[Read the full post here, otherwise this is the main argument]
I’ve been called a fanboy too many times…an Apple fanboy. Let me get things straight for all of you anti-apple cool kids, “I’m
not an Apple Fanboy!”.
Possibly the best definition of fanboy is from wikionary:
Someone (normally male) who is utterly devoted to a single subject or hobby, often to the point where it is considered an obsession
By that definition I could call anti-apple trolls “anti-apple fanboys” since it’s their obsession to point out their distrust no matter what the original subject was about.
Anyways…
I do tend to show appreciation for my Apple products, only because they have a positive impact more than any other. And since I’m a “techie”/gadget hobbyist and I make a living from the technology and the internet I’ve spent a lot of time preferring one product over another.
One would take the opportunity to theorize a master planned conspiracy for world domination with that last point; instead I’ll refrain from concluding anything ( except [1] ); but if those unlikely theories do come to pass my continues review of alternatives will lead me to the best user experience and productivity in my digital life/work–regardless of the company.
[1] …except to point out that all media rights owners ( music and video ) and iphone application vendors have a choice to deal with Apple distribution channel and their restrictions.
I’ve been called a fanboy too many times…an Apple fanboy. Let me get things straight for all of you anti-apple cool kids, “I’m not an Apple Fanboy!”.
Possibly the best definition of fanboy is from wikionary:
Someone (normally male) who is utterly devoted to a single subject or hobby, often to the point where it is considered an obsession
By that definition I could call anti-apple trolls “anti-apple fanboys” since it’s their obsession to point out their distrust no matter what the original subject was about.
Anyways…
I do tend to show appreciation for my Apple products, only because they have a positive impact more than any other. And since I’m a “techie”/gadget hobbyist and I make a living from the technology and the internet I’ve spent a lot of time preferring one product over another.
The desktop computer: It’s arguably the most essential piece of technology in our lives and the OS plays the largest roll of providing what we need and how we need it. From experience OS X is hands-down the best operating system out there; Linux at a distant second; Windows at an even further distant 3rd last.
Yes, Windows is the most popular OS but even though Microsoft did something right with Windows in the past to get them into this position it doesn’t mean their doing what’s right with Windows now. The only advantage they have, which is huge, is the ability to install the OS on any computer hardware you want ( if you purchase the correct version out of the four
billion available 
). BTW: that’s not “freedom”, that’s a business decision.
With that bit of history out of the way, to hopefully distill and prevent the anti-apple fanboys ms lovers…I’ll continue…
Unlike any other OS: OS X allows me to work 10 hours in front of a computer without frustration, we all know if you useWindows you’re more than likely to get frustrated with it–daily; that’s my overwhelming experience ( I dread the 3-5 hours a week I need to use it ); I used Windows for a long time, too long, every job in my adult life included working at a Windows machine ( except one short stint at a GL where I was able go 80% OSX and 20% Linux as a sys. admin. ).
Another building block of the desktop computer is applications, regardless of what you believe Apple’s developer community is rich. It may not be as large but the quality of these applications are great, largely attributed by the developer tools that Apple provides. Anyone that says functionality defines an app is wrong, it’s the user experience. The iPhone is a great example.
Computer Wrap:
The phone may be the acclaimed as the number one technology tool it’s a close second for me:
Again, “why would I use an iPhone over a X?”, like OS X the iPhone user experience and functionality doesn’t frustrate me.
There’s only one other phone out there that didn’t frustrate me, it’s the Blackberry. Partly do to the BB stability.
I choose to use the iPhone over any blackberry or any other mobile phone because of it’s superior UE and quality
applications. There should be no doubt the Apple store was/is the best thing to happen to the phone application market, it accomplished something handango couldn’t and it’s something all major handheld venders ( MS, BB, Palm and Android ) are moving to. Even other verticals, like the DSi and PSP have adopted something very similar.
In comparison the difference between these new app stores are/could-be restrictions but no-one really knows. The
current stores ( android ) are rather small but still have their problems of removals and rejected apps.
