Completing the VPN

For the past couple of years our VPN has been somewhat of a work in progress, although it has been providing a useful service it has never been quite finished, one of those 95% projects. Well I am sure you will all be excited to learn that tomorrow it looks like we will finally be able to stand back and say that the network is one project that is 100% complete in every way (for now).

All sites and key personnel are connected, our co location facility is connected, we have finally finished putting all the head office connections onto the Draytek 3300V and we have the RADIUS server running for mobile workers. Added to this we have upgraded the head office switches to managed Gigabit switches and tomorrow we should be activating the load balancing system so that if our leased line goes off the ADSL line will try to pick up the pieces and vice versa.

One of the major improvements has been the recently discovered need to reverse all the connections so that now both the co location router and the head office router are in charge of the connections to the remote locations. Quite why this never occured to anyone before will remain a mystery but hey ho :o) Of course the big question was which way should the connection be configured to connect between Manchester and Head office now we have 2 very clever VPN brains at each end, well the odd coincidence is that you can set then up to dial each other! It is not immediately obvious whether this will cause them to get in a knot at some point but we can always toss a coin and switch off one link if it does.

The main visible improvement has been the state of our comms cabinet or spaghetti junction as it was known, when we have disposed of our old ADSL router and installed the super VPN pass through modem we should finally have a perfectly organised rack of kit with no dangly encoutrements for once. I will take a piccie tomorrow to illustrate but unfortunately I don't have a before picture to give the true contrast.

I watched an interesting webinar last week about steelhead WAN link optimisers from riverbed which can allow network applications to be run from the datacentre so maybe this could be the way forward for the network, phase 2 if you will. Just need to find a couple on ebay running at a bit of a discount as they are a bit expensive. Maybe terminal services will be a better bet but if anyone wants to bin a couple of steelheads do call :o)

Extracting the 2950 from the dog house

Our upgrade to the Manchester server looked like being a bit of a damp squib this morning, after a good start with our new 2950 Draytek firewall router dropping straight in as a replacement for the 2900 things were not turning out to be as reliable as I had hoped. Twice the previous day the link from my house to Manchester had locked up and then Nigel had a similar problem when his tunnel locked up, the outlook did not look good.

However after having a pootle around on the Draytek forums and not really coming up with a lot I had a moment of inspiration, the problem is that if one of the pub routers drops its connection its too stupid to realise and doesn't try to dial back into the main host every time. So the solution is surely to remove the responsibility for dialling from the slightly less clever routers and put the main super efficient router in control. In a nutshell get Manchester to dial the pubs instead of the other way round, this way Manchester should know that a connection is dropped (using the power of its dedicated VPN processor) and simply dial it up again. One other thing to be aware of if anyone is trying this is that the default timeout on Draytek 2600's is a lowly 300 seconds and should be reduced to zero :o(

So after reprogramming all of our routers and having a major rejig of the Manchester end of things it all looks a lot happier, of course its not as simple as checking they are all connected and I won't really know until a few days have passed. Tomorrow I will rejig our Nagios server to test these connections and I should start getting an idea of how good this configuration is going to be quite soon. As an aside when searching for 'Damp Squib' on Google images this is what comes up, call me a fool but that dead cow don't look too damp to me :o)

Instant gratification

No sooner had I posted about my declining traffic due to lack of blog fodder than I get 30 visitors in the same day, I am wondering whether this means that people have subscribed using RSS readers and therefore I can generate as much traffic as I want simply by bombarding you all with posts!

Our 2950 arrived last week and was immediately dispatched to Manchester where it has now been installed, its early days yet to get an idea of whether it is going to provider a better and more reliable service but so far so good. Although the 2950 is quite different to the 2900 it is replacing, and as such you cannot simply export the configuration and move it across, the setup screens are pretty similar so it was easy to copy the configuration page by page. We have about 20 VPN tunnels hard coded into the config and one thing which would be great in a further revision of Drayteks new operating system would be to duplicate an entry in the profiles page because it can be a bit of a drag, just in case anyone from Draytek ever trip over this.

