I finally did it.

After 15+ years of working with computers and 10 of those years in software/web development, I finally own a Mac! Not a virtual machine, not dual-booting, 100% MacBook Pro.

I received the machine earlier this week and I can honestly say that it hasn't been as bad as I thought it would be to "switch". Sure, the close/min/max on the left is a little weird, command+c to copy instead of ctrl+c takes getting used to, but overall it isn't that big of a deal. Apple's Find Out How page has been a great resource and mapping the bottom right corner of the touchpad to right-click has been a huge help.

Naturally, I installed ColdFusion Builder so I could continue my development and had to immediately follow Aaron Greenlee's instructions to make ColdFusion Builder sexy. I have the rest of the programs I use installed, or comparable equivalents, and haven't seen any reduction in productivity.

Since I still have a Windows machine I need access to, I use remote desktop at times, or Synergy has ben AMAZING for sharing multiple computers/monitors with one keyboard and mouse. Strongly recommend it.

Here is my current desk:
http://twitpic.com/2y2k9k

The real test will be traveling and presenting at Max (you did register for my session, didn't you?) and fully intend to leave my PC laptop at home.

The next few weeks should be interesting and if all goes to plan, I may be be a 100% Mac user soon...

Many times when we're debugging software or testing new functionality, we need to use an email address to register, over and over. Well, rather than create multiple accounts over and over, you can just use Gmail.

Let's say your email address is:

james@gmail.com
(it's not because they require 6 letter minimum so this is a good example)

If you append a plus sign (+) after your username, but before the @, you can enter any number or combination of characters and you will still receive the email at your normal Gmail address. For example:

james+test@gmail.com
james+test1@gmail.com
james+test2@gmail.com
james+testOneMillion@gmail.com

All of these would be delivered to james@gmail.com and save you from having to create one million email addresses.

We've all heard the best practices recommendation to load jQuery (or other JavaScript libraries) from a CDN, such as Google's for performance reasons. But what happens if, in the rare chance, Google's network is down or inaccessible? At a minimum, your site would start throwing errors & wouldn't function properly.

Fear not, all is not lost. Using the code below, we can try to load the file from the Google CDN and then quickly test if it successfully loaded. If it did load properly, we don't do anything different. But if it didn't, we can load the file from another location, assumingly our web server. Then our site will function properly and once Google's CDN is re-accessible, visitors will continue to benefit from the use of the CDN.