super-cooper » windows

Windows on my Mac with VMWare Fusion

Chad — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 03:18:37 +0000

I’ve been running Windows XP Pro on my MacBook Pro for a few weeks now, and I have to say, I’m quite pleased. I have XP installed as a BootCamp partition, and at first, I booted into XP to do any GIS work. Lately, however, I’ve been working strictly in the VM, and ArcGIS works like a champ, a little bit slower, sure; but still quite reliable and stable. For the VM, I have allocated 1GB of RAM (I’m maxed out at 2GB, I have a first generation MBP) and both processors. I installed a Ubuntu Gutsy VM the other night, and that is one sweet little package. I’ll definitely be playing around with that some more soon.

IPython – first thoughts

Chad — Sun, 16 Mar 2008 14:45:56 +0000

After I got back from the ESRI PUG a few weeks ago, I installed and started playing around with IPython. I gave a talk at the PUG, and afterwards met a guy who told me I had to try it. Boy was he right. IPython is worth its weight in gold just on the surface for its color-coding of text and history access (hit the up arrow key to get the previous commands, like at the DOS prompt). Another gem is that you can CTRL-C code from your editor and CTRL-V it into the IPython prompt – nice. I plan on playing around with this some more, and need to install it on my Mac as well – after the impending Leopard upgrade I need to do.