Final eviction notice.

November 21, 2006

Early adoption is for masochists. Cohesive workflow and performance comes from being stubborn, sticking with what you know, and not drifting away from your comfort zone. Those who blindly accept and implement change are weak and tend to bend to peer pressure.

Yeah, ok. Whatever.

Six months ago I was done rationalizing. Enough dragging of feet. I was finally ready to say goodbye to Claris Emailer, Internet Explorer, Goliath, and very reluctantly, KeyQuencer. Most importantly, I simply couldn’t justify wasting any more time or testing any more patience whilst slogging about in OS 9. Every other machine I used was running either Panther or Tiger, with the exception of my box at home and my web server. The G4 tower under my home office desk received a series of transplants earlier this year. Now the web server is about to get the overdue upgrade it deserves. The dual processor 9600 which serves up these very pages isn’t OS X material, so a full hardware replacement will be necessary before the shift happens. There’s a spare G4 in the basement sporting a pair of 450MHz heaters. That’ll probably be enough to do the trick.

I’ve managed to hold on to OS 9 a lot longer than I had ever anticipated. But aside from the residual joy of a Finder that’s actually responsive and being able to set my folder lists in 9 point Geneva, the bloom is off. I was tired of punching the restart button whenever Internet Explorer hacked up a lung and hung hard. I was continually unimpressed with Korean-encoded spam causing Emailer to choke on its temp files. I have long since grown out of the quaint tidiness of 31-character file names. I expect to be able to stuff more than 2GB into Retrospect archives. I require a standards-savvy browser that isn’t named iCab.

The final smack of the reality mallet came down this week. The ten year old hardware running this server has been suffering from a worsening case of the “inconvenient freezies” … and there’s little hope of a full recovery. I’ve managed to patch things up — yet again — with the software equivalent of bailing wire and chewing gum, but it really is time to move on. Goodbye, Fortissimo. Hello, Tiger. So long, WebStar. Howdy do, Apache. Farewell, years of painstakingly modified host configurations and request rules. Very nice to meet you, platform migration headaches … oh, crap.

Ah, well. Wish me luck, regardless.

This item was posted by Grant Hutchinson.

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