Macbook Pro lives up to expectations

Well, it's been a long and practically empty summer for me in terms of coding, what with hardly any internet access and even less time.  I did manage to have time to improve the scheduling program I wrote for Greenwood Music Camp where we are in residence, but that was it.

Now, a new leaf has been turned over.  The Chiara Quartet has a residency at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln that began in 2005 for a 3-year term.  Much to our delight, the residency was renewed for another three years, and converted into a permanent residency.  None of this has much to do with programming, but a perk of this job is that every 3 years, we get a new computer to replace the old one.  This cycle, I requested a Macbook Pro, my first Mac, as I have been using a PC for years.

I had the tech peoples set up VMWare Fusion for me, and so I am currently running Mac OS X, Ubuntu Linux, and Windows XP simultaneously with noticeable performance gain over any previous computer I have owned, including my custom 64-bit Kubuntu desktop.  The screen is beautiful (15 inch Matte) and speakers far superior to other Macs I've heard as well as the Toshiba laptop I will soon return.  I was able to very quickly set up a working PHP 5.3 with xdebug and Komodo in Mac and linux, and almost have the windows side compilation of PHP working, which will greatly accelerate my development.  The ability to share changes with the shared folders between all 3 boxes will be a tremendous boon to my development, this will be fantastic.

It feels good to drop Windows as the native platform too, it's been a long time coming.