Kedar's Log, Stardate 2010

Death doesn’t just take someone.. it misses someone else!

–Mitch Albom (The Five People You Meet In Heaven)

There are a few mantras I believe I follow in my life. Just wanted to keep them all together. So I am starting a new post category today called “My Philosophy“. This is not something I have developed all by myself, rather, it is what I have picked from what I have seen around me. I will start this new category of posts by one of the mantras I believe in and then there will be follow-ups.

Many people don’t believe that. They feel hopelessly trapped in their life.
They do not believe they can go anywhere they want. Their options are
limited to availabilities. They consider what is available and discard
their choices in discouragement.
Other people believe that they can start from where they are and go
anywhere they want. Their options are limited only by their imaginations.
They consider what is possible and pursue their choices with vigor.

Have you been confusing availabilities and possibilities?

Having said what I said about my breakup with Ms Windows and a new relationship with Ms Mac, let me just say now, in all fairness, that I do appreciate some things about Ms Windows now that were more right than wrong.. that doesn’t mean I am not going steady with my new soulmate, no, on the contrary I have totally committed myself to ‘her’ now. This is same as my iPhone rant.. you gotta love it but sure, it is not perfect – kinda’ thing. So don’t think I am trying to get out of this!.. not yet There are more things here that I like or am interested in than I hate..

1. Windows Explorer rocks (the views especially). The Finder views in Mac are plain useless. No hierarchical view, not sure whose idea was the column view ‘coz it sucks so bad. The thumbnail view is stupid and unusable. Here is the thing, you can’t go into thumbnail view and select a few files to copy!

2. Windows Alt+Tab is much better than Mac (sure they have Spaces and all that fancy stuff but the basic Command+Tab is really not done right). The Mac Command+Tab does not show all ‘instances’ of an application, say you have 10 Firefox windows open, you will see only one icon for Firefox. So if you want to switch, you either have to search in the task bar or use Spaces.

3. Mac OSX releases a JDK version with its own release so you can’t just pick a JRE/JDK from java.com and use it on your Mac. How stupid is that.. apparently Mac mucks around with the JDK before it let’s it live on its OS.

4. No central program registry: While the Windows DLL hell is horrible, it still makes sense to me to have a central Program registry like Windows has, after having spent quite a few wild night-outs in the Linux and lately the Mac land. So I do like the convenience of getting rid of everything by just deleting the app instead of going through an Uninstaller that does not install everything (!) as on Windows. However, not having everything in one place is kinda’ not that great. Sure Mac has the Applications folder. But sometimes, you download something, install, and the app is sitting right there in your Downloads folder. Then you gotta move it to Applications… that’s a bit lame.

5. Resizing Windows:

This is really a bad usability thing. Again, I thought Mac OS X is known for setting standards in Usability and UI design. This is honestly a mistake to have the resize hotspot in the lower right corner. I use an external monitor sometimes and if I resize a window there, and return back to the laptop monitor, this corner is out of screen and there is no way to resize sometimes because you can’t move a window above the menu on top and off screen.

Let me state here categorically, whatever Mac loyalists might say, but using any window edge (like MS Windows) to resize is absolutely awesome. Even if a window is off screen in windows, you can switch to it, press <Alt>, <Dn Arrow> (this opens the main window menu), press ‘M’ which selects the ‘Move’ option in the menu and then just use the arrow keys to bring it back to the viewable screen.

6. Application Support: Some of the simple things in Windows life are fairly difficult.. now look, I have dealt with Unixes before, so I am not completely that “stupid-windows-user”! But if you don’t use Mac for a real hardcore *developery* stuff then you won’t realize these hardships. But then, you couldn’t get too adventurous with Windows on the other hand – you had to follow the stupid way or hit the highway which I finally did

