So there are two new computers in the house. One is my new MacBook Pro, and the other is Josh’s new XO. Josh and I were going to share the XO, but to date I have spend a whole 15min on it.

Josh would spend a few hours a day on it if we let him. The first thing he said after he turned it on was ‘Daddy, I need to move my sites over to my new laptop because my old machine is dying.’ That is a direct quote (Kim immediately wrote it down.) Josh uses the kitchen computer which is an old gateway all-in-one imac-ish 266Mhz PIII. It’s not dying so much as it just can’t run the new flash games he likes in realtime. Sadly I can not get the plucky little laptop to run the full www.noggin.com site due to it’s exclusive use of flash 8. There are rumors of a way to get it to work (with both software and hardware hacks as the real problem is the memory required to run such huge flash games.) The same reason why the 266Mhz machine can’t hack it, the XO can’t. I suspected this all along, but so far he has not missed the 1/2 functional flash games.One of his favorite activities on the XO is memorize. It is also the one he is most frustrated with. This is basically just the old memory card game, only it could be letters, simple math, or other matchings. You can create your own match boards, but for some odd reason, the game does not randomize the card placement (and hence his frustration). I noticed this and mentioned it to my wife, and then the next day Josh came to me and said ‘Dad, you need to help me program this. It’s always the same.’ I peeked at the source code and my eyes crossed. I can’t imagine the creators not using a randomization, so it might just be pseudo random and the lacking of a proper seed. I should mention that Josh is 4 (‘4 and a half in two days dad!’) and has been using computers sence he was one and a half. He has an impressive vocabulary, and ran read many words as well. Granted they are all words which show up in flash games; things like ‘Start’, ‘Play’, ‘Pause’, ‘Done’, ‘Next’, ‘Back’, ‘Print’, and ‘Quit’. It is fun to watch him show me how things work. The only activity which has him confused is ‘pipi’. When I told him it was how you program the computer he lit up, but as he can’t write yet, it is more a source of frustration than anything else. The track pad is a little frustrating as there is no tactile difference between the conductive and resistive portions. Right clicking is also an oddity for him. Early on I got a small kids mouse for the kitchen computer and mapped both buttons to a left click. I did this after the fifth time he brought up the flash ‘properties’ and got all confused. All in all, very minor issues.

Now to the Mac. This has been a long time in coming. I grew up on Mac machines. It was not until college that I switched to PC and linux (at the same time no less). This was because of a virus actually. I was fascinated by the Michelangelo virus. this virus actually affected both Mac and PC computers. However I could hack on it on the linux boxen (running the new, easy to install, slackware distribution, installed from 104 floppy diskettes!) The computer lab I was working at ran the new Windows 3.11 environment (not yet an OS) and Wolfenstein 3D was the game of choice (and Civ, Doom, and Scorched Earth… good times, good times…) Well I am back to the Mac, and just in time. Less than 12 hours after getting the machine my old laptop stopped having those pesky hardware faults intermittently; preferring to have them quite consistently during the boot process.So I have been using a Mac for almost 2 weeks. Win2K and XP are now painful for me to use; and I had always thought of Win2K as the best C++ development environment; sorry Unbuntu. I tried using a different laptop the other day and the lack of two finger scrolling and other quick options drove me to distraction. The ‘Command’ button still annoys me a little. Mainly because the control key has been moved over and not every thing has been remapped to command, so hitting control is a pain, which makes emacs less than pleasant. The other issue is the screen resolution. I am used to 1600×1200, and this max out at 1200×900 1440×900. The loss of 30% of my screen height is a real bummer for both browsing and coding. I limit my coding to 80 characters, so the extra wide screen does not gain me much, and the loss of 30% hurts a lot in viewable context. I am sure I will get used to it. To date the only software that I am missing are some obscure codecs for old fansub anime, the ability to write to NTFS volumes and dev studio; sorry there is no better C++ debugger, hate the IDE beyond that. I can live with that. I am trying out vmware to get those 3 things I am missing. The rest is currently native Mac. I can’t believe how easy it was to switch.