Over the years I have had a number of Macs (I was late to actually own a Mac - my first one ran OS9, despite having been a Mac user for many years before that).

I’ve already talked about my heavy heart as I freecycled my iMac (G3, 500Mhz).

But last night, my 12″ Powerbook G4 died. It had been my workhorse machine for four and a half years, spending the last six months in retirement as my daughter’s DVD/Youtube/iPlayer box. She woke it from sleep, it clicked, clicked, died. Repeat. Click, click, died.

The reason it was retired was because it was bruised and battered to fuck. Four and a half years of being lugged about, every single day, to and from work, to and from clients, upstairs, downstairs, all over the shop. The combo-drive didn’t work. The hard drive had been replaced once, as had the (removable) memory chip. The clasp was nearly unusable as the metal was buckled around it.

It was replaced late last year by a shiny (refurb) Macbook Pro. An Intel dual-core 2.3Ghz job. Appearance-wise, not too disimilar (although this was a 15″, not 12″). Spec-wise, it beats the pants off the Powerbook (1Ghz G4). Rails tests took seconds instead of minutes to run on large applications. Nothing seemed to beachball. Multi-touch scrolling on the trackpad is fantastic (and something I really miss when I use other computers).

But (and it’s a big but) - the Macbook Pro does not feel anywhere near as nice. I don’t know exactly what it is.

The Powerbook was personal, intimate - it was mine. The MBP is just another, expensive, computer.

The Macbook Pro has no soul. The Powerbook had bags of it.

Like a growing number of computer users, 3hv is an Apple Mac based company. Sometimes, this can lead to problems … most people use Microsoft Windows, which looks and works differently.

Never fear - since Apple switched to using Intel processors, companies such as VMWare and Parallels make it possible to run Mac software alongside Windows software. Making cross-platform testing a breeze.

Recently we needed to run some tests against our application. However, the application shells out and uses a couple of Unix commands to do some of its work - commands that were not installed on my dev box at the time. Rather than ignoring failing tests (something, like ignoring warnings, I find really hard to do) I thought I should alter the tests to only run if the Unix command was present. After some discussion with Peter he came up with the following syntax:

using :some_command do   some_workend

Pretty nice - if some_command is available then the block is executed, otherwise nothing happens.

(By the way, the code below is (c) 2007 Rahoul Baruah and is available under the LGPL and is not the same as the code that actually made it into our application. [Legal stuff over])

require ‘open3′

module UnixTools

  def using command    raise “USING: you must supply a block when calling using” unless block_given? 

    installed = false    Open.popen3(”which #{command.to_s}”) do | stdin, stdout, stderr |      line = stdout.readline.chomp      expression = Regexp.new “(.)*no #{command.to_s} in(.)*”      installed = !expression.match line    end

    return (installed ? yield : false)  end

end

Stick this in a file called “unix_tools.rb” in your lib folder, make sure which is on your path and use!

One caveat - Peter started getting EOFs - because he was using the version of which that came with Fink. which on OSX returns “no COMMAND in $PATH”, which on CentOS returns “/usr/bin/which: no COMMAND in $PATH” but which in Fink returns EOF. As soon as he switched to /usr/bin/which it worked fine. YMMV, as ever.

This post was written using Safari for Windows.

To be honest, it feels a bit weird. There are bugs (cannot import my bookmarks and it made everything freeze for about a minute) but the anti-aliasing is nice and (ugly menu-bar apart) it is much the same as Safari for the Mac.

Obviously, this is all about the iPhone and its non-existent SDK. Plus, as Gruber points out it could make Apple a shed-load of money.

But the interesting thing to me is that it suggests that Apple have kept OpenStep for Windows development on a par with Cocoa. It is presumably the same code-base (even down to sheets instead of dialogue boxes). So what else could Apple unleash with a click of a check-box in XCode? Those fat binaries just got fatter.

At my house I have three Macs. A 3.5 year old Powerbook 12″ (OSX 10.4, 1Ghz G4 with 1.25 Gb of RAM) that has been through the wars, has a failed optical drive and is covered in bumps and bruises. This is my day to day machine, my workhorse. Plus I have a relatively new Mac Mini (OSX 10.4, 1.7 Ghz Core Duo with 1 Gb of RAM) - actually this is the wife’s. And my favourite of the lot - a 1999 iMac G3 (OSX 10.3, 500 Mhz with 512 Mb of RAM) - which has been pretty much relegated to being a DVD player for my daughter (although every time I see it I want it back for myself - running OS9 with a Finder that works).

As I say, the Powerbook is what I use for work. But the other day I ended up working from home, and remembering DHH’s post about how fast his (then) brand-new MacBook Pro was, I thought it would be worth putting the Mini through its paces. My application is starting to creak a bit on the testing front on the Powerbook - 12 seconds for the unit tests, 50-60 seconds for the functional. So I spent an hour or so installing various bits of software, did an svn co and typed rake. 2 seconds for the unit tests and 11 seconds for the functionals! Incredible. I couldn’t believe it.

So I thought I’d give the Dell desktop I have in the office a run out too. That runs Windows XP SP2 and has 1Gb of RAM and a 3Ghz P4 in it (that Task Manager reports as dual-core). A while to install Rails … oops, forgot to install MySql … then Cmd.exe (erm, no Cmd-K) and rake … unit tests 12 seconds, functional tests 27 seconds.

Obviously there are variables at work here. The Mini uses SATA drives, the Powerbook the significantly slower Ultra-ATA - I have no idea what the Dell uses. The Dell had Mysql 5, the Powerbook Mysql 4. The Dell is switched off every night. The Powerbook and the Mini have not been rebooted since 10.4.9 came out a few weeks ago. But what really struck me was that the old “Megahertz Myth” is true. A 1Ghz PPC chip is only slightly slower than a 3Ghz P4. What prompted the switch to Intel (apart from the obvious Parallels/Boot Camp/VMWare bonus) is the fact that Core Duo is SO much better.