Last summer, I was looking for a new computer to replace a 12” HP tablet PC that I owned.  I wanted the new computer to be mobile, have suitable graphics; processing power and much better battery life (the hour I got out of the tablet was worthless).  I settled on a netbook from Dell.  It did exactly what I needed although it lacked a big enough screen for any real usability.  I typically use my mobile laptop as a dummy terminal that connects to remote systems via Remote Desktop or SSH.  I used the netbook for a few months and told myself that I need something that better fits my requirements.  After a long search, typical PCs turned up nothing particularly interesting, although I typically require Windows 7 since a majority of my licensed software requires Windows.

I remember meeting up with some friends who are “mac boys” as I like to nickname them last October.  They showed me how great the Mac OS is, and I have to admit that some of the features they showed were nice.  This along with the fact that I wasn’t really knowledgeable about Apple convinced me to look into an Apple brand computer.  I’d like to bring to mind that up until this point, I had very little experience with Macs so I felt that to help aid my extensive administration knowledge, a Mac wouldn’t be a bad investment.  The final push that got me over the hill was the fact that the cheapest MacBook pro had really good specs for the price and I didn’t find any PCs that could compare to the specs of the MacBook pro with a similar size.

So around Thanksgiving of 2010, I got a MacBook pro 13” model.  Honestly, my first words when it arrived were “this machine needs windows now!”, and I proceeded to configure bootcamp (a way to run Windows natively on the Mac hardware).  Bootcamp was an interesting experience because it was so simple that I overthought the problem and ended up having to reinstall the Mac OS.  I’m still not entirely sure how I managed that, but command line utilities definitely aided the problems.  It is at this point when I realized why people really like Macs.

After I got Windows up and running (it didn’t take too long to start thinking at the level that I needed to), the first problems I noticed were related to driver problems (mostly right click on the mouse, graphics not working properly, etc).  So I proceeded to install bootcamp in Windows and most everything fixed itself with a few minor exceptions.  The first exception was the nvidia graphics driver had a problem and caused Windows to crash, so I ended up installing the latest driver via their website.  The other exception I noticed was poor battery life (2 hours on a 10 hour laptop).  After playing around with nvidia settings, I turned off the dedicated graphics card and this bumped the battery life to 6 hours.  Still fairly crappy of course but I figured that Apple hates Microsoft and this is intentional to encourage users to try the Mac side.

Needless to say, I decided that I’d give the Mac side a try for a few days after being disappointed by the performance of Windows.  I quickly got Chrome and Microsoft Office installed and I must say that the effort required to accomplish this was little if any.  It was a pleasant surprise to find that Office installed a remote desktop client automatically.  As an aside, for the Safari / Firefox fans out there, I no longer like either browser since when I compare them to chrome, they’re really slow, and adblock plus is now available for Chrome!  I’ve also noticed that Chrome uses little to no resources.

After the first couple of days (and enabling several tweaks), I began finding Mac to be a somewhat superior operating system when viewed from Windows.  The first huge plus was that my battery life would often reach 14-15 hours while using Chrome, remote desktop, and the terminal.  This kind of battery life alone exceeded the 8 hours that I’d get from my old netbook and the screen space is actually large enough for me!  If you’re looking into battery life of 14 hours though, don’t be disappointed, much of my work is remote and doesn’t require a lot of power to run locally on the mac.  I found that if I went to YouTube (Flash powered), or opened any significant application like Microsoft Word, Firefox, etc, I’d easily trim the battery life down to a more realistic 8-10 hours as suggested by Apple.  Overall, I’m really impressed at how well the Mac saves power and I’m even more impressed by how few resources Google Chrome uses!

Coming from a Linux background, I found that the terminal was the easiest option to configure the operating system with since I’m already very familiar with the commands (and Mac is based on a BSD kernel, which is very similar to the Linux kernel).    I quickly installed MacPorts (and the supporting applications like XCode) to make my mac more usable for me, the programmer / system administrator.  With MacPorts, I enabled apache, mysql, wine, and several other applications that I found useful when on a Linux based system.  Other than adjusting to the change of /opt/local for the software installations by MacPorts, configuration was fairly simple and painless.  After everything was up, I even installed Eclipse (a programming environment primarily for Java, but extendable to C, PHP, Python, Lisp, etc).  I now find that it is easier to develop websites and applications on my mac locally than it is to develop on remote systems.  The one exception is C# and .NET applications of course due to their dependence on Windows.

There were a few pet peeves that I initially had with the MacBook pro and its OS.  I will start with my software problems and move to the hardware related problems.

