Shiny!
Power and internet finally came back at work at about 11:30, by which time the flower_cat and I had managed to assemble an early lunch of Pon-Pon Chicken (basically shredded cold chicken, cucumber strips, and peanut sauce).
Sometime around 2pm our sysadmin came back from his Fry's run with my shiny new 15.4" Macbook Pro. It's the high-end one, with a 2.1GHz CPU, 1GB of RAM, and a 100GB disk (actually more like 95, with almost 25GB of stuff already on it). It took the rest of the afternoon for it to download something approaching half a gig of updates over our T1 line. Meanwhile, I installed Firefox, fink, X11, the software development kit (called, for some unguessable marketing reason, X-code), and Emacs21, and copied my ssh keys over from my desktop.
Now, people who know me and my operating-system preference (Linux) may be wondering why I decided to get a Mac laptop. You may well ask. There are several reasons:
- The main reason is that I'm going on a business trip next week and wanted to take along a very reliable, reasonably fast laptop with well-supported WiFi, good battery life, and a decent-size screen and hard drive. The Mac qualifies.
- Everyone else in my group has a Mac, and several of them are developing software on it. Most of the guts are in Java, but the GUI and other wrappers are, at the moment, Mac-specific. We give demos.
- I have one, too, but it's ancient. The display has a couple of vertical lines, the battery comes loose at unpredictable times and shuts it down, it's horribly slow, and the case is coming apart.
- There are many documents floating around the lab and out in cyberspace in formats that aren't well supported by Linux applications. Admittedly, not all are supported on the Mac, either, but most are.
- MacOS X is a darned weird excuse for a Unix, but at least it is a Unix, and it ships with X11 and a reasonably complete set of GNU utilities and development tools. fink, which is basically a Debian apt repository for the Mac, takes care of most of the rest.
- I can't stand the trackpad as a pointing device, but it has USB and bluetooth -- I'll find something.
- This is an Intel Mac that we're talking about, and Linux does run on it. Dual-booting, and eventually virtualization, are definitely in the plan, though I might not have them done by next week.
- It was time. I think I held the lab record for oldest laptop still in regular use. (We're not even counting the semi-functional tablet, 166MHz mini-laptop, 90MHz mini-server, Netwinder, and other ancient artifacts presently cluttering up my office.)
And, of course, it's a nice shiny silver color. Our traditional naming scheme is rivers, and my personal scheme is "rivers of Middle Earth", so I'll probably go with silverlode. It also ties back to the Silvermine River, that runs near my parents' old house in Connecticut.