Category Archives: Technology

A Change of Mind

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Nate Beran over at posted Cloudy Future over at his blog and I invite you to go and read it.

With the continual move to “Cloud Computing” in many facets of IT, there is a mindset change that is needed in order to understand how things now work. No longer is your vital service housed in a small closet in the basement, but now it is in a number of huge data centers across the country or globe and being run by an outside vendor so there are going to be unplanned outages along with other issues (ISP having issues? No work done today!) that are outside of the control of your internal IT department.

Sadly, it seems like when a person hears “try again later, there really isn’t anything I can do” they often here “I hate you and I’m not going to do anything”.

That needs to change.

Double Dev

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So I’ve been running off of a single MacBook Pro for over a year now but there are two problems with that setup.

Using a single machine requires me to carry the MacBook Pro between home and work every day. Not a huge problem, but if I am going to walk as often as I would like to, it could get more than a little annoying to continually haul a backpack with all of the trimmings up Center Street Hill. If I can eliminate the laptop, I can probably carry a smaller bag.

I also need to spend upwards of 10 to 15 minutes on each end getting the machine setup properly so that I can work. Once again, not a huge deal, but an annoyance. The constant plugging and unplugging on cables is a hassle I wish I did not have.

To try and work around this I spent the evening setting up a new user on my wife’s 2009 MacBook. The idea is to try using this machine as my dev machine while at home an keep the MacBook Pro at work during the main part of the week. The issue will be how well it works for recording our weekly episodes of This One Podcast (shameless self promotion there).

The good part is that web development doesn’t require a ton of computing power outside or compiling dependencies. So far, the MacBook hasn’t burst into flame, so I take that as a good sign.

Postgres.app

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Recently I followed a link to http://postgresapp.com/ and was intrigued by what I saw.

Postgres

Not just the icon, which is nice, but the actual app itself. Go ahead and check out the site for more accurate information, but basically it comes down to this:

  1. Download the file
  2. Unarchive it
  3. Move Postgres.app to your /Applications folder
  4. Start up the app
  5. …
  6. Profit!?

That’s it. You then have a fully-functioning install of PostgreSQL 9.1+ for your Mac. To update, you go ahead and download the next version, shut off the currently-running one, and then move the new one over to /Applications again.

Super nice.

There is a ton more information at their documentation page, so head on over to find out more. This is a HUGE win as far as simplicity when installing PostgreSQL so that you can begin work on applications for Heroku (who just announced their free development database built on PostgreSQL 9.1). Head on over and try it out.