So last year I got a 17" Macbook Pro. I got it solely for the purpose of testing my team's web properties (www.asp.net. www.silverlight.net, www.windowsclient.net, www.iis.net)

Since I do allot of PHP programming and more and more PHP Developers are using MacBooks, I've started doing some Coding on the Mac and cross platform testing of PHP on the Mac and then on Windows.

It's funny, though I use my MacBook daily, I seldom use OSX. I've found the MacBook Pro to be a fine host for Virtual Machines.

I spend several hours every day answering customer email and more and more I'm asked questions about versions that I don't have installed on my machine due to limited disk space or compatibility issues. So, I've finally gotten to a place when I need to get virtualized so that I can support older versions of Visual Studio, etc.

So, I've decided to do this with my Mac.

For about $230 I got a 320 Gig 7200 RPM SATA Hards Drive and 4 Gig of RAM from NewEgg and a screw driver kit with the NECESSARY T6 screw driver.

I've upgraded Mac Desktop hardware before. G3s were easy, iMacs were less easy but my MacBook Pro was a pain in the ass on the hardware side.

I like my MacBook Pro hardware. It's "sleek". But not at all designed for end user hardware updates.

My Lenovo, Toshiba, and Compaq Laptops let me change hard drives in under a minute.

The MacBook pro is a MAJOR disassembly. Something like 25 screws. Disassemble the entire case, remove the keyboard, etc.

20 minutes minimum.

Having said that, you don't know how much Time Machine ROCKS until you install a new hard drive.

After I installed the new drive and the new memory (anybody want to buy 2 gig for their MBP ?), I fired it up and held my breath.

After booting from the OSX DVD, I provisioned the new drive and selected restore from backup.

Selected the Time Machine backup I made yesterday, and BAM! 90 minutes later I have my machine just as it was yesterday except faster and 200 gig of extra disk space.

No reinstalling the OS, no reinstalling (and finding the serial numbers) for all my software!

It "just works".

Note to Windows Visa Team, need that for Vista !!!

No question it's faster. Eclipse loads in just a few seconds.

Now - building VPCs !

Very cool !

Dies UAC give you a rash ?

It does me !!!

It's not that it isn't a good idea - it is. But I really wish I could train it or over ride it.

Maybe in a future Windows version - in the mean time, I'm trying Tweak UAC which provides a "Quiet Mode" for UAC.

[ Click HERE to get Tweak UAC ]

Note: UAC is a Security feature. Strictly speaking "Quiet Mode"  reduces your system's security.

AJAX opens many interesting new doors in terms of how we can tailor the user experience to the customers needs and how we can display content based on any number of state context.

This sometimes means fetching and manipulating HTML or XML in our server side code and sending it to the browser as execution time via an AJAX request.

Earlier today I was "sprucing up" a demo on implementing the "Partial Page Update Pattern" in preparation for a talk on AJAX Patterns that I'm giving at AJAX World next week in New York.

I always try to minimize my demo application dependencies and isolate the concept that I'm talking about as much as possible and I wanted to return some markup to my web page and dynamically update the DOM, but I didn't want to add a file or database dependency so I decided to just store HTML in a VB string.

I wanted more than trivial markup and HTML is time consuming to convert to a programming friendly string, what with all those quotes and all.

I decided to write a little quickie utility to do string conversion of cut-and-paste HTML when a little searching produced a free utility to do just what I wanted.

It's great for testing, demos, or if you have a manual cut-and-paste editing process. (But don't REALLY store HTML in your source code !)

Try it out.

[Just Click Here to get your copy - it's free.]

I love Office 2007, but recently I've had big problems with Word.

1.) I can't select text.....

It seems this is a common problem with a number of add-ins. In this case it was the Word plug-in for Snag-It 8 from TechSmith - when I uninstalled it, mouse support came back. Note that this is not JUST a Snag-It problem. A bit of searching on the web reveals that MANY plug ins can cause this problem.

2.) The more irritating but was that Word always crashes on exit. I tried disabling and removing all the add-ins, deleting all the auto loaded templates, even uninstalling and re-installing Office 2007 with no success. Just about the time I was about to commit to waste my day rebuilding my day - I found the answer in a newsgroup archive.

DO THIS !!!

• 1. Start Regedit.
• 2. Go to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\12.0\Word\Data
• 3. Right mouse click on the "Data" folder and delete it.
• 4. Close Regedit.

POOF - Word 2007 is back to it's awesome self !!