1. VMWare Fusion : Had to use Windows VMWare Workstation for creating a VM with 2 network interfaces. There was no easy way (even the difficult is just hearsay) to create 2 interfaces for a VM in Fusion..
2. Apache – mod_security : The amount of time I have spent so far without success just to get mod_security installed on my Mac is crazy! I found out about MacPort (package management system for Mac OS X) that potentially has a port for mod_security – http://trac.macports.org/projects/macports/browser/trunk/dports/www/mod_security – which allegedly has a variant for apache2 but everytime you do a “port install mod_security +apache2″ looks for and installs apache 1.3.7 and then the checksum for mod_security tar fails…. now how frustrating is that??
3. Enabling php5 for apache2, with mysql and pear support was just a port command such as – “port install php5 @5.2.5_3+apache2+macosx+mysql5+pear”

…there will be more as I get acquainted more…

When you talk about lifetime changes, you tend to think about getting married, having a kid, buying a house, getting divorced.. well, you know what I mean I went for a change in my life recently with the same bit of seriousness, as I would for any of the above, and it makes sense that I call it a “Lifetime change” too… Please read on, it is not a technical discussion.

The change was simply that I finally dumped my Windows machine, for a Mac, after about 16 years! For the non-savvy and non-technical, this may sound trivial. But having spent almost every day of my life, for the last 16 years, in front of different types of computers, I think they too, deserve to claim a piece of my life.

You know, I have ‘dated’ a lot of ‘damsels err, I mean computers.. a weird one called ZX Spectrum back in 1988 that ‘claimed to be a computer’ with a Cassette tape (!), the oldies – PC XTs, the ATs, Honeywell Unix terminals and many other Unix terminals whose names I have forgotten, the IBM mainframe terminals, PC 286s, 386s, 486s, Pentiums xxx, Dual cores… bla bla bla.

And I have seen the Operating Systems that control their behaviors, mood swings, tantrums – there was Unix System V, MS DOS 4, 5, 6, AT&T Unix, SCO Unix, IBM Mainframe OSs, Windows 3.1, Windows 95, 98, NT, ME, XP Pro, XP Home, 2000 flavors of Linux’s (!), Windows -2000, -2003, Mac OS-X, Mac Leopard..

So many of them, but I managed to stay loyal to one family throughout this 16 yr journey – the Microsoft family! I have dated many from that family, keeping the family loyalty intact for all these years! I have enjoyed the closeness, their popularity, their riches, and at the same time, have suffered at their hands, defended them out in the world, got embarrassed because of them, but still, at the end of the day, I came back to them – in their palace, to their kingdom, back to my in-laws…. And now this.. call it disloyalty or my mid-life crisis, but I finally realized that it needed to end.. I wanted out!

On that fateful day in the last week of February of 2008, I finally embraced a bright, slim MacBook Pro and flew away on my vacation to India. That’s when my love affair with the Mac started after so many stale years living with the Microsoft family. I had a few flings with the Mac family before but it was always too clumsy, since there was no commitment from my side. And I used to always complain as to why someone did not ‘click right’ or ‘close their windows right’… I guess I never looked at their heart, which is made of pure gold – the Unix heart – one that holds steady..

And all those complaints, I realize now, were just because I was so brainwashed by the Microsoft family members! I didn’t have a voice of my own, nor was I allowed to think outside the Window! I was comfortable, because it was all too familiar to me – someone blowing their fuse whenever they want, not having anybody to depend on, always living in fear of losing everything you have.. I thought that’s how it is in a love affair – you know, being ready to sacrifice, giving, forgiving, undemanding.. And I didn’t realize when those love affairs morphed into hate affairs.. I continued on as if I was married to the family and there were no divorce courts! It was as if, I had to go from one cousin to another…!

And then this day in February, I said to myself – hey! you are not so old yet.. don’t give up. You will find a soulmate if you are committed to making this change. Linux was too complicated and couldn’t have been someone to go steady with. The only other option I had been eying all these days was the stylish Mac, the one I had complained about in the past like a fool. I poured my heart out in front of her and she was magnanimous in accepting me.

From that day, I began living my new life, accepting things that were minor inconveniences, adapting to the new way of life, new moods, new responses, all the while admiring the beauty of my new girlfriend. And I told myself, nobody is perfect.

I still live my life, there is still programming, surfing, storing, retrieving, shutting down, starting up, but it is just done in a different way.

After all, life is a way of living rather than the living itself! Everybody has one..

Read the 2nd part of this post here