Phone Wrap:
One would take the opportunity to theorize a master planned conspiracy for world domination with that last point; instead I’ll refrain from concluding anything ( except [1] ); but and if those unlikely theories do come to pass my continues review of alternatives will lead me to the best user experience and productivity in my digital life/work–regardless of the company.
[1] …except to point out that all media rights owners ( music and video ) and iphone application vendors have a choice to deal with Apple distribution channel and their restrictions.
I was having some major problems installing the latest stable release of redmine and I had been getting the error “rake aborted! undefined method `register_template_handler’ for ActionView::Base:Class” after running $rake db:migrate RAILS_ENV=”production”.
I was able to resolve the issue and I wish I took better notes (or notes at all, using my bash history) so I’ll have to go off memory. And even though I spent countless hours trying – it’s worth it.
First, I wasn’t able to use the latest stable release on .7, I gave up near the end of this install and just checked out the latest stable of .8 and viola!
svn co http://redmine.rubyforge.org/svn/branches/0.8-stable/ .
Originally I had commented out the rails version requirement in the enviroment.rb, but I uncommented it when I started this process.
Essentially I uninstalled the re-installed (removed and installed) ruby and all gems. I’m on a (mt) DV so it was good to install yum and break from the existing knowledge base FAQ about installing rails and a test app.
I used:
$yum remove ruby
$yum update ruby
$gem remove rails [got some error, which made me run]
$gem clean rails
$gem install rails -v=2.1.2
$gem install actionview
$rake db:migrate RAILS_ENV="production" --trace
[not sure why I ran] $gem update [then] $gem update --system [before I was able to run]
$rake redmine:load_default_data RAILS_ENV="production"
[could explain why my rails version was update after the specific version I previously installed]
Pretty ugly but it worked.
Here is my latest config.. Mileage may vary.
[root@scatter3d httpdocs]# ruby -v
*ruby 1.8.6* (2007-09-24 patchlevel 111) [i686-linux]
[root@scatter3d httpdocs]# rails -v
*Rails 2.2.2*
[root@scatter3d httpdocs]# svn info
Path: .
URL: *http://redmine.rubyforge.org/svn/branches/0.8-stable*
Repository Root: http://redmine.rubyforge.org/svn
Repository UUID: e93f8b46-1217-0410-a6f0-8f06a7374b81
Revision: 2170
Node Kind: directory
Schedule: normal
Last Changed Author: jplang
Last Changed Rev: 2146
Last Changed Date: 2008-12-19 03:45:33 -0800 (Fri, 19 Dec 2008)
I wish I knew what I was doing exactly, I was pretty burnt at the end of this cycle and I tried a lot of things. All in all, it’s a matter of certain version requirements on ruby and rails and redmine.
#Crontab runs this every ten minutes (root)
*/10 * * * * /root/scripts/redmine-rake.sh > /tmp/redmine-email.log 2>&1
#this is the script
One of the recent projects I gave myself was setting up redmine for project management. I’ve found it to be a great project management system and since I’ve been looking for alternatives to Basecamp-because of the monthly extortion fees-this one stood out. I’ll leave a review for another post but it’s the best tool I’ve found, much better than trac, and since I’m really familiar with it (Shane and Peter, whom I’ve been working a lot with lately, use the tool) it was an easy choice.
The choice may have been easy but the installation and parts of the setup were not.
One issue was getting a simple cron job to run the rake task of fetching email.
I was continually getting errors like:
/usr/bin/rake:9:in 'require': no such file to load -- rubygems (LoadError)
from /usr/bin/rake:9
Turns out when rake is run in cron, the .bash_profile file is not processed, so you must include the environment initialization in your cron script. I should have figured this out yesterday, instead I spent countless hours figuring this out.
