Journal: First Entry

Woke up early this morning, to get to work to support a demo happening... right about now. Turns out enough people are here who know what they're doing that I'm largely extraneous. So I'm hanging out, looking at Mac sites, thinking about the next thing that's going to need to happen to my code. Some additional thread safety, maybe, but I'm a little too groggy to wrap my brain around that. Pete's been pulling a lot of the weight in our section of the code this past week, I'm kinda falling behind. Once the demo's past, our priorities will become straight, I hope.

I've been borrowing an older PowerMac from my housemate, Raj, for the past week or so, and gotten OS X up and running on it. Lots of fun. I'm doing it mostly in preparation for getting my iBook, experimenting to see which weirdo hacks I'm going to want to install, etc. I've put together a page of MacOS X required software and useful links, hanging off my homepage.

Last night I got two pieces of good hardware news. Apple has put together my iBook, and shipped it, in only 8 business days (nicely short of their estimated time of ten business days). I've got the memory upgrade waiting on my desk for its arrival, and when it all comes together, it will be sweeeet.

The other bit of good news was, I came home, and Raj asked me if I wanted to trade my old Dell P2-266 for the PowerMac I was borrowing from him. The PowerMac is a G3-233 with 192M of RAM, and I decided to go for it. Woohoo, I will soon own two Macs, where before there were zero. I'm glad Apple finally came out with a real OS. :)

A little searching this morning found cheap RAM upgrades and, more importantly, a cheap video RAM upgrade. The 2M in the system as it came was insufficient to drive my 1280x1024 LCD reasonably, and I'd been running it at 1024x768 to get some decent color. The blurriness could kinda be mistaken for anti-aliasing, I suppose.

Anyway, I'm hoping to make the laptop useful for work pretty quickly, and get my various and sundry files onto it for gaming. And then, begins the MacOS X programming. Ooh, excitement; I haven't felt this way since OS/2.