I’m having to get re-used to the keyboard again and the mouse is giving me some difficulty which might just be due to the mouse itself, but all-in-all it’s been a not-unpleasant experience so far!

I’d forgotten how elegant the whole Mac lifestyle is. I’m used to Linux on my desktop and so I’m accustomed to a certain degree of clunkiness and things not always working the way I’d like. Not to mention that I have to use Windows 2000 during the 9 to 5, so it’s been like a breath of fresh air, which makes the contrast even greater.

I do most of my work on Linux boxen via the command line, along with a web browser and a mail client, so at the end of the day I have a similar experience no matter which platform I’m on and through the magic of free software I can use pretty much the same applications which makes things even easier.

Now that I have the hardware, you never know, I might actually become a “Mac Guy” yet!

I enabled admin routing in CakePHP and put all the back-end code into admin_* functions in my controller which are accessible via /admin/controller/action. I wanted to enable some form of access control but without utilising a full user management system which would have been overkill.

The /admin/ directory only exists through some mod_rewrite magic so I couldn’t just use a simple .htaccess file. After much head-scratching and reading of documentation I arrived at a simple solution:

1. I created a .htaccess protected directory, /adminauth/
2. in this directory I created an index.php file which redirected to a URL passed to it via HTTP GET
3. in /app/app_controller.php I defined a beforeFilter() function which uses a regular expression to determine if the called action contained “admin_” in its name
4. if so, check if the $_SERVER['AUTH_TYPE'] variable is set
5. redirect to /adminauth/, passing the current URL, if it isn’t set
6. let mod_auth take care of the rest

This worked a charm on my home Linux box, but when it came to testing the code on the iMac the site is being developed on, the script couldn’t detect the server variable and was thrown into an infinite loop of redirects, doh!

The same result was had when I uploaded the code to the FreeBSD web-host the site will be deployed to, so I had no choice but to rethink my solution.

It was either going to be sessions or cookies and in the moment cookies seemed appealing. I changed the controller to check $_COOKIE[] instead of $_SERVER[] and /adminauth/index.php to call setcookie() . It seems to be working so far, fingers crossed it’ll be suitable for production purposes!

I’m not a Unix wizard, but I do make a lot of use of the command-line so I’m enjoying the underlying BSD-goodness of OS X and multiple terminal sessions are a necessity: one to tunnel select local ports to my home slackware box via ssh, one to perform local operations and one to host a screen session on our development box.

I initially used Terminal.app but running several instances of it proved a bit fiddly: if I avoid cluttering my screen real-estate by minimising my terminals and then try to switch to one it isn’t automatically unminimised. Enter iTerm.

iTerm seems to solve my problem: it allows me to have multiple shells open and accessible via a single, tabbed interface without having to think about the implications of running a screen session within another screen session.

The only real difficulty I’ve had is the behavior of the arrow keys within vim, but after much head-scratching and googling this post came to my rescue: I added export TERM=dtterm into my ~/.profile, executed a quick source ~/.profile to make the changes active and went about my merry way.

A minor niggle is when I create a new tab: it’s background colour doesn’t seem to match up with that I specified in the preferences, but this seems to be fixed by going to View > Show Session Info and turning Transparency on and then off.

All in all, I’m adjusting and next on my agenda might well be looking into Quicksilver and possibly VirtueDesktops. I still haven’t found out how to go to the start or the end of a line in vim without using ^ or $ in normal mode though…

I’ve got a 2GHz Intel Core Duo processor along with 1.5 GB of RAM at my disposal, so everything is very smooth and shiny but I’m having to adjust to an operating system I’ve never used before so I feel almost crippled when it comes to doing things I don’t normally even have to think about. Oh, and the keyboard just seems wrong.

First thing I did when I got my new toy home was to set up wireless networking: before I put together an IPCop router I was using a Gigabyte GN-B49G and had never used the wireless facility, but I plugged its WAN port into the switch for my “green zone” and went through the router’s setup wizard and bingo! As a finishing touch I configured it to use MAC authentication to prevent any of my lovely neighbours hi-jacking my bandwith

So far there has been nothing that has struck me with “ah, this is what I’ve been missing all along” but I’m looking forward to adding another string to my bow, regardless of the amount of muscle memory I’m having to fight against to do anything via the keyboard. The only negative side I can see to using a Mac is that the experience might be a one-way thing and I’ll never be able to go back to commodity hardware. I’ll always have Linux running on my servers though!