Conánn FitzPatrick

After a week of sitting in the window waiting for the TNT delivery van and humming ACDC, my iMac arrived. Now I had to stop short of taking pictures of the box autopsy and posting them on flickr as I think that is a bit geeky, but I have to tell you the opening ceremony was great fun it all took about a minute and I was plugged in and ready to go. Set up was a breeze and I was able to mount my dead ibook as a target disk and rescue my files. Relief!

I have to say to anyone who is thinking about moving from a PC to a Mac or even just getting an Apple Mac to compliment your complement of computer parts. Do it! you will not be disappointed. Getting used to OS X takes very little time and you will very quickly find yourself wondering why Windows does not implement the same unified menu system. The Dock is very cool to play with and you will probably do the same thing as me, make it as small as possible and turn off magnification, until a PC using friend comes by and you want to show off.

The heavily flouted dashboard is more useful then I thought it would be but I only use post-its and to do lists. As it sits my iMac has 512mb of ram, which is what it came with and it is not enough to really take advantage of dashboard as it’s hog. I will be ordering another gig asap. For most uses it’s a wonderfully quiet machine but as soon as it gets under a little bit of strain the fans kick off and it gets louder but still nowhere near a regular PC.

I am in love with iTunes, I know it’s available for PC but I had never played with it. Music is fun again and ripping CDs is sooo easy. Being able to switch from music to KCRW and podcasts is great and did I mention easy. It is when listening to music or watching a DVD that you realise how good the sound is on an iMac.

WTF how do I read or even see a .htaccess file on a well that’s this weeks dilemma the á problem was answered very kindly by Roger Johansson last week. Nice guy with a great website with loads of really good info.

I have been working on couple of websites this week and I have to say Drupal is the best thing since sliced bread. Now that I have had about six months of using it I really feel there is nothing I can’t do with it. There are loads of different blogging solutions out there, Darren Rowse had a piece on two of them last week and while Drupal is more of a CMS then a pure blogging app I have to say Drupal kicks the llamas ass even for simple tasks.

When I created the website for the Titanic Memorial proposal I used Wordpress and was impressed with the ease of use and simple setup, but since its creation I have wanted to add little things that I can only do with Drupal. Setting up a simple image gallery is such a task with Wordpress and MovableType let alone set up an ecommerce store or a RSS feed reader.

Last year when I decided to try a CMS instead of coding every page; I set up MovableType for the content and static pages for all the images. I felt it was all pretty cool as it was my first full on venture with CSS and XHTML and having some control at last seemed like a great thing, but it was not long before I realised how shit comment spam was. Within a few weeks my nice new MT website was becoming a pain in the ass, with over a 100 spam comments a day, I needed something new and after a few months of trying loads of different solutions including Gallery, Wordpress, Phpnuke and Mambo I fell across Drupal and I have not looked back, it really is great, this site is built with Drupal 4.5.2 and has worked without fail since day one.