Here is the cron I’m using:
#Crontab runs this every ten minutes (root)
*/10 * * * * /root/scripts/redmine-rake.sh > /tmp/redmine-email.log 2>&1
This is the bash script I’m using:
#!/bin/bash
export PATH=$PATH:/usr/local/rubygems/bin:/usr/local/rubygems/gems/bin
export RUBYLIB=/usr/local/rubygems/lib
export GEM_HOME=/usr/local/rubygems/gems
cd /var/www/vhosts/scatter3d.com/subdomains/redmine/httpdocs
RAILS_ENV="production" rake redmine:email:receive_imap port=993 host=imap.gmail.com username=redmine@domain.com password=redmine42 ssl=1
cd /var/www/[FULL PATH]/subdomains/redmine/httpdocs
RAILS_ENV="production" /usr/local/rubygems/gems/bin/rake redmine:email:receive_imap host=imap.gmail.com username=[username] password=[password] ssl=YES port=993
For those interested those settings are for gmail apps, so you’ll need to change them accordingly.
I’m really sick of all the content being fed by Windows Media DRM.
This time around it’s NBC Direct.
So the the change? It’s all about control and WMV let’s them screw the consumer all they want by requiring the “hoops” for the lemmings and screwing the majority of the world with non-WMV DRM players, but those Zune owners are stoked.
It’s just one more thing Mac users to deal with. I would say another complication with Linux too but since I’m comparing the DRM schemes to iTunes it’s meaningless.
There is really nothing religious about our use of open source. We use it because it’s better on the scales of merit that we care about. For infrastructure software, such as web servers, databases, server operating systems, programming languages, and web frameworks, the scales of merit lend themselves incredibly well to open-source development. Thus, we use it and are passionate about it.For desktop operating systems? Not so much. There are just too many disciplines involved that programmers are not naturally good at and don’t have sufficient levels of taste to prepare masterfully. And programmers constitute the vast majority of builders in the open source community.
Read the rest of the article, it fits my sentiments exactly.
I’d also like to add:
When it comes to the power of the underlying OS, OS X and Linux are practically the same. So the apparent advantage of Linux over Windows isn’t necessarily the case when you compare OS X and Linux.
A lot of the best applications found on Linux can also be found compiled for OS X. I also notice a lot of open source apps are polished up and sold for OS X, not just polished looks but polished functionality that may warrant the small fee.
One of the first things I did on my Media Tempe (dv) was install webmin because I’m a huge fan of easy it let’s you manage your web/server, e.g. web interface to quickly change config files or restart particular services without having to login through SSH.
A more official description:
Webmin is a web-based interface for system administration for Unix. Using any modern web browser, you can setup user accounts, Apache, DNS, file sharing and much more. Webmin removes the need to manually edit Unix configuration files like /etc/passwd, and lets you manage a system from the console or remotely.
Add the following section to /etc/yum.repos.d/CentOS-Base.repo
[dag]
name=Dag RPM Repository for Red Hat Enterprise Linux
baseurl=http://apt.sw.be/redhat/el$releasever/en/$basearch/dag
gpgcheck=1
enabled=1
Install GPG key/signature by running
# rpm –import http://dag.wieers.com/rpm/packages/RPM-GPG-KEY.dag.txt
Run
# yum install webmin
Your webmin should now be available at
http://your.ip.address:10000/
or
https://your.ip.address:10000/
and you can login using your root account.
I would highly recommend the stressfree theme for webmin, it makes it much easier to navigate. Also, Virtualmin is a must if you manage a lot of domains, it “supports the creation and management of Apache virtual hosts, BIND DNS domains, MySQL databases, and mailboxes and aliases with Sendmail or Postfix”.
This has got to be the best review/article on the age old debate of Linux vs. Mac. The article is extensive but the conclusions on the topic mimic my sentiments exactly.
In the following pages, they lead a guided tour of the two OSes, paying particular attention to eight important areas: Installation & Migration; Hardware Support & Power Management; Networking, Web & Wireless; Productivity; Entertainment; Security; Working With Windows (because we couldn’t completely ignore Microsoft); and Stability, Backup & Disaster Recovery.
