I have always had a home office because working from home I found I needed a place that was isolated from the rest of the house. I did not enter the office very much after work hours, and the same in reverse. Since I am no longer working out of my home, I have not entered the home office in the last month. Also meaning my desktops in there have not been booted since. These days the last thing I want to do is come home form work and sit at a desk for any longer, and if I need to use the computer I would much rather grab my laptop and sit on the couch to crank out some code. Now I am sure that my home office will see some use in the future, some late night coding sessions, but nothing like what I used to do.

Lately I have been toying with converting over to the Mac, which again has me wondering what do I do with all of those desktops? I am not going to completely convert over to the Mac, ever, but I would be very content with two laptops that I could dock into my monitors at my desk. This is a lot simpler setup then the two desktops and two laptops I used to have to run for my job.

Lately I have been wondering if the desktop is dead. Do you use a desktop at home, or do you just use a laptop? Granted that desktops are generally more powerful than desktops, but I am not sure I need that power at home anymore.

So let me know, what kind of setup are you running at home?

So far my experience with Apple products has been limited to a fifth generation iPod, and most recently a 3G iPhone. Today I started my new job and last week they offered me the option between a PC and a Mac. I have used the Mac before and have been interested in starting to develop for OSX and the iPhone, so I thought why not and went for the Mac.

As a little bit of background at home I am running a Windows Home Server, Windows Vista Ultimate machine, a Windows Vista Ultimate laptop, and a Windows XP machine. This is what I get for developing Windows based software for most of my career.

All this morning I have been configuring, customizing, and setting up my new MacBook. So far I am really enjoying it. I really enjoy the battery life, which compared to my laptop at home is decades longer. I like the portability of the MacBook as well, which again my laptop at home is a tank. Not to neglect the software side of things, I am relatively sure that it has taken me less time to setup and configure this Mac than it has to configure my PCs in the past. Granted, the machine came preloaded with some software and updates and I am not setting up the same software, but overall I have found the process smoother and had no errors or problems along the way.

The only thing I am worried about getting tied to the Mac is having to replace my hardware at home. My monitors and keyboards would be the only thing that I could continue to use, my other machines would probably be shelved or donated. But this is all in the future, we are only on day one.

Yesterday it was reported that Google “walked away” from the advertisement deal that it made with Yahoo back in June. As with a lot of big stories like this these days, there was also a rumor that an internal memo was sent out about Jerry Yang stepping down from Yahoo. Something that not surprisingly turned out not to be true.

On Google’s Blog, Google says that they ended the deal because of antitrust concerns. Oddly enough this is what everyone was concerned about at the beginning. So the question is did Google purposely strike this deal with Yahoo knowing that later it would back out just so Microsoft did not acquire Yahoo? Part of me thinks not because the plan backfired as Yahoo is now even cheaper and more desperate. But the other side of me looks at the history of Google and the fact that they have never been the one to fight antitrust “concerns”

To me it looks like Yahoo is on it’s way to being the next AOL, always around but no real purpose and revenue. Microsoft could swoop back in and pick them up for a deal, but Microsoft continues to show that they are not interested. Either way a sad day in tech.

I love Google Chrome, and was thinking about keeping it around even though there are not a lot many plug ins for it yet. However, some things are holding me back.

First I do not like the Google Updater that it makes you install. There are ways to manually remove it, but somehow it always seems to be running in the background. I do not need constant updates to Google, let me use my browser in peace.

Google Chrome also does not appear to use your host file. Google is checking with it’s own DNS server instead of going off of your hosts file. Why is this a big deal? For developers. We have a sandbox server that we use to build websites before they are rolled out. We direct our domains to these servers with our hosts files. Chrome never allows us to get to our sandbox servers via our host file.

I appreciate Google’s efforts to innovate, and change things up. But I would appreciate some sort of option for both of these above. I can live with both of them, but options in general are very nice. It seems that Google does not want to give the user very many options. I hope future revisions get better.

Alright everyone, I know the economy has us all down on our luck and pinching pennies where ever we can. A friend of mine, Taylor Barr, is trying to raise enough money to go to LaWeb ‘08. The best thing to invest in is yourself, and Taylor is going over seas investing in himself and his talents. One of Taylor’s many talents is video, and he has put together a very high quality video to promote his fund raising. I have included the video below, if you enjoy donate something, anything you can.

Paris on Le Mime from David Parsons on Vimeo.

7 Days ago I moved all of my sites and domains over to Media Temple. Media Temple is arguably the industry leader in grid hosting, not to be confused with cloud services.

So far I am very, very happy with their service. It is good to sit back and worry about the other aspects of business, and know that your hosting needs are taken care of. I do not need to worry about memory usage, bandwidth caps, CPU spikes, or anything.

