BrianJarrett.com

So, why a Mac? Well, I’ve done a fair amount of thinking about this decision and have come to a few conclusions. I need to upgrade within the next two years. My current box, although still quite snappy, will continually become slower and slower as software and operating systems (Vista, in particular) become more processor and memory intensive.

First of all, I had to consider my options. I have three options really; Windows, Mac, or Linux. I know there are other operating systems out there but for my personal machine at home none of the other options make sense. Given these three options I first needed to identify what I really wanted. Part of me, at least the non-conformist in me, wants to buck Microsoft completely. Sorry to disappoint all you Linux apologists out there but Microsoft is and will continue to be a major force in the computing world for some time to come. There is no escaping Microsoft completely, especially if you’re coming from a Windows world and have already come to use some Windows-only software.

But I still want to …read more »

Date::Manip doesn’t work “straight out of the box” on Windows due to the fact that Windows doesn’t have a timezone defined. I use Perl on both Unix and Windows and as a result I use Date::Manip on both systems as well. When I was a newbie this confounded me to no end when coding for Windows. I couldn’t seem to find a good solution for it but ultimately through research and determination I figured out how to fix it.

I create a system variable in Windows for the timezone and then …read more »