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An Office Away From Home, Part One

A continuous string of events has led me to spend an entire month away from home, in order to cut my traveling down to a manageable portion of what it would have been otherwise. I had a birthday to attend, then Christmas, and a wedding to finish it off, all spread across two states, neither of which I reside in presently. I won’t mind spending new year’s eve with my friends in Michigan either, which is where I’ll happen to be at the time.

I’m currently in the middle of this journey, having just arrived in Michigan, by way of Illinois. I first left home, in North Carolina, on December 12th. Working away from home has been an interesting experience thus far, with a lot of things that I thought were worth sharing.

With an eMac as my main computer, and only an aging, deathly slow iBook for a portable, I wasn’t quite prepared at first to spend a month working away from home. I could add some RAM and buy a new battery for my lovely, key lime, clamshell iBook, but then I’d be out $220 and still stuck with an 800x600 screen. Not entirely ideal for a month’s worth of web design work. After mulling it over a week or so, followed by an hour drive to the nearest Apple store, I was quite settled on buying a new 12” iBook, with the hard drive bumped to 60GB, the internal Bluetooth module added, and an extra stick of RAM from DataMem.com, for a total of 768MB.

Now I’ll admit I’m an Apple fanatic, but I am with good reason. I have used their computers for years (18 of them), and they have rarely failed me, and regularly made even mundane tasks unexpectedly enjoyable. Meanwhile Windows computers have failed me slightly more often, and made even enjoyable tasks unexpectedly mundane. It would be fair to say that perhaps I haven’t spent enough time using Windows computers, because I haven’t used them nearly as much. But I’ve spent enough time to know how to use them quite well, and even solve serious problems, which I am asked to do frequently by various family members, friends, clients, and acquaintances, who also sometimes send other people to me with their problems. The fact is I have spent several years using Windows and I still just don’t enjoy it. Yet I fell in love with my first Macintosh immediately, when I was only ten, and had no idea at all about how to use a computer. I love my Mac just as much today. Doesn’t that say something?

I bring this up because I do not think my new iBook is merely an excellent Mac, I think it’s an excellent computer. I’ve found very few people who own one that would have any interest in disagreeing. Many of those people even have a Windows PC as their desktop computer. It is not the most powerful machine—it’s the low-end Mac portable after all—but in terms of what it can do and how well it can do those things, it is entirely amazing.

With the 60GB hard drive I custom ordered from Apple, I was able to copy everything I could possibly need from the 160GB hard drive in my eMac at home. Before I left I spent quite a bit of time testing various synchronization apps, to keep my files and settings in sync between my two computers. File Synchronization came close, but simply failed to work far too often. It would repeatedly fail to recognize that files had changed. ChronoSync made things slightly more complicated to set up, though in its defense that does make it more flexible. Aside from that it is easy to use, and has performed flawlessly.

My computers at home (eMac, Windows PC, and iBook) are wirelessly networked. With my new iBook I had AirPort Extreme (802.11g) in two computers for the first time, and wow, what an improvement in file transfer speeds. I still used Firewire Target Disk Mode for transferring the bulk of the 40GB I copied over, but for typical use the speed is impressive and entirely adequate.

Which brings me to another point: I have yet to do a single thing with my iBook’s network settings. I’ve gone from AirPort to ethernet without so much as clicking a button. Admittedly I did have some infrequent troubles as a result of frequently swapping an ethernet connection between two computers, but I don’t think a Windows PC would have fared any better. On the one occasion it was necessary, a quick restart resolved the problem.

I wouldn’t always have internet access during my travels, and even being tied to an ethernet cord can be a pain, so I took some time to set up a server on my laptop. I use a lot of PHP and MySQL, as well as server tricks like mod_rewrite, so I can’t always test a site just by dragging HTML files to a browser window. I had used the PHP and MySQL installer packages (and instructions) from Entropy a couple years ago, and found them fairly easy to use. I continued to hear good things about them, so I went straight back this time around. They’re even easier to set up now; a novice would have no trouble getting them installed and running.

A few years back, before OS X was released, I set up my own server. I used Apache running on Red Hat Linux, and since I had already spent a couple of years maintaining a Linux server over telnet, I never bothered to install a GUI. It was initially frustrating and I ended up buying a couple of books to get everything sorted out, but in terms of what I could do, and how flawlessly it ran even on an old hand-me-down machine, it was impressive. About a year later, Comcast decided they really didn’t want people running web servers at home, so I was forced to pay for web hosting elsewhere. I’ve come to appreciate not having to deal (directly) with the occasional—but often frustrating— issues that arise, so I haven’t run my own server in quite a while. As mentioned I did set one up in the early days of OS X, but I never did much with it.

What impressed me most was how easy it was to replicate my server environment on my iBook. Virtual hosts? No problem. I opened NetInfo Manager and in a few clicks added three new aliases for my machine: emma (my iBook’s name) to serve as a home site for phpMyAdmin, Tense Log, and so on, as well as mikepiontek.emma and tinyforest.emma for the two sites I’m coding at the moment. From there I opened up Terminal, and using pico (a command line text editor) I edited my httpd.conf to let Apache know what files those domains should point to. I couldn’t quite remember the commands to kill and restart Apache, but no worries… I simply opened System Preferences, clicked Sharing, selected Personal Web Sharing, clicked Stop, and then clicked Start. Within minutes I had three different web sites running on my computer. Unlike Linux, I had a gorgeous GUI to do it all in, and apps like Photoshop and Flash were just a click away.

Now honestly, I can’t say whether this is any easier than it would be in Windows. I can’t even say for certain whether it’s any more stable. But in both cases I really, really doubt it. OS X takes everything I loved about Linux and marries it to a gorgeous Mac interface with absolute grace. I’ve never seen this sort of elegance from Microsoft so I don’t see why they’d choose to display it here. And I already know quite well that Apache isn’t integrated into Windows, so the Mac OS has a huge advantage from the start.

I forgot to mention, I do have one complaint about the iBook itself. The trackpad button. It just feels a little clunky, and it’s a bit loud. This problem is spectacularly minor.

More soon.

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