I have moved hosting providers a lot in the past. I can say that my move to Media Temple was the easiest and smoothest yet. I used to prefer “professionally made” control panels like Plesk. Then I would just use remote access to control the server. Media Temple has the best of both worlds. You have root access, and their control panel is definitely top of the line. They have done a good job of putting any feature you need within the click of a button. Even complicated tasks like switching PHP versions for a specific domain is as easy as clicking a button.

With Media Temple to proof is in the pudding. Their control panel is never slow, and you have to figure that they are hosting it on their grid services themselves. I have dealt with hosting companies custom control panels in the past, usually they are slow and crappy.

The only trouble I had during setup was setting up Google Apps for my domains. The values you input into the DNS administrator are a little different than what you would insert into other control panels. Fortunately this article provides you with a very straight forward way to set it up. I lost email for about a half a day before I realized the values were different.

I have not activated my Ruby grid container yet, mostly because of a lack of time. I am very excited about the grid containers they offer. It is an added bonus to be able to code in Ruby on Rails.

All in all I am very happy with Media Temple, and you cannot beat the price. I plan to stay month to month for another three months, and then I can save even more by paying for a quarter or a year. Definitely check them out.

BrightKite is one of hottest mobile social networks out there right now. It has been a huge asset in meeting new people since moving to Raleigh, NC. BrightKite has been working hard on a new iPhone application, and last week it was released to lots of praise. The iPhone application lets you check in using GPS tracking, which saves loads of time when travelling from event to event. I have been using the application since it was released and find myself using BrightKite a lot more because of the ease of use the iPhone application brings to the service.

If you do not have an invite to BrightKite, please leave a comment below and I will get one out to you. First 10 to comment get invites, after that I am out.

Download the iPhone application today, I am sure it will become one of the most popular iPhone applications very soon.

Another summer is over and here in beautiful Raleigh, NC. the colors on the trees are starting to change. To celebrate yet another fall beginning, we are giving 25% off our award winning products NetGrid Studio and GMail Desktop Studio.

You can use the coupon code BCSFALL to receive your 25% off either NetGrid Studio or GMail Desktop Studio. Alternatively you can use the purchase links below and the coupon code will automatically be applied. But hurry, offer ends November 16th, 2008. We hope you have a great fall, and make sure to stay up to date with all of the latest news at BlueCrestStudios by signing up for our newsletter.

NetGrid Studio

NetGrid Studio gives you an inside look into your network connection. Internet Service Providers are playing all sorts of games these days with “unlimited” and “always on” network connections, when really that is not the case. Many ISP’s have also been found to be packet shaping and throttling network connections for certain protocols like Bittorrent.

NetGrid Studio is also great for computer users, parents, or small businesses that wish to know how much through-traffic there is on a certain network or computer.

NetGrid Studio follows both common and IEC units of measurement. Total information is gathered with a background service, which makes it so you do not have to be logged in to a user in order for NetGrid Studio to monitor your network connection.

GMail Desktop Studio

GMail Desktop Studio brings all the features of GMail to your desktop. With a system tray notification system, a built in browser, and the ability to handle mailto links: GMail Desktop keeps your GMail accounts within a mouse click. GMail Desktop Studio allows you to monitor multiple GMail or Google Apps for your Domain accounts. The system tray notification system allows you to see how many new messages you have without any interaction from you. From the new mail notification window you can click on any of your messages to instantly view.

GMail Desktop Studio is great for those who want quick access to their GMail accounts, and instant notification of new mail.

Toward the end of the day yesterday, the GMail team announced that emoticons have come to GMail and Google Chat. I have always love GMail, from the second I transferred my mail services over. I really like how Google has been coming out with feature after feature. Even better under “Labs” it is good that I can turn on and off what I want.

As of this morning I do not see emoticons in either of my Google Apps accounts, but hopefully soon they will roll these out to the Google Apps customers.

A very long time ago I was planning on moving to a grid hosting platform, and planned on using a company called Mosso. I never got to the second part of my write up because I never ended up trusting Mosso enough to move all of my sites over. At the time Mosso was having all sorts of troubles with up times, email, and managing their services. I have not looked into the company since, so I can not say if these troubles continue.

Lately I have been once again looking to make the move to grid hosting. Grid hosting offers a lot of benefits, one of them being cost. The cost for me will be over a 50% savings, and you can not argue with those numbers.

My company of choice this time around is Media Temple. You might have heard of them, if not check them out they are a great company. They host very large websites like TechCrunch. I am very excited about this move for several reasons:

• The cost savings
• The scalability factor
• Getting back on the LAMP stack
• The ability to use both PHP 4 and 5 (I hate that some things still do not support 5)
• Support for Ruby on Rails. I would love to start developing in Ruby again, and am stoked that I now not only have a host that supports it, but encourages it.

Media Temple has their act together. Sign up was a breeze, activation was very fast. Little to no problems at this point. This post is being written on the new hosting platform. One thing I have noticed is images are slow to load here at Code and Coffee, but I am not sure that this is not related to the ISP I am on at the moment.

I will continue to let everyone know how the transition goes. Smooth sailing so far.