One other little happening which I found very interesting is that Google have created a little program for Pocket PC's which runs Google maps. I must say that my HTC PDA is becoming more and more useful now that I can get my email, it is a phone, it syncs with my Gcal over the air thanks to goosync and now Google maps as well! I feel quite spoilt.

With all this in mind I found it very interesting to note that HTC have got a new version of my favourite toy coming out. I would guess that they are watching the IPhone with some trepidation because although apple will have a lot of work to do to create something as functional as the STC S710 I think we can all be confident that OSX on the IPhone will be slicker than Windows Mobile 6. So like the technology lemming that I am when the contracts on the phones are up for renewal I shall be torn between these two new and probably slightly flaky but 'oh so cool' toys and once again spend the duration of the contract getting it just right in time for the next one.

Google Apps cntd.

I have been progressing with lots of odds and ends this week and last which has meant no blogging, you can't force it after all. Unfortunately this means my traffic has nosedived so its a good job I am not dependant upon the income from my blog like Rob is ;o) (see previous post)

Which illustrates a point I wanted to make - should anyone read this and think 'Hey that looks like a cool thing to do that blogging lark' the only advice I would give is to get a Google analytics account because otherwise is pretty dull. As you can see I have visitors from all over the world when I can actually work up a little blog fodder but otherwise I have had no feedback at all, so praise Google for keeping beerbytes online!

So I am sure you have all been waiting with baited breath for an update on the Google calendar situation, well we have had some movement - spanning sync is out of beta and ready for deployment. Hooray! I really must congratulate spanning sync for producing just about the only calendar syncing software which works, I have been running it now for about 4 weeks and whilst syncmycal was merrily trashingmycal, spanningsync has just worked which is all we ask.

Another piece of software which also seems to be working is a little system called goosync which is syncing my Google calendar over-the-air with my HTC Pocket PC. This means now that the Mac side of things is perfect, Ical Syncs my calendar both ways with Google, my PDA does likewise and Ical also displays the rest of the offices calendars via .ics addresses.

This last point brings me onto a bit of a gripe with Google Apps. On paper Google apps is great but I have steadily been whittling away at the features which are actually useful to an organisation like ours. 2 weeks ago I closed the premier account because it was not bringing anything to the table over and above a standard Google apps for domains account and this afternoon I have had to walk away from even this because the calendaring system on these accounts does not allow private Ical feeds! Big mistake - I have had to spend some time this afternoon manually setting up standard Google accounts because syncmycal on the PC is not very happy with the Google apps calendaring feeds which seem to be slightly different from standard Google feeds and Outlook 2007 cannot plug into the Ical feeds on Google Apps.

So I am short of only 2 things now, Goosync is struggling to work on our Nokia 6233's but I am sure we can sort this and I need to get Outlook publishing to Google which syncmycal can allegedly do as long as your not on Apps.

Other news, Joost is still very cool but the content has been suspiciously stagnant since I first went on possibly indicating an Achilles heel, is it difficult to get the established networks to part with their premium content? And/or is it difficult to circulate new content around the Joost network? Maybe they need to take at look at the youtube way of doing things and get the public to contribute, I am not talking about the 240x180 endless rips of Simpson's funnies but seriously good quality video from Jo public. something along the line of a bit torrent network where people can submit content recorded on proper video cameras to make good quality but amateur videos which will play full screen. These could be vetted and categorised by Joost thereby avoiding the lawyers making a fat buck or two and allowing a huge variety of content to be available.

I've seen the future - and it's Joost

I am going off topic, as in this has nothing to do with IT and business, but for anyone else who thinks that TV in the UK is a bit poor at present I have just seen the future and its truly exciting and scary in equal measure......

A perfect Friday night, I got a pass from the missus for an hour at the local, they were in the middle of a barrel of Jennings Mountain Man which is nectar, and I get home to find out that I have been admitted to a rather exclusive club. I am a Joost beta tester!

