Therefore, I took the splurge yesterday and upgraded. It took a little while, mainly because my ADSL was flakey as hell yesterday, but eventually it completed, and I’ve been using it since then. It did not get in the way of my PhD research this morning (which at this early stage mostly involves me doing a literature review anyway, that is, searching article databases for relevant academic papers and taking notes).

Some observations;

1. The reverse-scrolling thing on the trackpad or magic mouse surface takes only a short while to get used to. I am pretty much used to it now after a bit more than 24 hours.
   You just have to think of it as if the surface of the pad as pushing the document about, not the moving the view port. So you push “up” to move the document up through the window, rather than “down” to move the view port down the document, just like you do on an iPhone or iPad. Like that experiment where they put the inverting-prism glasses on a guy who at first staggers about wildly, but quickly learns to adapt (and when they take them off, having to relearn to see the world “normally”), you quickly get used to the new paradigm. … BUT … and there always was a “but” coming here … the keyboard behaves just like it used to. The “up” arrow moves the view port (or the cursor) up to the top of the document; Page Up likewise. There’s a disconnect here; the keyboard moves the view port, and the mouse and trackpad surface moves the document. For someone like me who spends a lot of time at the keyboard, both for coding, and for writing, this could be a bit of a gotcha, switching between these paradigms.
   This is not the first time Apple’s has this type of disconnect either. In Pages, the arrows move the cursor/selection as you’d expect, but the Page up/down keys move just the view port. I’ve found myself caught out before while writing a long document (as you tend to do quite a bit when you do postgrad study in a historical discipline!) when I’d hit Page Up a couple of times, saw the text on screen I wanted, then hit one of the arrow keys to adjust the view of the text slightly, only to find myself two pages down the text only a line or two from where I started!

 

2. Spaces is gone, replaced by Mission Control. I don’t think a lot of people will miss Spaces. I used it a lot, but then I’m coming off a Linux and X-window background, where the concept of multiple “virtual desktops” was not uncommon. I don’t find a lot of other 10.6 Mac users using Spaces much – my wife doesn’t seem to use it much on her iMac. Mission Control is nice, although I did prefer the  ”2D” approach of Spaces, to the “1D” approach of Mission Control. But Mission Control’s view of the open windows when you press “F9″ is just gorgeous. I did find it however rearranging the order of the Desktops, from 1,2,3,4 to either 1,3,2,4 or 1,4,2,3 and I only found out later what was triggering that (the preference “automatically rearrange spaces based on most recent use”). You can just drag them back into any order you want. You can also create and destroy additional desktops easily. The short cut keys ctrl-1 to 4 don’t seem to extend past the first four desktops (i.e. ctrl-5 doesn’t get you to Desktop 5 if you create it).

 

3. Choosing a desktop picture seems randomly screwy. You have to configure it for each new desktop. Often when I go to change it it insists that I had previously selected a picture I hadn’t selected and is not showing. Sometimes opening the Desktop Picture system preference pane changes the picture on the Desktop straight away (often back to the “default” photoshopped Andromeda galaxy). I can’t select pictures from Aperture anymore, I assume because I’m still running Aperture 2 (the ver 3 upgrade is running as I type).

 

4. I ran Launchpad once to look at it and quickly shut it off. If I wanted a desktop full of application icons I would have created one years ago. I know that it gives its a more “iOS” feel but I mostly use Spotlight to find programs I want to run (and I’m tending to even use search on my iPad to locate apps rather than flicking about for them).

 

5. The biggest, fattest, and ugliest p-ss-r is still the way that you can’t properly integrate iCloud calendars and address book to the Google versions of the same.
   I’m a dedicated Gmail user and I’m sticking with Mailplane. The Mac Mail.app is much improved with some cool features, although the new threaded conversation view totally sucks (wrong order guys, the oldest message should be at the top of the conversation)! Therefore  I still want the Gmail interface which I know intuitively and even more importantly, the use of the powerful Gmail filters, of which I have very many. While the Gmail tags can be exported via IMAP to look like regular mail folders, it’s not the same thing. The iCloud calendar, like the “upgraded” mobile me calendar before it, just hates to be also synced with something like Google. You can have a Google Calendar or an iCloud one, but you can’t apparently share between them. I was using Spanning Sync to sync “local” calendars to the Google ones but it doesn’t work anymore for iCloud-based calendars. For the moment I am going to try to use iCloud ones and see how it goes. The ability to add a calendar entry on my iPhone and have it sync automatically with everything else without having to do a sync is just too powerful a pull for me. I know that Google is now Apple’s mortal enemy, but guys, some things you just gotta cooperate on!