Which is the better OS? Only you can decide –but you’ll make a more informed decision after you’ve taken this tour, and you’ll discover you have some companions on your journey.
I will admit I have not completed the entire article, I have skimmed and read the beginning and end but it is something I want to go back and finish. I also don’t think anyone can conclude that either writer is biased because from what I’ve read the entire article plainly exposes the downsides of each platform in almost every major factor of any OS. It’s really apparent within the conclusions which they make the reader decide what’s best for them.
The conclusion of the review that mimics my take exactly (spoiler alert):
Conclusions: Linux
Linux gives you freedom on many levels: the freedom to tinker, the freedom to work without arbitrary constraints on your system setup, and the freedom to make decisions about nearly every aspect of your system.That freedom does come at a cost, though — the cost of a certain degree of effort. I haven’t yet dealt with a single Linux install that didn’t require me to edit some configuration file somewhere. That said, the amount of effort required to get the Linux system you want (or need) has gone down enormously with time.
If the freedom to use your PC in as unhindered a way as possible is important to you, that’s what Linux delivers — although keep in mind it comes with a learning curve, one that is still flattening out rather slowly.
– Serdar Yegulalp
Conclusions: Mac
If you believe that open source is a moral choice — and many people do — then buying Apple is making a deal with the devil. Apple is arguably the most proprietary hardware / software company in the industry, despite Mac OS X’s origins in BSD Unix, and the products’ compliance with many industry standards.You think Microsoft locks users in? At least with Microsoft you can buy a PC from a huge number of big and small vendors, or build your own from components. With the Mac, you buy your PC from Apple, you buy your operating system from Apple, and you’re also encouraged to buy your mouse, keyboard, display, audio device, and smartphone from Apple, all at an Apple Store where you can get Apple service.
But if you’re willing to live with lock-in, Apple is a great choice for computing. Installation isn’t a problem — Apple does it for you. Networking is easy. Productivity is a dream. The Mac offers a broad variety of entertainment options. It’s a secure platform. It interoperates well with Windows. It’s highly stable, and offers solid backup choices for the data losses that are inevitable on any computing platform.
Right now, Apple is smokin’, and its customers are happy. But if the Apple gets rotten and starts coming out with inferior products — as it did in the ’90s — its customers will have the choice of suffering, or making the painful switch to another platform.
Until then, I’m sticking with the Mac. It’s a great computer.
– Mitch Wagner
Well said…most of you know where I stand but no platform is perfect and it’s up to the user to decide what they value the most.
Yesterday I e-mailed TLAS about the conversation happening over on one of my posts. Without entirely reading the entire post they noticed a “mac fan” was criticizing them for their stance on Apple and how it clearly biased their Apple news reporting. Chris responded with,
Mac fanboys are all trolls, and well, I try not to feed the trolls.
He is obviously feeling insecure about his “Mac faith” so he needs to
attack us to rally the troops so that they can reassure him that his Mac
life style is worth basing his entire self worth around it. The sad part
is I feel sympathy for that poor man, he does not even realize thats
what he is doing. So I say let them spin their own wheels, they aren’t
getting anywhere and it’s fools like him that killed resexcellence.com.
He is the very type of person that nailed that coffin shut.Thanks anyways man! You rock,
You’ll notice he didn’t understand I was the “fool”ish “troll” that he had “sympathy” for. I had originally wrote it off because it seemed to me he was just lumping me with any mac fanatic and I wasn’t about to defend them. But it turns out that he just lumps any person in the mac community into this description.
I come to this conclusion after digging around at resexcellance and seeing Phill Ryu’s post about Bryan Lund.
I’m going to grab some of my comments form the original post here. The tweet was about how the show has a direct anti-apple stance. And with reading Phill’s post, remembering the marketing ploy and the comments about the issue it’s clear to me that TLAS motivations to keep Apple down is entirely personal.
Starting to listen to The Linux Action Show again but I absolutely hate the incorrect Apple bashing and I now know where the idiotic term “Apple hates freedom” came from. # … Read More »
July 17