Now for those of you who don't know (I can hardly remember quite how I ended up signing up for Joost myself) but Joost is a new online TV station. Online TV is one of those technologies which has promised so much in the past but never lived up to the hype, I am sure we have all tried some of those poor real player feeds in the past and frankly if you have real network shares take my advice and sell sell sell! Joost is a quick download, I was genuinely very pleased to find a Mac version for a change, so I installed it on the ol' mac book, logged in and just watched half an episode of fifth gear full screen with no buffering. Seriously.

Vicky Butler-Henderson never looked so good, although I suppose she never sat on my knee whilst presenting fifth gear before :o) I am such a nerd sometimes...

The choice of programming even in beta is far superior to HDTV even f the quality isn't, its full screen though, its on demand, they have programmes from national geographic, channel 5, MTV, I even heard tell of a Viacom deal yesterday and you can tell that the choice is going to be truly staggering on an international scale. I cannot emphasise this enough, sign up now because in 6 months time your digi box is going to look pretty dull, and that is the scary part. I dislike TV, I like gardening, I am a frustrated smallholder (in that I haven't got one) and I think people should be tilling the soil rather than vegging on the sofa and I quite like having an excuse to turn off the TV when nothing is on. In a Joost world there is always going to be something on you would like to watch, maybe land will become cheaper because all the smallholders will be watching Joost and then I can make my move.... sweet.

Delving further into Google Apps

Last week I set up a Google apps account to investigate the potential for using it as a replacement for Microsoft Exchange, given that we only really rely on Exchange to share calendars. Today I finally got chance to properly look into the fixtures and fittings of Google apps and I must say that my initial impression is very positive.

Although I had used Google Calendars before, and found the user experience to be a very positive one, especially for a browser based application, I had not really investigated the other aspects of the apps suite and that was the aim of this afternoon. Google apps is actually a very simple system and that is one of the things that appeals to me about it, the manual for exchange is about a foot thick and I would say that its a typical case of Microsoft over engineering. It is quite unfair in some ways to compare these 2 products because Exchange does lots of things that apps does not, however as a small office I would say Google is closer to fulfilling our requirement for information sharing.

So to the details, there are only 3 elements of apps which really interest me at present and these are in order of importance, calendars, email and finally the personalised start page. Of course each of these elements have been available on an individual basis for sometime but the new apps for domains approach allows one person to administer these systems for an entire office. The first thing you have to do is provide the domain, it would have been possible to sign over our existing brunningandprice domain and then link back to the website and use Gmail as our primary email system but I am not quite ready to take a jump like that so I got a new one for a mighty £2 pa :o)

One of the really nice features becomes apparent at this point, if you want to create user accounts for 20 odd people you can simply fill in an excel spreadsheet and Google will quite happily auto generate your user accounts. Easy. You can even set a global setting to ask all your new users to change their password when they first log on and preset their sharing options to allow everyone access to each other calendars. At this point if we were happy to use online systems the job is done, everyone has an account, email, calendar and even instant messaging.

The next thing I wanted to look at was the personalised start page, everyone in our office almost without exception uses Google as their start page anyway so to have the opportunity to add their calendar and email to this was quite appealing. It turns out that this system is again very simple to use and I simply popped our logo on the top of the page and dropped in each users calendar, email preview, to-do list and even a link our internal applications. I think we will get compadre Rob to use a bit of his design magic on this page if the idea takes off.


So far so good, the task for tomorrow is to make a decision about how best to approach using the email, should we simply have one pop3 account or route the existing mail via Gmail, my initial reaction is no however Gmail is a rather nifty web mail system compared to our existing service... tempting. Also its time to start throwing some larger calendars up and seeing what happens to performance, I'll keep you posted.

A really slick backup idea!

And it wasn't even mine.....

Its another not very exciting post about backup, I know its not the most fun subject even for fellow nerds but its a fact that backup is very important (see the last but 1 post). One issue we have as a company with distributed sites and therefore computers is trying to make sure we get copies of the data from harassed managers. Its no use giving them a cake of Cd's and a printout which requires them to do complicated computing tasks, it simply doesn't work, so you have to think of something really slick and this is what our main mac man Nigel has done.