 

The Calendaring issue has existed for some time with mobile me anyway so I’m used to it being a bit fiddly. I was (probably naively) hoping that in Lion and iCloud they would have improved Google integration a bit.  Overall I’d rate my experience so far as 4/5.

I was off the client site so I couldn’t rely on a fast connection to their development databases. I just wrote a dummy function that was called the same as the real function with the same input and output parameters and instead of the complex function body it just wrapped a simple mock table of test data. Problem solved, Oracle XE to the rescue. But first you have get Oracle XE running on your Mac, this is what the rest of this article is about, because you can’t just download an Oracle XE edition for the Macintosh.

Virtualisation is great – use a Linux VM

However modern Virtualisation is your saviour. Put simply, you can use a virtualisation tool like Parallels, or my choice, VMWare Fusion, to run a virtualised version of Linux that contains the Oracle XE instance.

Because VMs can waste a bit of your local resources, luckily there is a specialised version of Ubuntu designed for running as a virtualised machine of this type. Its called JeOS (pron. Juice, apparently). It doesn’t have an X-window environment, just the shell, so it’s pretty lightweight and can run, with Oracle XE, in less than 512MB of memory. Perfect for getting a copy of Oracle XE onto your Macbook Pro.

It will however, eat up a couple of gigabytes of disk space, up to the maximum limit you choose for your disk size in the VMWare configuration. However it will only use the current amount of disk needed, as VMWare will expand the size of the image as needed (I’ll just assume that Parallels does something similar).

Setting it up – basic instructions

This page here – has a great set of instructions for getting JeOS installed and configured with Oracle XE on it. Follow the instructions there exactly – but only to the point where you install and configure Oracle XE – don’t go further than that.

Make sure you configure plenty of swap space as outlined in the instructions.

Setting it up on standard Ubuntu/Debian

If you are running a full Ubuntu or other Debian based instance, the instructions are somewhat simpler. Install it as per normal in your VM. But make sure your swap space is twice the memory you have assigned to the VM! Oracle XE demands things to be like that.

Add

deb http://oss.oracle.com/debian unstable main non-free

to /etc/apt/sources.list and then:

$ wget http://oss.oracle.com/el4/RPM-GPG-KEY-oracle  -O- | sudo apt-key add -
$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get install oracle-xe

These instructions were cribbed from here.

After installing and configuring Oracle XE

After you run the XE configuration (‘$’ represents the Unix shell prompt and should not be typed);

$ sudo /etc/init.d/oracle-xe configure

If you’re running on JeOS don’t yet make the machine “headless”! Or you might find there are issues with the “Apex” application. The problem is that the Apex application, which is a useful web-based administration program for Oracle XE (especially for developers who don’t want to be forced to use sqlplus for all their database administration), will only allow connections from localhost – and you don’t have X-window, or a browser, to access it (I don’t know if lynx will work with Apex and I wasn’t going to try).

Get SSH installed

First get SSH installed in JeOS so you can get to the command prompt remotely:

$ sudo apt-get install ssh

Find out the VM’s IP address

Now, if you type ifconfig (/sbin/ifconfig if that’s not found on your path) you will be able to determine the IP address of your VM running on your Macintosh. At this point you can connect to the VM using ssh from a Macintosh terminal window:

$ ssh username@ip_address

Actually, at this point you can go ahead and make the machine headless, if you want. I would recommend not to do that until you’re sure of everything you’ve configured.

Configure environment to run sqlplus

After you’ve logged back into the running Linux VM using ssh from the Mac Terminal, the next thing is you’ve got to get sqlplus access working to the XE instance you installed. Funnily enough, although the .deb file that is installed off the Oracle site creates an oracle user, it doesn’t in any way set that user up so you can use the command line tools. SO you can’t just su – oracle and get a functional environment.

Anyway, you will need to do two things to your environment; add the ORACLE_HOME environment variable and set up your PATH so it can find sqlplus.

$ export ORACLE_HOME=/usr/lib/oracle/xe/app/oracle/product/10.2.0/server
$ export PATH=${PATH}:${ORACLE_HOME}/bin

You should add these two lines to your .profile or .bash_profile file – probably best for the ‘oracle’ user that the installation will have created. But you can actually set this up for any regular user that you configure in this VM. You can also just type them at the command line to get them in your current environment, if you have to.

Configure Apex to accept non-localhost connections

The web-based administration software for XE, called “APEX”, only binds to localhost. This is a big hassle if your VM copy of Linux (like JeOS) doesn’t have a GUI, because you don’t have a browser (lynx/links excluded, I did not try those!).  However, you can make Apex bind to the “external” IP address for your VM, but you’ll need to use sqlplus.

