Category: Technology

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Technology

Desktop Experiment

I’ve been running with a desktop as my main computer for almost five months now and I am ready to give some thoughts on how it is going. This is going to be a list post again, so bear with me:

  • Having a stationary desktop is really nice in three areas: instant access, stability, multi-monitors. Being able to sit down at my desk at work, have both monitors sitting there, and not moving the machine around so that I don’t break anything is really nice. I can get to work a little bit quicker and be able to see a lot of information when I need it (like troubleshooting our storage servers).
  • Oops, there is one more area: storage and expansion. Even with just the Mac mini, I have two external hard drives hooked up and 750 GB of internal storage. Total I have almost 3 TB of storage available whenever I need it. That’s nice.
  • Not having access to everything wherever I am in a pain many times. My wife’s MacBook Pro  is nice and I have a user account setup for the basic things I need to do from home, but I don’t have all of my pictures on here and the customizations to my development environment need to be synchronized in some other way. I’m fairly certain Apple is not going to bother syncing my .profile anytime soon. Getting the itch to work with Swift has keenly hit me because I have two different environments at work and home.
  • As a sysadmin and (hopeful) developer, I still have a need for a laptop … so then I’m working with two different environments at the moment and I’m definitely more comfortable and familiar with OS X than I am with any desktop Linux distributions.

I’m definitely leaning toward picking up a new Apple laptop when it becomes doable and then moving the Mac mini that I have to a server role. OS X Server 4 looks to be an excellent release and I am looking forward to playing with it and seeing if I can fit it into my technology life in some way.

Being able to consolidate down to a single machine running OS X will happen, but I do not know when. With rumors about a 12″ MacBook Air swirling around, and (thanks @curtismchale) Henge Docks working on some amazing products for pseudo-docks, it looks to be doable for me soon. One decision that I will need to make is how important multiple monitors will be.

Then it would be a MacBook Pro with Retina display.

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Business Life Technology

Tools and Jobs

In What Happened to the Month With Linux, I had this paragraph:

I lasted about five days before I gave in and decided that I’m just going to give up with trying to do anything like this and continue to use the best tool for the job for me, or (as my friend Aaron Spike has said), the tool most familiar to me.

I added the very last part of that paragraph after some texts with my friend, Aaron Spike. It got me thinking about what a “best tool” might look like for different people and it really does come down to what the two of us were talking about.

It isn’t enough to be a tool that can just get the job done. For every job, there are multitudes of ways to complete it using any number of tools. What makes a tool great probably gets down to the user being comfortable using it.

But maybe comfortable is not enough. The tool needs to make the user feel like they are able to accomplish more than they would when using another tool. It might just be a feeling, but the ability to “delight” (there is a terrible word to use for almost anything) makes the choice of tools to be a completely personal choice in almost every case.

That’s why I continue to come back to OS X and iOS, entirely because I FEEL like I can do more with them. It might not be true, but the feeling is very powerful.

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Technology

What Happened to the Month with Linux

If you want the short version here it is:

I lasted about five days before I gave in and decided that I’m just going to give up with trying to do anything like this and continue to use the best tool for the job for me, or (as my friend Aaron Spike has said), the tool most familiar to me.

The longer answer starts here:

It is the same thing that always happens. When I need to get work done, I reach for my Apple products. If I need to do something quickly, I’ll reach for my iPad and/or iPhone and/or MacBook Air/mini because, frankly, they just work. They also work well together.

I also gave in because WWDC happened.

Why is that important? BECAUSE APPLE ANNOUNCED A LOT OF REALLY COOL STUFF!

So basically, I’m just really weak.

I’m still going to keep my Lenovo ThinkPad X220 with openSUSE around at work for doing the odd thing here and there (and for testing), but I think that I’m even more-firmly in Apple’s camp now than I was at the end of last month.

openSUSE still would serve my needs quite ably, but I enjoy using Apple’s devices and OS (on both desktop/notebooks and mobile devices) more than I enjoy using the laptop that I currently have openSUSE installed on.

The benefits still stand, as always. I really like having a dock available so that I can bounce between work and home with the same machine and have identical setups available to me with little-to-no fuss at all. I’m hoping that Apple can come up with something similar for their notebooks (a Thunderbolt dock with a power adapter comes about as close as possible right now … but that is still two cables).

The sheer amount of available hardware is great but it is impossible to find a great laptop anymore. Most of what is available does not entice me in the slightest. Apple’s hardware still, to and for me, is the best available. I’m hoping that rumored 12″ MacBook Air will actually happen one day.

Linux is still firmly with me every day, and that is not going to change. As for this challenge, I completely failed.

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Technology

Silver Linings

On Novell’s Cool Solutions there was a recent post titled Turning Data Breaches into Positives. The best paragraph for me is the following:

Another way to use a breach is in communications to your customers. You don’t have to sell security software to offer value. The first thing you can do is spread the news. It’s often important for affected parties to act quickly after a data breach, so notifying your customer base in the hope of reaching any who might be affected is an important service.

That is true not just for data breaches, but for when anything goes “not right” within an IT department. Anytime you have the opportunity to speak with your users/customers/people, do so in a way to make it as positive an experience as you can.

Making a bad experience good can pay off hugely in the future.

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Technology

SwiftMN

As an aside related to my post about Swift, there is a group forming in Minneapolis around Swift and Apple technologies: SwiftMN.

Join the Meetup group and let us know what you want to try out. I know that I won’t be able to make every meeting, but I am hoping to make the 2+ hour trip as often as I am able.