I went with the MacBook. White, 2Gb memory, 120Gb disk. Remembered the mini-DVI to VGA converter too. I’m writing on it as we, er, speak.
I timed the acquisition I can take my new toy with me on the road next week when I do a class where I’m driving instead of flying. (That way I can take both my old and new laptops easily. It’s always risky when presenting from a new machine – but even more risky when that new machine represents a whole new OS. Having the old Windows machine there as a backup for the first time out mitigates the risk.)
I’m really pleased with how smooth the transition is going so far.
I use subversion for my course materials and slide decks. So I just did a “check out,” and *pouf!*, the new laptop had my most important presentation materials. Same thing for code, of course.
So…speaking of subversion…and about email synching – I’ve been thinking and tinkering.
I checked out the folder structure Mac Mail uses and discovered that emails are stored in flat files, one file per email, with file system folders as mailboxes. Not only does that seem much more sensible than Microsoft Outlook’s gigantic pst files, it also opens up the possibility of using subversion to synchronize my email in the same way I use it to synchronize my content and code.
So I started experimenting. Early trials are promising. I can check in my Library/Mail directory contents on one machine, svn up, and see the results on the other. But it’s not seamless. First I discovered that I had to set up accounts manually on both machines. Then I realized that every deleted email results in an svn client “! – item is missing.”
If I seriously want to make this work, I’ll probably need to write a little Ruby script to do the synch the way I want it.
But this is certainly more promising than anything I tried on a PC. Gotta love UNIX.
Please write again when you get this working. I’d love to do the same thing between my desktop and my laptop.
Actually, I wish my laptop had waited another week or two for its intermittent backlight problems to get bad enough to send it in. I’ve got adequate backups, so I’ll be able to get back to where I am now.
But, I haven’t yet figured out how to sync ‘sent’ mail between the two machines. So I’ll have two distinct sets of ‘sent’ mail, one on each machine. I still haven’t figured out how I want to merge them.
(BTW, I use Unison to sync things between the two machines. That way, I don’t have to designate a ‘server’, just two co-equal clients.)
I am baffled as to why you would use svn for synching? I would think that would be more appropriate for situations were you want to keep all the revisions to a file. Why not just create the same account on both machines you want to keep in synch then use rsync or unison to keep them synced up? Alternatively what I do is keep an IMAP account on a server, then configure that account on two different machines. I configure the account to download all the bodies of the mail, so I now have two copies of each message, plus the copy on the server. The IMAP protocol keeps track of which messages are read and deleted.
It seems to me that svn is the wrong tool for this job. There are tools that have intended for this specific task.
That is my thought on this, anyway.
+1 on using IMAP. That’s what I use for my multiple Macs. Recent versions of Apple Mail make a pretty decent IMAP client.
About IMAP – for now, I’m sticking with POP. My sites and email are hosted at GoDaddy, and they don’t do IMAP. I may switch at some point in the future, but for now any solution I adopt has to work with POP. (Also, I don’t really want all my email stored on a central server in perpetuity. Call me old-fashioned, but I’m still fond of local email repositories.)
No, really, IMAP is the way to go. In the meantime, rsync is the next way to go.
I have been using IMAP on a small homeserver (currently an old PowerBook) for years now and that is working fine. There I can do my backups and use any IMAP compatible email client. Latently I am also switching more and more over to Gmail, but I wouldn’t want to have all of my email there either.