBook (excuse me, MacBook). Next out the gate was the Mac Mini. Rumor has it that the next part of the product line to be X86’d will be the iBook. The final Mac to be intellified is likely to be the PowerMac, possibly in the late summer/early fall.

I’m just curious why this order? I would have guessed the PowerMac would have been one of the first systems to go Intel because:
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A New Mouse

Friday, March 31st, 2006

I’ve heard studies claiming vastly increased productivity from dual-monitor setups and arguing that companies are being penny wise and pound foolish by refusing to buy extra monitors for their programmers. That may well be true, though I mostly work with one large monitor myself. However in my experience many companies and individuals are being even more foolish by limping along with old, grody keyboards and mice.
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Converting a Mini to a Server, Part 8: Wrap Up

Monday, March 20th, 2006

So far the Mini is chugging along quite happily. Here are a few hopefully final notes.

At various points over the last day the Mini would spontaneously lose its ability to find the router and thus could not connect to external systems. However external systems could connect to it. Possibly this was related to using DHCP with manual addressing. I switched over to static addressing and so far it seems fine.

The WordPress transfer was smoother than I expected but not as smooth as it could or should be. For one thing, the URL of the site should probably not be stored in various places in the main database. That makes it too hard to move to a different URL. Instead it should be stored in the config file along with the database user name and password. Furthermore it should be stored once. Storing it in multiple places and then doing a search and replace in the SQL script to update risks breaking links that shouldn’t be changed. I still have to search for any broken links here and fix them.
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Converting a Mini to a Server, Part 7: There is No Part 7

Monday, March 20th, 2006

OK. So this wasn’t exactly a trivial operation, and there may yet be a few glitches. (I can already see that some of the internal stylesheets didn’t come over.) but if you’re reading this then the transition is a success. All three of my locally hosted sites are now served by a Mac Mini running the latest and greatest versions of WordPress, MySQL, Apache, and PHP.

On the down side, in 2.0.2 the so called rich editor appears to have gotten richer and harder to use. It even seems to be hard wrapping unexpectedly. Why, oh why, does everyone hate plain text so much?

I’m going to bed. See you tomorrow.

Converting a Mini to a Server, Part 6: WordPress

Sunday, March 19th, 2006

I downloaded the latest version of WordPress, 2.0.2, and copied it over the old version. It started up fine, but couldn’t connect to the database server. No surprise. I haven’t imported my old database tables yet.

After setting up the database and importing the old database data, the site seemed to work. However, on further investigation all the links went to the old site (cafe.elharo.com) and not to the new site (minicafe.elharo.com). That’s weird. On top of that, the equivalent URLs at the new site were 404. Hmm, there’s probably something in the database that points to the old URL. Yep, that’s it all right. Seems I have to edit the SQL directly before importing it in the new server. Bleah.
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Converting a Mini to a Server, Part 5: Virtual Hosts

Sunday, March 19th, 2006

Now that I’ve got one site working on the Mini, it’s time to set up the other two. Naturally this requires virtual hosts. Since I’m not ready to switch off the current production server yet, I added a few more host names I can use until I am: minicafe.elharo.com for cafe.elharo.com, xom.elharo.com for www.xom.nu, and blog.elharo.com for www.elharo.com. (These are only accessible from inside my internal subnet so don’t try to connect to them.)
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