At the same time that I was playing with rsync to backup my Manchester installation over the VPN Nigel was using the same program, which comes as standard on the Mac, to do some simple backup tasks on his computer. Having both recently installed a nice RSS reader called Vienna we have access to a useful little blog called Mac OSX Hints which pretty much does what it says on the tin. One hint which Nigel picked up on was a rather nifty little application called "Do Something When" which very simply runs a script when a USB Flash drive is plugged into a Mac. Using the power of his brain Nigel that put these 2 ideas together resulting in "A really slick backup idea", luckily Nigel doesn't blog so I get to write all about it and reflect in the glory of the idea without doing a thing - sweet :o)

So after a small amount of programming, setting up you Flash drive and rsync script, every time you plug the Flash drive into the Mac it automatically does an incremental backup of your predefined files! This will allow us to present our managers with a backup solution which is so slick they can't fail to use it.....

The rest of this week has been programming for me, a mix of finishing our new job applicant database and moving our exisitng data into the new database, from Microsoft SQL server to MySQL which has been a bit painful. A thing to watch out for if you are trying to use DTS to move data between these databases is that text data will not copy across using an ODBC connection and I couldn't tell you why. Varchar data will move and I have checked its not a collation issue, it just won't go, answers on a postcard please. The solution I used in the end was moving data to excel spreadsheets and then pushing the data into MySQL from there, not very elegant really.

Improving the 'Manchester connection'

Sounds a bit like a Tom Clancy novel doesn't it - "The Manchester Connection" - in reality of course it's nothing very classy (if Tom Clancy novels can be described as classy) it is a slot in a rack in Manchester which is currently occupied by one of our little VPN firewalls.

When we first embarked upon extending the VPN to Manchester it was a bit of an experiment and as such we didn't necessarily want to go mad buying expensive hardware for the first phase. However now that we have approaching 20 connections to this part of the network and are beginning to use the applications and data store there more and more, we are in need of a bit more horse power.

One thing we have noticed is that when the total number of connections on our current Draytek 2900 exceeds the recommended 16, although it will quite happily chug along for days without a problem every now and again if a connection is dropped it can fail to automatically pick up again. The only solution is to manually drop the connection and then everyone is happy again. Of course when you are relying on this connection to serve up applications it is not acceptable to have this occasional glitch and the resulting lockout so its time for an upgrade. What we were intending to use was a Draytek 330V as these units have capacity for 200 simultaneous connections and a dedicated VPN processor and was the choice for our main VPN hub, however it turns out that Draytek have a new toy out - the 2950 Note especially the cutting edge case design which is such a hall mark of any Drayteck product, the designers obviously frightened themselves with the racy blue case of the 330V and retreated to their comfort zones with the latest offering! Its a good job they work so well.


Click here for a full spec and here for a link to their control panel demonstration. We have been given a delivery date for Friday so if its on time I should be able to relate the tale of the setup on the Friday afternoon post :o)

Other news is that on the Google calendaring and sync front so far the Mac system - spanning sync - seems to be fine. However the PC solution syncmycal is having some minor emotional problems, so far the most impressive thing is the prompt service from their technical support department. Nuff said.

Mounting a network drive and dabbling in cron jobs

Now before you all think I have gone crazy and started a sideline in email scams I must explain some background before things will become clear.

Our new all singing and dancing application we are building in Manchester is starting to become useful and inevitably when something becomes useful people start actually using it to do important work. Also when people start using software they trust their friendly IT manager to look after all their useful information in a responsible manner so that if anything bad happened their precious information will be preserved. Imagine if you will a collection of harvest mice with a big stash of blackberries, if the stash of berries is squished the IT manager has an opportunity to become a hero by unsquishing them or alternatively slightly fired :o)

(The operations Director was very angry when she found out all the data was lost)

So the solution for guarding our 'blackberries' is to duplicate them and put them in several places at the same time, we have a clever piece of software in head office which does this - when it can be bothered (thank you to the creators of retrospect). However our new system is being created on a Linux server and as such has no access to our main backup software so we have had to create our own. Its pretty simple really, every night copy our 'pile of blackberries' from this place to this other place, as I have bored you already with the story of replicating our database we are simply concerned here with files. The thing is that there would be no point in copying our files from one part of the Linux server to another so it needs to be sent to head office, this means going from Linux to windows and this is where the fun is.

