Ultranormal

I feel the need for a redesign. Yes, I’ve said it before, but this time I mean it. I put Movable Type back on the Powerbook, and started last night while watching Big Brother. I’m not starting with the main site this time, but with the Geekery, and a new section that will move all the pics linked to from Max’s page to a family photo album. I never update Max’s blog, which is still hosted at Blogger, and heck, I haven’t uploaded any new pics in a while. So, I’m going to try to re-organize what’s up there now into “albums” (really just Movable Type categories), with each picture as a separate entry in the “album”. That way, it’ll be easier to add descriptions and keep them all organized. And now that I have PhotoShop 7 on the Powerbook along with iPhoto (which doesn’t even try to compress jpg’s on export… grrr), it’ll make all this organizing, exporting, uploading, etc a little easier. It took me two weeks of after-work-tv-viewing to complete my first Movable Type design for this page… hopefully it won’t take that long for this.

Which brings me to my next topic, OS X. Yes, I’ve talked about it before too, but I just want to talk about it some more. I upgraded to Jaguar a little while ago (which is how my first Movable Type installation got nuked), and am having a lot of fun with it. I forget sometimes about the Unix underpinnings of OS X. But, last night while installing Movable Type, I was going to create an alias in my Documents folder to the Apache Documents and CGI-Executables folders. I was already in Terminal, so I decided to try symlinking to them. What do you know! The aliases in OS X are actually symlinks. They worked beautifully and well, it’s just cool. It took me all of five minutes once I had everything unzipped to install everything, chmod it, and get started. Now, I could have installed AOLserver, Perl and Movable Type on my old Dell laptop running Windows 2000, but that would have taken a good long time, and I still wouldn’t be able to properly symlink anything or use the terminal to do my normal *nix type stuff. With OS X, I have tar, chmod, vi, etc all right there installed on the system with a beautiful user-friendly system on top of it. I can use my new copy of AOL, Mozilla and PhotoShop and still use vi, ls, ln, etc. Heck, once fink has a stable version for 10.2, I’ll have ncftp, xemacs and a host of my other favorite *nix tools.

OS X has, for good or bad, slightly weaned me from Linux. I was in love with my RedHat Uber-Box until I got OS X. Now, I log into the Linux box from OS X and do what I need to do and then get off. It’s servicable, does what it’s supposed to and I don’t have to worry about it crashing, which is really what I need Linux for. I don’t feel the need for the perfect Linux desktop now. Am I going to hell for that?