First, mac doesn’t believe that the maximize button should maximize to the screen, so instead, it maximizes to the required window size.  This is very annoying on websites since some websites use fluid layouts (meaning they dynamically size to the browser window size), and mac doesn’t size properly.  To solve this issue, I found RightZoom which is an application that solves that issue.

Another problem I encountered was the startup sound always came on regardless of the sound settings.  In addition, there was no intuitive place where I could disable the sound.  Thankfully, an app called startupsound made fixing this problem very easy.

Up next is probably my biggest pet peeve, which is standards compliance.  Mac really impresses me design wise, but I find that some functionality that I would expect is missing.  If you remember back to my OpenVPN blog… my internal network has special routes programmed to ensure that some traffic will circumvent the VPN connection (like YouTube, local college bound traffic so that I’m within the firewall, and Netflix).  These rules that allow circumvention save a lot of bandwidth, and therefore cash (internet connectivity is charged by the GB for providers such as myself).  For those of you who understand DHCP, Option 121 (254 on some Windows versions) is reserved for Classless Static Routes.  This means that a DHCP server can push these routes to a computer automatically while assigning addresses and the computer knows that certain internet traffic (e.g. YouTube) will pass through a proper router (or gateway).  Fortunately, both Windows and Ubuntu look for this option and appropriately adapt to the rules… mac on the other hand completely ignores these options.  Although this is the first case I found that Mac doesn’t adhere to standards, I’m sure that this isn’t the only case.  Of course, most people won’t ever need this, but still, it is in the RFC #4562!  So as a work around, I have to manually add routes to my mac via command line… it isn’t the best option but it does work.

Finally, I’d like to talk a little bit about the Apple keyboard and track pad.  If you’re like me, you will find yourself wondering where the home, end and delete keys are.  The truth is that they don’t exist on the Mac keyboard layout (at least on my new MacBook Pro).  I ended up mapping F10, F11, and F12 to these functions respectively using KeyRemap4MacBook.  For the Windows side, I used an application called SharpKeys.  I also found that mapping F9 to print key saved me a little time in Windows.  I also made sure to have the keyboard function keys enabled without the fn key required.  With the track pad, I made sure that double finger scrolling and right click were enabled features.

They keyboard itself is very uniform on Mac so many protective covers have been made for the Mac keyboard.  I got two covers, a cheap one ($8) from Amazon and a fairly pricy ($30) model from KBCovers.  If you’re going to protect your keyboard (I highly recommend it), definitely go for the KBCovers version since it feels a lot more secure and real than a cheap imitation.

Overall, this keyboard/mouse solution made me so content that I ended up buying a wireless keyboard and magic mouse for my windows desktop (both Bluetooth wireless).  Although I installed bootcamp (not entirely necessary), the magic mouse doesn’t have the full functionality as it would in Mac (Apple hates Windows, I get it), it is still a great keyboard / mouse combo.  Maybe someday when I get the time, I might write an application that enables the full functionality of the magic mouse on Windows, but don’t get your hopes up.

Back to boot camp, on every Windows machine that I’ve ever owned, I’ve always kept restore images of the hard drive incase Windows got a virus or I messed Windows up somehow.  I am a fan of both Acronis TrueImage and Symantec Ghost, but neither solution looked appealing on the mac.  So I found a free program called WinClone.  Unfortunately, its development has been discontinued but it still works well on my mac (version 10.6.6).

In addition, I discovered that VMWare Fusion is a way to virtualize the bootcamp partition, so theoretically Windows can boot natively or via a virtual machine.  I really like this feature since I often only need Windows for very minor tasks, but the initial setup wasn’t all that great.  After Windows booted, it required me to reactivate it, and as per Microsoft’s crappy licensing policies, you have to call them and tell them what is happening.  After a bunch of problems, I finally figured out that before activating, VMWare tools needs to get installed.  After that is installed, activate Windows and Office in the virtual machine via Phone.  Then reboot into the native Windows and reactivate using an internet connection.  If all goes well, VMWare tools will help solve the problem, at least it did for me.  I’m guessing that it stores both activations and switches them on Windows and Office automatically so both the VM and native modes think that they are properly activated with Microsoft on the proper hardware.

Overall, I don’t think I’d go back on my decision to buy a Mac.  It’s definitely a really nice computer and I have to admit that the design is outstanding.  Who would have ever thought that an aluminum body would dissipate enough heat to remove the need for a blatantly visible fan (like many PC laptops have).  Anyways, there are a few things that Mac could definitely improve on, but for now I’m happy with it and would find it difficult to move to something else for the needs that acquainted me with this computer.  Finally, contrary to popular belief, I do not believe that Mac is an overpriced fashion accessory, at least for the model that I bought.

