After four years plus of six and seven day heavy usage, my Mac 15" Powerbook, Buford, is retiring on Monday as my main business computer. This thing has been across the country again and again, been dropped off airport security counters, left for hours on a freezing Alaska runway while four inches of snow piled up on its carry bag, visited the Caribbean several times, and just basically been beaten on pretty much constantly since 2003. Still works just fine, mind you, but operating systems and the graphic intensive stuff of today have left its 1GHz processor and limited graphics abilities pretty much behind. When I alter a cell's contents on an admittedly very large and complex Numbers cash flow spreadsheet, it can take five or six seconds to see the change!

I am admittedly an Apple enthusiast, but by no means a fanatic. There's an HP laptop right behind me that I've had longer than this thing that is still running XP like a champ... but it weighs a ton so you can't travel with it, the fan noise is like a jet landing, and it's got some of other lesser issues of the OS that moved me back to the Mac as primary in 2003 anyhow.

Don't know what I'm going to do with Buford, but it will remain in service around here at a secondary workstation, probably as a backup Filemaker design box on our network. I fully expect to get another four years out of it before we're done.

If the MacBook Pro that's arriving Monday is half as good as this thing has been, I'll be more than happy. Planning ahead, I bought a Fusion vmWare license for it when vmWare was still in beta early this year, and I am very much looking forward to having XP and OS X coexisting on the same computer. That alone is a good enough reason to move up, since I seem to spend more time on the road these days and I'll have a pretty complete arsenal with me at all times this way.

We've been using Open Office for some time now on our Windows computer, but I'm not in love with their Mac implementation as it currently exists... so it's been Office 2004 on our Mac boxes, which are our main programming and work computers anyhow. The day before yesterday, Microsoft delayed once again the supposed release of Office 2008 for the Mac, which was pretty much expected.

But yesterday Steve Jobs hopped onto the stage at Apple's summer press event and released the new iWork 08, which for the first time contains a spreadsheet: the new Numbers product. So I have recently returned from the Albany Apple store and am pleased to report that Microsoft Office is 100% gone from every Mac in the joint - assuming you can actually completely remove any MS product from anything, of course. We're all iWork all the time now, and I've been very pleased at how well all our very critical spreadsheets made the move to Numbers. I had already pretty much stopped using Word, and now that the new version of Pages contains not only full change tracking but distinct modes for word processing and page layout, it was an easy thing to send Office into the void.

The new iWork even supports Microsoft's (supposedly) open doc formatting - before Microsoft itself does, for that matter. Another really outstanding job by Apple, and a good day around here as far as getting things done goes.

The renovation of The Bunker, Steamboat's office and programming HQ, is nearing completion. Three and a half weeks ago this was a very well equipped basement - all the necessary and desirable computer equipment nicely situated atop a concrete floor, exposed pipes overhead, and excellent white pine wall studs cradling the insulation. What could be more conducive to a good creative attitude?

So now we've got proper sheetrock ceilings and walls, a beautiful cushioned Pergo beech floor, the pictures finally hanging against a very snazzy yet calming desert toned paint - Terra Cotta Red Clay, to be exact, from Valspar via Lowes. Nice thick stuff!

The second workstation goes back in tomorrow, at which point we can hide all the wires and finish up. The Airport Extreme wireless network is back online, we've got more power sources than we'll ever need, room to spread out into the "other" part of the space, past two very nice half walls that define the two rooms. That side has great Berber carpet and contains the new Elliptical machine and four guitars - to allow a nice escape from the desks when a break or general thought is called for.

All in all, a great project and a fabulous place to design and execute PolicePro's iterations, and to do the steady client support that we supply over the Net. Some difference!

Anybody else out there enjoying their MS Vista experience? God help us, Filemaker yesterday announced that as of version 8.5v2, an update released yesterday as well, FM now supports Vista. Spending as much time as I do in the vortex of the tech journals, I was hoping they'd just blow the whole thing off as a weird anomaly and hope for something better out of Redmond in another six or seven years.