To run sqlplus, do the following:

$ sqlplus system@XE
  Enter password:

Enter the password you specified at the ‘oracle-xe configure’ step above.

At the SQL prompt, enter the following command:

SQL> EXEC DBMS_XDB.SETLISTENERLOCALACCESS(FALSE);

Now you’ll have to stop and start Oracle to make the configuration active:

$ sudo /etc/init.d/oracle-xe restart

After which, if you type

$ netstat -tna

You should find a line

tcp        0      0 0.0.0.0:8080            0.0.0.0:*               LISTEN

This indicates a process is listening to the port 8080 on all IP addresses for connections coming from any other IP address. Assuming you specified port 8080 at the ‘oracle-xe configure’ step. Sometimes I use 8888 especially if I have a Tomcat instance in the same VM, as Tomcat will also like to run on 8080 and I’d prefer it if it did.

Test and use Apex

Test this connection in your browser, in my case, the address was 10.1.2.17, but you will have to substitute your own VM’s IP address – http://10.1.2.17:8080/apex. I like to make an /etc/hosts entry that points to this address as ‘oracleXE’. That way I can use a symbolic name in my jdbc connection strings and actually switch which instance of XE I am using depending which VM I’ve fired up without editing the jdbc configuration of the application under development – I just change the /etc/hosts entry instead.

Anyway once you connect to apex you can login using the user name and password you set up during your XE install and configuration process (same as you used for sqlplus). The users will be sys and system, you can use them to create new users to contain your databases for development.

The same IP address as above will be used to connect to your Oracle database from the programs you are developing. The default port should be 1521 and the SID should be XE.

Enjoy!

Tip – I found where it was installed with this simple series of *nix commands that should work on most Unix variants such as Linux, for anything on your ${PATH}, using the ‘which’ command:

CrazyMcphee:systems smcphee$ which mvn
/usr/bin/mvn
CrazyMcphee:systems smcphee$ ls -lrta /usr/bin/mvn
lrwxr-xr-x  1 root  wheel  24  9 Mar 22:50 /usr/bin/mvn -> \
  /usr/share/maven/bin/mvn

Following the information on this page as a template, here’s the procedure I used to upgrade to the latest version at time of writing, Maven 2.1.0:

CrazyMcphee:~ smcphee$ sudo su -
Password:
CrazyMcphee:~ root# cd /usr/share/
CrazyMcphee:share root# mv maven maven-2.0.6
CrazyMcphee:share root# cp -R \
/Users/smcphee/Development/systems/apache-maven-2.1.0/ \
maven-2.1.0
CrazyMcphee:share root# ln -s maven-2.1.0/ maven
CrazyMcphee:share root# exit
logout
CrazyMcphee:~ smcphee$ mvn -version
Apache Maven 2.1.0 (r755702; 2009-03-19 05:10:27+1000)
Java version: 1.5.0_16
Java home: /System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions/1.5.0/Home
Default locale: en_AU, platform encoding: MacRoman
OS name: "mac os x" version: "10.5.6" arch: "i386" Family: "unix"

You’ll note I used a symlink for the ‘maven’ directory to the ‘maven-2.1.0′ directory (the command ‘ln -s maven-2.1.0/ maven’ …). This is to allow me to quickly switch back to version 2.0.6 if I find any incompatibilities in my old POM files with the new version of Maven, by simply changing which directory the symlink points to.

• Uploading photos in bulk does not preserve the order (any order) in the Flickr stream. So your photostream gets whack out of order.
• When you upload photos it assumes that whatever event, album, or smart album you’re currently viewing the photos in should be created as a Set on Flickr. Oh and if the event, album or smart album contains any ‘special’ character that Flickr won’t like in a set name, it won’t do the upload and doesn’t tell you why not.
• Deleting the spuriously created Flickr Album in iPhoto means the photos are removed from Flickr. After iPhoto tells you it won’t actually delete any photos! (it means from iPhoto, not Flickr).
• I tried moving the photos to another Set using Flickr’s interface, and removing the now-empty spurious set. IPhoto then asked me if this remotely-removed set should be removed, when I answered yes, somehow iPhoto still managed to delete the previously-moved photos from Flickr.
• Did I mention that iPhoto flakes the photostream order?

Most of this will also probably apply to the Facebook plugin integration too. This is seriously poor software from Apple. It effectively lies to you about what it’s doing. Yet again proving that Apple doesn’t like to play nice with others. Do not use the Apple-provided iPhoto to Flickr integration. It’s stuffed.

[UPDATE. More information from a iPhoto-Flickr plugin author here: http://speirs.org/2009/01/30/on-the-flickr-support-in-iphoto-09/ ... ]