Upgrading to Tiger, Running Rails, and Fun Toys
Posted by Doug Wed, 19 Oct 2005 20:04:09 GMT
When I should have been hacking on my Rails apps, I decided instead to upgrade to Apple Mac OS 10.4 “Tiger”. I did a straight “upgrade” and not a re-install. Overall it went very well.
I keep all my stuff installed via DarwinPorts. I’m sure that made my upgrade easier. All my stuff is in /opt and isn’t screwed with by the Apple updates. I guess I do have some stuff in /usr/local too that was left alone. Anyway, the upgrade took less than an hour. I immediately went into my Rails projects and ran rake. All my tests passed and I didn’t have to do anything to my system to get them to run. Of course, my system’s ruby, ruby-gems, mysql, and rb-mysql are all from DarwinPorts; so nothing really changed with the upgrade.
I’d like to say kudos to Precision Information Services for their RDoc Dashboard widget. That’s great! Much easier to use than the API.
I’m also using SlothCam to periodically fetch my daily statistics graphs from my server. This is handy to have a hot key that will graphically show me how my server is doing. Dave has a script he runs to fetch the graphs, merge them into a single image, and then use that as his desktop. So, he’s had a hot key (show desktop) that gives him the same information. Dashboard is a little less intrusive, I think, and let’s me keep a nice background.
Oddly enough, I’ve not really used Spotlight yet. Other than mail, I usually don’t have any problems finding my files. I’m not sure if that’s because I’m good at locating stuff or if I just don’t save that many diverse notes. I will admit to using the locate command a lot. We’ll see if Spotlight proves useful over the long haul.
I’m really happy with the new Preview. The big plus for me is the bookmarks. Since I use the PDF versions of my Pragmatic Programmer books, this will let me quickly jump to oft referenced tables and such without having to search or scan the document.
I’ve scanned through the 10.4 Mac OS X Hints, but I’d still like to hear what Tiger features you can’t live without or how I could milk more usability out of my Powerbook.
