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.