And so to a brief instruction on mounting a windows network share:
1. Stretch - its important.
2. Create a new windows account on your domain.
3. Create a folder on your windows server and allow access to it for your new user
4. Try connecting to it using the following command:

mount.cifs //servername.domain/share /mnt/ -o user=user,password=password,domain=domain

Don't try smb, mount, mount.smb or any of that because it doesn't work, I have no idea why - its probably very simple but 2 hours of banging my head against it could not get it going!

If the preceding command works edit your /etc/fstab file and simply copy and paste the command into it. That way every time you restart your Linux machine it will automatically make your windows share available to you in /mnt/ magic!

So next to the cron job:
For those of you who do not know, cron is a simple program which runs another program at a certain time on a certain day so you don't have to remember to. A cron job is a preconfigured task which cron will perform at a specified time and date, told you I could explain.

In our scenario we have a very simple command to be run cp -r "/home/store" "/mnt/" so the first step is to simply run it at the command line and see if it works. If it does you copy and paste the line into the /etc/crontab file with a preceding '0 1 * * *' which it turns out translates 'to please run this every night at 1am' simple really.

I hope you find this ramble as useful as I would have done if I had found it 2 hours ago :o)

The Ultimate Calendaring System?

First job this morning was to spec out and test the idea outlined yesterday and I have even made a pretty picture, I might print it out and put it on the fridge at home :o)



I have had Spanning Sync on the Mac for a couple of weeks now and it seems fine, ditto for sync mycal on the PC and at £12 per license its very reasonable but they have been linked into separate calendars. This morning I have linked up all of these systems via my Google calendar and so far they have not started fighting. I think the key must be to accept that the Google calendar has to wear the trousers and although its 2 way sync set both of the client tools to defer to Google if there is a dispute. The next step in testing this system will be to actually set up one of the new Google domain accounts, I will keep you in the loop :o)

BTW in writing this blog I thought I might put in a little picture to illustrate the fact that this Calendaring strategy might be 'all things to all men', when I searched for this phrase another quirky burp of Google images threw up a picture of a squaddie with an enormous gun(see right). Not quite what I had in mind but he definitely does seem to have the equivalent of my Calendaring strategy tucked in his sweaty pit doesn't he :o)

Groupware Eaton Mess?

For those of you who don't know it Eaton mess is a kind of pudding, I know this because even though I am a techie I work for a pub company and you pick up nuggets like that. Eaton mess is not just any kind of pudding though, its the Rio carnival of puddings, the fact is it shouldn't really work, its just a pile of stuff that just happens to be delicious.

I was reading the write ups this morning about Google's paid for 'sort of office' suite and was quite impressed but it has taken me all day to actually digest the possible opportunity which this service might be offering. I had been looking before at using just the calendar aspect but the App suite brings a few more things to the table for a quite reasonable £25 per year. As a suite of tools the offering is quite basic but there is nothing wrong with that, and the simple fact that you have to be online to do anything is quite limiting. For 360 days of the year it would not be a problem but I can just imaging the other 5 could be very frustrating indeed. That said there are 3 aspects of the suite I really like, namely the Calendars, Gmail and the Personalised Home Page the question is how to make best use of them and this is where it turns suddenly into Eaton Mess. So could a useful Groupware system be shackled together using Google Apps and some supporting software to create a masterpiece or just a big pile of stuff that doesn't quite gel.

Our problem as described before is the requirement to support Mac's and PCs and a variety of software applications with 2 way synchronisation for all applications. Or to put it another way is it feasible to replace Exchange with Google?

The requirement:
Shared Calendars, Personal Contacts, Web Mail, POP Mail and Mobile Access

Platforms:
Outlook 2007, Entourage, Ical, Apple Mail, Pocket Windows 5, Apple Address Book

I have alluded before to a couple of pieces of sync software that look promising, syncmycal and spanningsync, these are both coming along and although I am nervous about 3rd party plugins getting in the mix if, just if, they did get finished and worked well they could make all the difference. I will put together a diagram to illustrate but I would say that off the top of my head all that is missing is a way of syncing contacts with Gmail.

