Got a MAC
Well I guess I have officially joined the cool crowd since I am now the proud poppa of a bouncing baby MAC.
The best things about it so far are:
- It runs windows so I still have a safety net if I get to feeling totally lost. I’m using VMWare which allows me to jump back and forth.
- It runs some flavor of unix as it’s operating system. (so I can run top, ps, sar, etc… – it’ BSD but it beats the crap out of DOS)
- It’s about a million pounds lighter and half the size of my old Sony laptop.
- It’s faster than my old laptop.
- At 4G, it’s got 4 times the memory my old laptop had.
- The video iChat thing is pretty cool.
- It’s the worlds biggest iPod.
It is pretty cool but I just hate the process of going from one machine to another. Even without the frustration of the keyboard changes that the Mac inflicts, changing just makes for some amount of unproductive time. I have to do a presentation next week in Fort Worth at an Oracle Technology Luncheon thing (here’s a link to the presentation: 11g Advanced Features) So anyway, I am working on the Power Point slides using the MAC and it makes me feel like I’m typing with mittens on. I’m sure that will get better over time. I am finding that there are a lot of options with this setup though. Almost everything I am doing can be done in more than one way. Like I can do my calendar stuff in MS Office or in iCal (or on my phone for that matter).
I have to admit that old laptop was starting to have a lot of problems. Wireless was flakey, it would freeze every other day or so, and last week the keyboard quit working. Kind of reminded me of the PC/MAC commercial where the PC was sick.
Anyway, so far so good. Now if I can just figure out how to make the F11 key work in windows instead of turning on the speaker I should be in good shape.
To get the F keys working in VMware, hold down the “fn” key at the bottom left of the keyboard. This will force the usage of the “F” keys.
Out.
Actually that doesn’t work for me in Photoshop Elements. Probably something self inflicted, but I did find a “Send Key” option under the VMWARE Tools menu that let me send the F11 key.
It’s a MacBook.
OS X 10.5.4
I don’t intend to install 10gR1. I do have the 10gR2 client installed and it seems to work fine. I am rarely (never really) unable to get to numerous severs running lots of combinations of o/s’s and versions of Oracle, so I really don’t have much need for a local version on my laptop. And if I did, 10gR1 would not be very helpful as it is not a very widely used version (8.1.7, 9.2.0.x, 10gR2, 11gR1 – are the ones that hold the most interest for me).
Kerry