So what exactly changed?

I changed the color scheme a little bit and this is what you will likely notice the quickest.  I decided to go with a traditional blue theme using the same blue that I selected before, but this time with a color guide.  For anyone in need of finding colors that go well together, I strongly recommend: http://colorschemedesigner.com/.  That site helped me a lot!

In addition, FamousPhil now validates to XHTML Strict 1.0, it used to validate to XHTML Transitional 1.0.  This is basically technical language saying that FamousPhil is guaranteed to look the same on all compliant browsers that can display this website.  This was very difficult to achieve considering the old website base uses many elements of XHTML transitional that don’t exist in strict.  Regardless of the difficulty, I managed to get everything updated and working well   You may ask why I didn’t choose HTML 5 (I know one person who did), and my reasoning is, its standards aren’t fully established yet and aren’t mainstream enough for my personal preferences.

Finally, the major component that I really wanted to fix for a long time has happened.  On my end, FamousPhil now has a real content management system.  I wrote a theme for WordPress (thanks to John) and I now use WordPress as my content management system.  Doing this has made my life much easier since changing the site has gone from manually editing source code to “drag and drop”.  Hopefully I can continue to make my sites easier to manage so I can perhaps find more free time in the future

Thats all for now.  I still need to do some blogging on some important issues, but that will come someday in the near future

The ultimate bad design that has always slowed me down is here at the University at Buffalo.  If you have any classes in the Natural Sciences Complex (NSC), you know exactly what I am going to be ranting about.  Have you ever got caught in the after class rush hour traffic? (sorry, I had no better words).  Whoever engineered the exit door for NSC into the surrounding buildings really designed it badly.  There are two doors and a single file stair case (basically 1 lane coming up and 1 lane going down).  Trying to push about 1000 people through that staircase at the same time results in HUGE backups and it usually takes me 5 minutes to get through that passage when leaving class late.  Here is a picture of this design:

Another bad design at the University at Buffalo is the front lawn between Bell Hall and Bonner Hall.  In this case, there is a sidewalk that runs about 150 feet in a square around this huge patch of grass.  Diagonally, there is a really beaten path that is now showing only dirt.  Unfortunately, whoever designed that path didn’t realize that putting a sidewalk through the center might be a good idea since the door to a building is about 20 feet from that diagonal path and most people going to it come from the exact opposite corner of that patch of grass.  Note that a^2 + b^2 = c^2 and the hypotenuse (c) is obviously the shortest path and most people take the shortest path.

Now lets talk a little about door handles.  Have you ever sprained your wrist because a door handle looked like a handle you pull, yet at that door, you push it?  Or even yet, a door bar that you push but the door was actually meant to be pulled?  I can give you many instances of this that occur on the University at Buffalo campus and I’m sure you could give me many examples also.  Mike pointed out a really surprising but believable story.  Between the math building and NSC, there is a tunnel that connects both buildings together.  The doors open out of this tunnel and both sides of the doors have a pull handle.  Someone entered this tunnel through one door and got trapped because he couldn’t pull and didn’t try to push the door open.  This is truly a bad design and it could potentially scar people who got seemingly trapped.  This is very similar to people who get trapped in an elevator once and never ride them again.

Naturally, I could go on and on about bad design so I’m going to stop ranting here.  I am going to leave this little tidbit for you though: as you go through the day, how often do you hit a bad design such as the door handle and blame yourself for being stupid?  I know I do it quite often.  Mike pointed out that it really isn’t the case that I’m stupid, but rather, the person who designed what I’m doing wasn’t really thinking critically for real life application.  So the next time you hit a bad design, blame the designer, not yourself!

As you’ve probably noticed, over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been very tight with my blog releases after posting almost every day for one stretch there.  The truth of the matter is, when I get highly involved in a site redesign, I like to spend all of my time and effort working on that redesign and forgetting about everything else.   I do admit that its tough for me to get into working on a website design in the first place, but once I’m in the process of working, I generally do not like being distracted.

For me, a distraction of any kind, even that 1 second hi to a friend passing by can throw my mind off by a huge amount.  To me, distractions can end up costing me a few hours (sometimes an entire day) to get my thoughts back and continue working on the problem I was focusing on at the time of the distraction.  Sure, this is annoying, but I’ve learned how to slam the door and tell people not to disturb me at all unless the world is on fire when I begin such projects.  Its just the way that I work I suppose.