One thing which would be great about this whole house of cards would be that looking forward we could actually think about binning outlook and any other email/calendar clients thereby making life very simple. I love the idea of opening a web browser and having my mail and calendar immediately available to me, it was in fact a part of the initial idea for our central management system but it didn't seem worth while reinventing the wheel so to speak.

Why I like SQL and a matter of AS Dysfunction

One of the little projects I an engaged in at the moment is quite a nice little program to store facts, its the latest chapter in the drive to put information traditionally stored in a managers spreadsheet horde onto a central system which anybody can access.

The program is very simple, a set of pubs and a set of facts but one aspect which was quite intriguing was how to efficiently add an address for an entry without ending up with a huge database of contact details which would require constant maintenance, we have enough of those already! In due course a solution presented itself, why not simply use one of those other databases and what better than the accounts system because frankly businesses like to get paid and if there is one set of contact details which they make sure to get updated if anything changes its accounts. And this is why I like SQL, the new 'fact' system is in MySQL the accounts system in Microsoft SQL but thanks to the gift of SQL and PHP all of this information can be glued together in a really elegant little system.

The next step with this program is to then load this contact information into a VCard, we may be writing lots of our own software but you have to have an eye on standards and for contact information the VCard is it. Thankfully a nice group of people have written a PHP addon for creating VCards via the PEAR system and if you know what I am talking about and fancy a laugh pop into the documentation section for the VCard PEAR module :o) I'll tell you how I get on with this part tomorrow.

One other little note for today was a confusing feature of the asfunction in Flash, if you are ever programming in Flash and cannot get a function to work using asfunction check the target level, it does not reference the root level but whichever level the text area is in which is calling it. Bet you'll all sleep better now :o)

The rack is open and Rob earns 2 cents

When I first started musing upon life and aspects of IT on my little blog it was really a test, sorry to break the news but there you are. The theory was that the blog would be a valuable way of getting interesting and topical content onto our company website, explaining to anyone who cared what we do in the IT department and dispensing some useful nuggets of information to anyone having trouble with things we find solutions to. Its what makes the web so interesting, whatever mess you have got into you can almost guarantee someone has been there before and was good enough to write about it so other people could dig themselves out of the mire slightly quicker.

The question we had to answer was, is it possible to blog on a regular basis, say something interesting and informative and would it be worth linking into the site. So here we are 2 months later, still posting, still enjoying it and very pleased with the amount of traffic on my blog, at present only about 20 a day but its encouraging to know people are finding it and we have decided to link it onto my profile on the company website :o)

Having extolled the virtues of regular blogging as a tonic for the soul our revered communications director has decided to join in and I would like to link you at this point to his blog - a view from the bin. As our wine aficionado this of course relates to his tales from the wine bin in the same way that mine relates to the server rack, as opposed to the instrument of medieval torture... although...

And moving onto our other company blog the big news from compadre Rob is that he has sold out and plugged Google AdSense into his site, obviously a worth exercise as in the first week it has earned him a truly mighty 2 cents, or 1p after tax.

This of course now leaves Rob in a terrible quandary as he will
have to choose between a black jack or a fruit salad.

Shared calendars - how hard can it be?

Not been very much of note going on this week, mostly moving some of my little applications over to our Mancunian installation. I have now moved over our R&R invoicing system, the SMS system and our Pub facts, these are all little Flash applications now running on AMF and served up over the VPN.

One big movement this afternoon has been with our company calendars, for the last few days we have been evaluating Outlook 2007 to see where its new Ical support is worth us spending the money for an upgrade on our Head Office PC's. Compadre Rob has been less than impressed - click here for his frank evaluation. Officially we have a support contract but according to Microsoft our Small Business Server license does not entitle us to an outlook upgrade until exchange 2007 is out which conveniently might be after the contract runs out. If anyone ever offers you a Microsoft support contract tell them to pound it, if they brought the software out on time it would be fine but they don't and its more trouble than its worth.

