williamhathaway.com

Check out Jim Laurent’s blog entry that covers tips from the Sun mac user’s mailing list.

I received a company sponsored Verizon V740 cellular modem for my MacBook Pro today (ExpressCard format).  The user experience was seamless. I plugged the card in, a dialog box popped up saying the card had to be activated. I pressed ‘continue’ and the automatic activation took about a minute and then I was able to click on the icon and connect to the internet. No need to even load the CD that came with the card.

Cellular reception isn’t great in my house (I get one or two bars depending on the location), but I did two speed tests and got up to 1200 Kb/sec down and 256 Kb/sec up. The only thing that bugs me is there is a large green light on the top of the card which blinks when it is transmitting data and it is very distracting, especially in low-light conditions. Some electrical tape should do the trick nicely.

The card should be really helpful to me. I spend quite a bit of time traveling or at customer sites and in many locations it is difficult (and/or expensive) to get on a network. There are also times where over zealous content filtering proxies make it tough to get work done (a recent customer’s web proxies blocked all web pages that contained the word ‘proxy’ which made researching an LDAP problem involving proxy accounts difficult).

I bought a 15″ MacBook Pro in November running OSX 10.4 and have been loving it. Over the past 10 years I’ve used laptops with Windows 98, 2000, and XP, various flavors of Linux, as well as Solaris Express. In the past, I’ve always struggled with the trade-offs between software availability (especially things like VPNs), general ease of use, and reliability. Now that Macs are running x86 chips and there is efficient virtualization software (like VMWare or Parallels), I feel like I finally have a platform where I am generally happy. OSX has a lot of built-in software that is really well integrated and in general I feel like the OS doesn’t get in the way of what I want to do. I have added the following additional software:

• Firefox
• Adium – for OTR encrypted conversations over AIM
• QuickSilver – crazy cool keyboard interface to search and fire off actions
• Smultron – handy text editor that is a more feature rich than the bundled one
• NeoOffice – OpenOffice port to use the native OSX graphical interface
• VMWare Fusion (beta) – lets me run Virtual Machines (I’m currently using it for Solaris and CentOS)

In no particular order here are some of the base OS features that I like: solid suspend/resume, global in-file search, first-class terminal support, ease of application install/uninstall, smart roaming network profiles, great printer and PDF integration, fantastic multi-media support (quicktime, iTunes, photo management).