So, this redesign took me about 4 weeks total and the end result impresses me.  I must thank John (JohnCiacia.com) for his input and criticism.  John in addition is the reason why the banner was shrunk and the colors were introduced.  Typically, I’m a fan of the most boring colors known to man, but John began playing with colors and I liked the effects. John also familiarized me with Adobe Photoshop (I’m not sure if I’d call myself proficient yet, but I’m gaining) and the concept of web 2.0 icons which I used at the top.  John is also the person behind the RSS dude at the top

At first, I had the header and navigation split into sections, but John suggested that I should make it one image and use CSS to display parts of the image on demand.  Thanks to this, I learned the beauty of CSS and I now use a few big images compared to a lot of small images.  This has improved my site load times a lot (especially on high latency satellite connections).  I now use higher quality images because they look nicer with all the colors.  If you are on dialup, I guess you will have to find a faster connection   Before moving on, there is this great image map making website that I found (http://www.maschek.hu/imagemap/imgmap).  This site makes getting the values for css positioning of link regions trivial and I used them a lot for the header!

After the header and backgrounds were completed in the first week, I was distracted for a few days and headed home from college.  This was fine since I didn’t really know how I wanted to envision FamousPhil at the time and this was my drive to keep looking for good ideas.  At home, I normally watch Fox news, and for some reason, I caught a Mac vs PC commercial, and that is what got me thinking about how to finish the widget / module (window panes for text and stuff) design for my site.  I decided that I would use a Mac IPhone like widget that is black, and the Windows Vista window as my module background.  Believe it or not, I could not find a decent Vista window on Google images, so I installed a copy of Windows Vista (I don’t use it because its so inefficient and buggy) just to take the screenshot of a window.  It worked out nicely too!

I would like to point your attention to the envelope icon in the main banner at the top.  If you click that icon, you will notice a darkening effect of the page, showing a contact module.  This effect took me forever to accomplish with the help of http://dbachrach.c…hboard/.  Unfortunately, this effect also breaks my site’s CSS validation because the darkening effect is not supported yet as a standard.  Hopefully this will change in the future so I can make my site valid CSS in addition to the already valid XHTML standard.

While I’m on the topic of validation, I might as well note that as a web developer geek, I discovered that I write valid XHTML Strict natrually now.  I can remember that a few years ago, I would spend hours trying to fix my mistakes.   Practice and Time are truly the key to producing effecient websites.  As I move forward, I’m beginning to use divs instead of tables for positioning, and I must say, divs are a whole heck of a lot easier to position correctly when supporting Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, and Safari with one css file.  I’ve found that the latter two browsers seem to the hardest browsers for me to support since they like to interpret css tags such as position differently than Firefox and IE which seem to guess correctly based on what you are doing.  This is just another reason why I dislike using chrome and safari so much.

I do have  tips for web developers who are looking to integrate wordpress into their site.  WordPress was fairly easy to encode into my site, except for a few problems.  My first problem was that wordpress doesn’t validate with photo galleries.  I hope that the wordpress people fix this in the near future.  Another problem that I’ve found is that sometimes the wordpress theme files are overwritten during an update.  Unfortunately, this happened to me on the old famousphil design which is why it looked sort of crappy for the past month.  I include a main header file that is site wide now and I have backups of the theme folders, so this should fix that problem.  Finally, since I installed wordpress in a sub directory and have redirected every page to this subdirectory, all of my image and php paths have to be root relative.  I now start all of my images/files with a / so it will goto the root directory of the site (famousphil.com) to find  the appropriate files, this was  a huge help in keeping wordpress updated with the rest of the site without having to keep separate image/css folders.

Finally, I have decided to test the waters with advertisements for the next month.  I chose ads that are non-obtrusive and can easily be blocked out.  The search bar is supposed to also earn revenue.  We will have to see what happens as the month progresses.  If I don’t see much more than an additional annoyance, I will likely remove the text ads all together.  I myself use adblock on firefox so I never see my own ads (except the hard coded ones).  Its really sad that google doesn’t let me hard encode ads like pictures into the site.  This way, ad blockers can’t block the ads, and sites will load much faster than relying on an external javascript codebase sitting on a remote server somewhere.  Perhaps the advertising industry will realize that someday

Thats all I have for this topic.  I hope to be blogging much more frequently now that I’m done with FamousPhil’s redesign.  I’d appreciate any comments that you can provide about the readability and general use.