Transition to Intel

It's been a while since I've posted - I've been mainly doing Delphi work recently so there's not been much to report on the Rails front.

However, in the next week or so I will have the 'All-singing, All-dancing WEBrick Windows Service Rails Application Installer' available for you to play with. This will use the excellent InnoSetup installer package to create a single Setup application that installs Ruby, your application and some patches, and sets up WEBrick as a Windows Service so that your application is always available. I've got a few low-volume sites to install in the next few months so I figured that WEBrick will do the job - although I am hoping to do the same for a FastCGI/IIS installation at some point.

Anyway, the purpose of today's post is basically a rant ... over the last few months my 12" Powerbook has slowly been dying a death. I've carted it around to and from the office every day for two years, it's had kids climbing on it while I try and use it, it's got massive dents in the side and the CD drive has died.

And as my day job is Delphi and SQL Server I had a crappy Dell desktop in the office that I used for development and my Powerbook for everything else (emails, writing documentation, drawing charts and diagrams). But I persuaded work to buy me a Dell laptop (actually we had an insurance claim pending so I got lucky) and now I carry a widescreen Dell Latitude in my bag. The Powerbook has been retired to a desktop machine at home (coupled with a 1280 resolution monitor) - it occasionally struggles to start up but for the most part it is much happier.

However, I am not. Windows XP is not bad. Windows applications are not bad. But I definitely swear at the Dell tens times more than I ever did at the Powerbook. That's the difference between OSX and Windows.