Okay, if I get up before the sun comes up on vacation to catch up on my blog, does that mean I’ve joined the ranks of the blog-addicted? I mentioned in a previous post that I converted to a MacBook Pro this summer for my new job at Furman. Faculty in Math and Sciences have both Macs and PCs, so I figured I could best support them with a Mac running a VM with Windows XP, using Parallels.
There are many times I need to be running a local web server to experiment, and since I was more comfortable with PC, I’d run WAMP (an easy installation for Windows of Apache, MySQL, and PHP). After wrestling with some issues running MediaWiki on WAMP/Windows, I decided to give MAMP (Mac, Apache, MySQL, and PHP) a try. Now I have one more reason to hang out on the Mac side. This is way easy! It literally took 5 minutes for me to get MAMP set up and install MediaWiki on my laptop. Here’s a shot of the MAMP control window.
I don’t do much Java coding now (I used to do a lot), but this summer I was able to set up Eclipse as a Java IDE on the Mac side easier than on the PC. I can’t believe I’m saying this, but maybe my next personal purchase will be a Mac! Rhapsody is one of the few reasons I fire up parallels now. The web client just doesn’t do it for me.
GIS, Data Visualization, and Teaching 
Mike W,
Did this connect w/ no issues when you did the installation? I keep getting a ‘can’t connect’ error. It can’t connect through the identified socket. Sorry to bother, I know you’re not the help desk!
I didn’t have any problems, but if something like IM has a hold on the port you specified that would cause a conflict. If you launch MAMP and select ‘preferences’ you could try changing the apache port to something like 8885 (or something similar) and see if you can get to your server with localhost:8885. A colleague had skype takeover his WAMP port just yesterday. But why use a windows product, when you can go mac? 😉