Enough of that or I'll get all angry.

So we have been using exchange for about 18 months now and it is less than impressive when you have a mixed network as support on the Mac's is poor so we are desperately trying to extract ourselves. Moving the email back to POP3 is easy but we still need to be able to share calendars. One thing we have been looking at quite seriously is using Google calendars but in order to have your calendar offline you need 3rd party software in the shape of Spanning Sync on the Mac or Syncmycal on the PC, both of which seem to work but we have tried so many other pieces of calendar syncing software in the past that I would be very nervous of recommending it.

So given the new Ical support in Outlook we are looking at the simple option of Webdav and Ical/Outlook. I have dusted off my old Pentium 3 based server called Chubba and given it an install of fedora core 5, setting up webdav on Apache is easy thanks to this rather niffty tutorial. The only thing we need to sort out now is whether Ical can cope with 12 calendars, it used to cope with about 10 but ironically it was an upgrade to Tiger which caused major problems. Seeing as all our Mac's are now core 2 I have high hopes that they will have sufficient cojones to keep everything synced up. If they struggle it will have to be Google calendars and plug in hell! No offence Bill but exchange is going and that's that.

Still loving the Mac by the way, must have quicksilver, Neo office and synegy if you have another machine though - again I will point you to the bug for a good post on stuff you need on your Mac.

Return of the MAC

Just so that my newly expanded international audience doesn't get too worried that I might inflict some off key UK R&B schmoltz on them the MAC I am referring to is not Mark Morrison but in fact a shiny new MAC Book. Although in fact its not shiny because its a rather nifty Matt black, it's just new.

Gotta love Google Images - turns out this guy is called Mark Morrison too :o)

(Can I just reiterate this is not a picture of me - he's called Mark Morrison and I don't know him, its funny and if you don't know why Google Mark Morrison the singer)

Firstly I must say hello to the international audience I have alluded to, thanks to links from my com padre Rob at bugeyedchron, and his rather popular brother Thom, this humble little blog has now been visited by people in all kinds of places including Australia, Singapore, Mexico, Norway and China. I hope you have been informed/entertained and please be assured each new blob on my Google analytics Geo Map makes me very happy :o)


So to the Mac...
Normally I am a Windows person it must be said, I don't like Microsoft particularly but I am a developer, I write programs and web apps, mostly cross platform actually, but I like an easy life, I like a choice of development tools and I like things I can tinker with. I suppose you could say I like PC's but that does not mean Windows. In fact I would love to use Linux more often but it just not quite there yet on the desktop.

I have had a hankering for a Core 2 Duo machine for some time as my Dell laptop is getting a bit long in the tooth but I have a feeling that a Vista based laptop could be a bit lacking in the trouser department as XP does not run that quickly and newer laptops do not have that much more horse power. I almost went for a desktop but the opportunity to swap out my Ibook presented itself and I have been really very impressed by the new Mac books so I thought - "twist my arm I'll have one". I have only had it a day but it has definitely impressed far more than the original Ibook did, here are a few Plus points:

Seems nice and quick, a good step up from what was already a quick machine
Much better value for money, Ibook was expensive compared to the PC competition, this seems good value
love the inbuilt Isight, great quality, very convenient for Skype
Screen is the best I have seen on a laptop
Still like the CD drive, its a great piece of design
The new magnetic power connector is brilliant, probably the most vulnerable part of a laptop is instantly rendered much more robust,
Lovely tactile keyboard.

What more could you ask for in a laptop? Frankly not much, I suppose you would think me ungrateful if I said outlook and a maximise button :o) , throw in Half life and I would never go back!

Seriously though, within 2 hours I had FireFox, Thunder bird, Open Office and Skype on it and I began to feel quite at home, its almost unfortunate that my Flash Pro license is PC only because I would move my license if I had the option.

The only dark cloud in my otherwise seamless experience was that MySQL Maestro does not have a Mac version so I am having to use Cocoa, its OK but just the sort of compromise which gets on my nerves. I am keeping an eye on Parallels and crossover just in case they solve this annoying aspect of running a mac.

Will keep you posted.