...arrrrr matey, taday ye’ll be feelin’ my blade! Arrrr!

Happy International Talk Like a Pirate Day!

TOAD connected to Oracle Enterprise installed on Windows XP which is a Virtual Machine in Parallels running on my MacBook Pro. Cygwin for OpenSSH in order to access a remote Oracle database behind a firewall through a port-forwarded SSH tunnel.

Sheesh. Oracle. Pain.

One thing that I love about Seth Godin is his unceasing efforts in trying to make companies see that they need to treat their customers with respect. This is made evident again in a great little piece he wrote about Apple’s $200 iPhone price drop that the mediawenttotown on.

He talks about a bunch of things Apple could have done to make the early adopters “ok” with the fact that they were just out $200. But then he goes on to say:

The key is to not give price protection to early buyers (that’s unsustainable as a business model) but to make them feel more exclusive, not less.

I wish more corporations would take the route of doing everything in their power to make their customers feel respected. To make their customers feel like they have a choice and could take their business elsewhere (even if they can’t take their business elsewhere).

In the process of setting up my new dev machine, I decided I was going to try using MacPorts to install all of the dev-type-software instead of installing into /usr/local.

James Duncan Davidson has a great overview article (that needs no further explaining from myself), titled Sandboxing Rails With MacPorts. Another similar article can be found here.

My problem is that I work on a lot of projects that use ImageMagick / RMagick, and that’s not discussed here.

No worries, I’ll install ‘em and give it a go:

sudo port intall ImageMagick
sudo gem install rmagick

CRAP! I don’t know what happens for you, but ImageMagick installs perfectly for me, and then RMagick craps out and dies something like this:

/opt/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/rmagick-1.15.9/./lib/rvg/misc.rb:321:in `get_type_metrics': 
unable to read font `(null)' (Magick::ImageMagickError)
 from /opt/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/rmagick-1.15.9/./lib/rvg/misc.rb:321:in `render'
 from /opt/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/rmagick-1.15.9/./lib/rvg/misc.rb:696:in `text'

Now, for the solution I am going to give all credit to Jakob Skjerning, because I found the solution on his site after doing some Googling.

Do this instead:

sudo port install ImageMagick
sudo port install rb-rmagick

Done. Works. Thank goodness.

I went out and picked up a new MacBook Pro yesterday, after the display issue on my wife’s iMac got so bad that finally the machine has become unusable. We’re gonna do a little swap – she’ll take my MacBook, I get the MBP, and the iMac is going to get thrown off a bridge or something.

What I wanted to comment about here is Apple’s Migration Assistant – which absolutely and undisputedly rocks my little world.

After pondering the long hours I was in for getting all my apps reinstalled, settings, passwords, serial numbers for apps, bla bla bla up and copied and running onto the new Mac – Nick pointed me to the Migration Assistant (which I’m not sure I even really knew about) and off I went. Plugged in my male-to-male FireWire cable into both machines, and booted the MacBook into Target Disk Mode (hold down ‘T’ while powering up until the FireWire symbol displays on the screen). The Migration Assistant asked me what users I wanted, if I wanted the Applications as well, and blammo. I went into the hot tub for a while, and when I got back I had my user, files, documents, library, settings, applications und alles.

So far there are only two apps that didn’t come over seamlessly, and those would be Parallels and Mozy (which, if you haven’t tried, is the best backup software I’ve ever laid my hands on), both of which I needed to reinstall, but after a bit of fiddling are working fine again. All told this thing saved me hours, and I’m sure I’ll use it again on my next Mac purchase.