How did *that* happen?

Dan's PC died yesterday; hard disk died. It's been replaced, but while Dan was working on it, we were having a chat with Jeff, our finance director, and Dan suggested that we should keep a spare PC about the place so that in the event of one dieing, there's always another one to be getting on with. Jeff thought that this was a jolly good idea.

I pointed out that I thought that we ought to get notebook PCs rather than desktops in future. The aren't that much more expensive, and they give you a whole lot more flexibility. I'm forever being sent off to client sites, and a notebook of my own would be dead handy. (There is Roadwarrior, but you know how it is using a PC other than your own..) Besides, we'd be able to work from home if we needed to occasionally due to trains not running or other problems, or to implement that bright idea that you have on Saturday evening straight away.

Jeff thought that this was a good idea too. "Just spec yourself up a decent notebook," he said, "and order it".

"Result!", I thought.

"Oh, don't go ordering yourself a Powerbook, though!"

"Fair enough. I wasn't planning to try and get that one over on you, much as I'd love to. You do realise, though, that all the stiff we work on these days is cross platform, and would work just fine on a Mac?" I couldn't help but point it out.

Half an hour later, Jeff and Alex (our technical director) came over and told me to order a Powerbook! They asked me to check that it wasn't going to cause a problem in terms of development or office tools or network infrastructure, but that if it all looks workable, they'd like to make sure that we really are building cross platform software.

So, I've checked. Development tools are no problem - just about everything is Java based (Eclipse, Ant, Tomcat, Spring, Hibernate, Axis, etc, etc, etc.), though I have a bunch of Python stuff too. We want to be cross database, too, so we are developing against MySQL, and deploying against SQL Server and DB2/400 (which don't run on the development boxes.). We use Subversion for change control. All of this should be fine on a Mac. MS Office for Mac is compatible with Windows Office, and our network should just require a little tweaking. All systems go.

I did suggest that we should wait for El Presidente to get back to see if he was OK with it all, but there's no stopping Jeff and Alex with the wind in their sails, so the order went in today:

• Macintosh Powerbook G4, 15-inch 1.67GHz SuperDrive model, with 1GB of memory, an 8oGB HDD and OSX 10.4
• Microsoft Office 2004, Mac edition
• Crumpler Sticky Date Laptop Bag
• Mac OS X in a Nutshell
• Mac Keyboard

I have no words for how cool this is. See - who needs a girlfriend? ;-)

Tulna, (who doesn't have a blog, oh no,) is dead jealous. And she says she's not a nerd. Now - lots of Mac software to download...

Posted to Mac by Simon Brunning at August 17, 2005 04:04 PM