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If you have ever mounted a network volume you'll know that chances are if the Mac goes to sleep it won't remount the volume when it wakes up. This is a pain for me because I have all my music on a single samba share, using SleepWatcher ensures that volume is always mounted when I wake my Mac from its slumber.

To perform tasks at the sleep/wakeup moment create .sleep and .wakeup files in the user's directory (e.g. /Users/david/.wakeup). These files are just plain old shell scripts so you can do anything you like within them, just ensure you mark them executable by the user. Below is my .wakeup file which I have symlinked to .sleep, it mounts my music volume (on the server SERENA) when waking up and disconnects when going to sleep.

Late last week Apple released Boot Camp, a tool that greatly simplifies the installation of Windows XP on Intel Mac hardware. Obviously this tool has been in development for some time, it and the included Windows drivers CD image are very slick. Once hackers managed to figure out how to get Windows XP running on the Intel hardware a few weeks ago it must have been decided within Apple that now was a good time to let the cat out of the bag.

OSX and Windows after Boot Camp (click to enlarge)

Last night I used Boot Camp to install Windows XP on my Intel Mac. The process was very smooth and the instructions provided by the software could not have been clearer. After about an hour I had a fully functional Windows XP install with graphics, wireless, bluetooth and sound all working without hassle. In fact it was significantly less work to set Windows up on an Apple Mac than it is to do the same with a Dell machine. Hopefully this tool will urge Dell and HP into action in this regard.
Another nice touch is that the Windows volume is accessible from OSX so it is straightforward to copy things to the Windows partition. Unfortunately as Windows does not support HFS (yet) the reverse is not possible.

FireAnt brings video, RSS and tagging together into a very tidy package used for automatically downloading video content onto your desktop or personal media player. It is interesting that people can construct their own 'channels' which are a series of different (or similar) shows and act like a mini-CNN, Discovery Channel or E!

Whilst Apple's iTunes video service it is still targeted at the 'pay per episode' model it would be nice to see a competitor offer something that worked with the concept of channels. We do not have the bandwidth or the iTunes video store in New Zealand but it would be nice to imagine a day where I could subscribe to and pay for mini-channels produced by people of my same interest group featuring both commercial content, videoblogs and adverts. For example I would gladly subscribe and pay for a channel that played the Simpsons, TWiT, Discovery Channel documentaries about space, the highlights of BBC World News and an episode of Lost. That would be a great night(s) television watching. Plus I would not mind the adverts as long as they related to me (ie nothing about retirement, womans products or toilet paper). Conventional broadcasting models do not allow for this but digital video based environments like what are evolving certainly do.

Over the weekend I finished the transition from my PowerBook to the Intel based iMac as my primary development platform. Rather than use the PowerPC only Flock or stick with Safari I have started using an unofficical Intel compiled version of Firefox. Performance is excellent and there are no issues with reliability, Java or Flash.

Installing Rails and ImageMagick turned out to be very straightforward thanks to DarwinPorts, the Rails on OSX wiki and the ImageMagick on OSX howto. Currently there is no Intel compiled DarwinPorts binary but fortunately it compiled from source without issue (once the Apple Developer Tools were installed).
In the process I found a nice Eclipse plugin for Ruby on Rails named RadRails.

My Intel iMac arrived on Tuesday and I have been playing with it ever since. Overall it is working out really well, it is snappy when running Intel/Universal binaries and the screen quality is superb. The extra 512meg of RAM has not arrived yet so it is hard to judge performance but it is very promising. At the moment it kind of feels like you are driving a Formala One car with the tires borrowed from the family sedan, whilst Intel binaries run very nicely Rosetta is very slow especially when two or more legacy binaries are open at once. I have a feeling however that the extra RAM will help a lot with this.

Eclipse patch for OSX Intel: https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=98889

Still waiting on Fink support. Once that arrives in the near future will be able to install developer tools like subversion, ruby, rails, php5 and openldap.

With my new office space I was finding that my PowerBook was getting used less and less as a laptop. For a while I was considering getting a Mac Mini/iMac to replace it as it is two years old and sometimes a little slow. Then this week Apple announced their new iMacs based on the Intel processor. It is hard to turn down a major speed increase (my guess running legacy apps through Rosetta will still be faster than my PowerBook) plus it comes with a far better video card, more RAM, bigger hard drive and the ability to plug my 19" LCD display into the side and span screens.