A not so quite december

Although it was not my plan, november was a very quite month on this blog. Thats not to say I didnt do anything fun or have anything to say, but I just couldnt seem to find the time to sit down and type something out.

As many of you know I am an avid Mac fan. I have had my powerbook for a little over 2 years and I have loved every day I have spent with it. We are like good friends, we spend alot of time together, we know the types of things the other enjoys. But as happens with all computers my powerbook started to feel a little bit laggy. Actually thats not true. I was very happy with the performance of my pb, but I couldnt help but be lured by the prospect of more power in the new Mac Book Pro.

Well I finally broke down and I bought a new laptop. I told my powerbook that the mac book pro is just an accessory, not a replacement, but I dont think either of us really believe that. I know that with the switch to intel many people have been lured over to the mac. And I have to say (having had my mac book pro for 4 full days now) that if you like this…you would have loved the powerpc equipment. Dont get me wrong, the speed increase is incredible, but other than that it seems to be all headaches. Will my software run? Is it a universal binary? Is it gonna run in Rossetta? I have had firefox crash more this week than in 2 years on my powerbook.

Then you lay in the fact that I am an Apple Developer Connection member. Which really only gets me access to new software. And in that new software I have been using leopard (OS X 10.5). Beyond all the cool things that they showed us at WWDC last year 10.5 also comes with Subversion 1.4, Apache 2.2, PHP 5, and Ruby on Rails all preinstalled. Which makes setting up my development environment seamless and simple. On leopard all I had to do was install CF and grab the new wsconfig.jar from the technote on adobe.com. A quick Eclipse download and I am working.

Leopard doesn’t currently have drivers for the airport cards in the new Core 2 Mac Book Pro laptops. Unfortunately I sorted that out after reinstalling the OS once. So then it was back to Tiger. None the less, 4 days later I still dont have a “functional” development environment. I have CF running in JBoss (which I learned how to do this week). JBoss uses Tomcat for its servlet container and so I also played with Tomcat as a standalone server (also first time this week). I ran through the CF installer and tried to get JRun working but even following the highly linked to guide for getting started, my Jrun is full of errors on startup of CF. I now have apache 2.2 talking to JBoss/Tomcat through the mod_jk connector. However I just found that this works differently with these products than it did with the JRun connector.

With the JRun connector in apache I could keep all my files in my VirtualHost documentroot and when I made requests apache would pass those files off to CF to be parsed. It appears that doesnt work with the mod_jk adapter and my files HAVE to be in the Tomcat server document root in order for the files to be processed. This just doesnt feel right, mostly because I have been using the JRun version my way for 5 years.

Once I have my CF installation woes worked out I think I will be very happy on the new laptop. Most of the things I had worried about have turned out to not be true (exessive heat, weird noises). And once I am back to some semblance of normalcy I will post about all the other code things I have been doing. Lots of fun flex and Cairngorm stuff.

So take this very long winded post as the first of many for the month of december.

Now if i could just remember the url to the svn repository for this site, I can update the blog software and use ecto for my postings. Wouldn’t that be nice :)