Programblings

Good news everyone*!

Tomorrow my presentation at Montreal on Rails is going to be made on my brand new Mac Mini!

In my last post I mentioned I was going to present on an ooooold Win XP laptop, but I decided to make the switch to the Mac world now. Well, one week ago. So fear not, I’m not going to subject our community to a 5 square meters XP/Powerpoint eye bleeding festival.

The Apple world had one little surprise for me, however. Immediately after I bought my Mini I started hearing about the Java 1.6 debacle on Leopard. What? I didn’t event know OS X didn’t come with the standard Java distribution! And here I am, about to make a presentation on JRuby on a Mac :-) Note to self: never switch to a completely new OS (to me) one week before a presentation again.

This won’t affect the presentation, however, since everything works perfectly fine on Java 1.5, preinstalled on Leopard. And isn’t it reasonable to expect Apple to release Java 1.6 shortly anyway? So for those I’ll convince to give JRuby a try, all hope is not lost. Moreover, for the Rails community I think the Java 1.6 story is pretty much a non-issue. Your test and production servers are running on Linux, right?

So with that out of the way, there’s only one bump left in the road. As our host Fred pointed out to me, my mini has only one video out. Doh! I didn’t find any VGA or DVI splitter, so I’ll deal with it. This will be a bit of a pain in the neck, but hopefully just for me :-) Let’s see how the live coding part goes!

* In my best Professor Farnsworth voice (from Futurama)