SteveJamieson.com

Well, I already know what my favorite Superbowl commercial will be this year.

Although not being sold in stores until 8 PM tonight, my MacOS X 10.3 (a.k.a. “Panther”) pre-order arrived this afternoon via FedEx. I love it when Apple throws in a free upgrade to overnight shipping. Too bad I’ll probably have to put off installation until I get back from PA.

On January 22, 1984, during the Superbowl, Apple Computer aired arguably one of the most memorable commercials of all time. It was the commercial that introduced the Macintosh. Two days later—19 years ago today—the 128k Mac was released, and the computer world was revolutionized. Happy Birthday Macintosh. Thanks for 19 years of non-Orwellian computing.

Well, at least the SoHo Apple Store…

Pippin (Billy Boyd), Sam (Sean Astin),
Merry (Dominic Monaghan), and Frodo (Elijah Wood)

Ever since upgrading to Mac OS X (which is Unix at its core), I have been achieving new levels of geekiness. For example, if you had told me 5 years ago that I would be using a command line interface again, I would have laughed at you until I fell into a Serotonin coma. Today, however, I am quite comfortable using the command line.

I’ve used the command line to change file ownership (chown) and permissions (chmod), to edit configuration files (pico httpd.conf), to perform tasks as root (sudo), to play with MySQL, to install binaries, and most recently, to install Perl modules. (Okay, I know I just lost just about everyone who reads this blog, except Jed. However, if you want to love me, then you must put up with the geek in me. Sorry.) Yes, even command sequences like the one below no longer scare me.

perl Makefile.PL
make
make test
make install

Mmmmm… Unix…