We don't do any operating system consulting of any kind - we prefer to stay in our own sandbox, so to speak - but even my phone has been ringing from people all over the place going through all kinds of hell trying to get Vista to do what their Windows 95 OS did ten years ago: sit there and just run their computer.

All of which speaks to why I enjoyed this entry I came across today in response to a rant posted on The Business of Software about the seeming impossibility of even getting a "Certified For Vista" logo going, much less the actual software.

Hey, you gotta start somewhere, right?

Well, maybe Betty Lou doesn't, but Mary Jo Foley does! First she left her longstanding post on Microsoft Watch recently to start All About Microsoft. Now she's redone the whole site with a great, clean design and gotten rid of the clutter on the old site. What an improvement!

Disclaimer: don't know her, never met her, but she knows what's going on in the MS world, which of course means everyone's world if you have anything to do with computing. MJF has covered them - sometimes relentlessly, some at MS would say - for quite a while. A daily read.

Here's one I love to agree with. Gall's Law states:

A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over with a working simple system.

This ties in well with my personal hatred of detailed functional specification sheets for database systems. Some people, very successful ones, love project specs as ironclad blueprints to give a client exactly what they want. I tend more towards the reality of the "What I thought I heard is what you thought you said" problem: The best stuff evolves out of a general plan as opposed to being built to a blueprint. Every time we give a client exactly what they ask for, they end up wanting it changed, because it doesn't work like they expected it might.

The people at 37 Signals are really strong on this. Their Getting Real book contains what I think is the best argument there is against forced structure in program (and database) design.

The Wikipedia page on Gall's law is at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gall's_law

Although nearly all our clients run Microsoft Windows based systems, we choose to do all our development - and nearly everything else - on Mac Powerbooks. I started on Macs back in the very early 90s, moved to Windows for six years when the business got going, and came home, so to speak, in the fall of 2003 when a mail virus nearly wiped me out and stole a week of my time before I was able to completely eradicate it. We still have two Windows computers, and the HP in particular is reliable as hell, but since I do this stuff eight to ten hours a day, I'm gonna do it where I'm comfortable, and that's on the Macs.

My main development computer, a 15" Powerbook, just passed three years old, and has been used maybe six to eight hours most days over that whole time! Been across the country eight times, left outside on a snowy runway in Alaska for an hour and a half while the ground crew fooled around with the Piper plane (and an inch of snow piled up on the laptop case - see picture before snow started), worked in 114 degree Arizona summer heat - oops, make that ten trips across the country - and has never so much as coughed once, much less puked up a hard drive or something similar. Scheduled for replacement next year with a new 15" MacBook Pro when Leopard (the next Apple operating system) comes out, but I tell you I love this thing. I may have it bronzed. What a workhorse!

What to do with the few free evening hours on the recent PolicePro trip to Skagway, Alaska? Why not write a quick program for a local tour/adventure tour outfit owned by some friends of one of Skagway's officers... not rocket science, but a basic, solid and useful tool for these guys to get their work done.

There is a force in the design/programming universe called Scope Creep which says that every project will grow beyond all recognition as requests for One More Little Thing are made and addressed, which lead to more and more. This project, being self-limited as far as my short local access, was an exercise in fighting that force. We whittled it down to the most basic useful form and worked to that and nothing more.

The result? No fancy audit trails, no endless snazzy automation, but a hell of a nice interface and a shot right at the heart of the work that actually needs to be done. The program tracks bookings and clients, sends automated email confirms, and handles the rest of the nuts and bolts stuff. If they ever want to go bigger, they certainly can, but this is a small family outfit and all they really need is to be able to track the clients and make sure everyone gets what they expected.

So they don't all have to be huge showcase projects... and it was a nice change, cranking this one out.

The site is out in the world as of today, March 1. Over the past few weeks while under development, it's been hiding in a private directory... the basic navigation from the existing Steamboat Data/former PolicePro site is in, though that will change a lot over the next two weeks. Now the page counter might actually start to show some activity...