It took a while, but yesterday the full import of having disbanded my own infrastructure finally hit me when I wanted to put up a test page and had no public web server to call my own, nor a remote shell to do some quick tests.
I haven’t missed my old web site much, but then again I haven’t felt much need to jot down generic notes or comment on industry shenanigans. I have, however, been feeling the need to code some things, in which I’ve been somewhat hampered by lack of time and my total reliance on the iPad, on which I can write anything but code at this point in time.
So this weekend I went on a geek binge - I resurrected my little ARM box to run lighttpd, prepped a G4 mini to act as a Git repository, and dug out one of my netbooks and hackintoshed it all the way to 10.6.5, given that the likelihood of my getting a MacBook Air is currently below zero and I needed something small (if slow) to run Xcode on.
I actually considered ordering an 11”Air as a birthday present to myself, but eventually reasoned that I don’t write enough code to ever justify dropping that much cash on another laptop - not while my unibody MacBook is still useful, or while I have a couple of netbooks able to run OS X well enough for casual coding.
Still, there is the occasional need. My current endeavor on the Mac is to port (or rather, re-create) an existing app with some pretty kinky interactions with a back-end service as a sort of 20% project, and as such I’ve been following in the footsteps of those heroic folk who use CoreServices.framework to invoke SOAP services.
And you really don’t want to go there…