Shiny New MacBook Pro

Wow. Just Wow. An almost seamless technology change. Almost.

The old MacBook Pro (dual core 4Gb RAM) was struggling to keep up. Struggling. It had been dropped once, so there was a ding in the corner. The trackpad "click" wasn't reliably clicking. It was shaky.

Nothing that couldn't be cured by a new Bluetooth keyboard and/or mouse. Awkward, but cheap.

Instead, I opted for a new quad-core 8Gb MacBook Pro.

Hence the Wow.

Here's how the upgrade worked.

I logged in once in the Apple Store to create an "Administrator" account. That's Not Me, but it allowed me to configure and register the machine.

Go Home.

1. Finish the last Time Machine backup of the old machine.
2. Move the Time Machine device to the new machine.
3. Use the Migration Assistant to recover everything from the old machine. There was 300+ Gb of stuff, so it took a few hours. Completely hands-off. Completely successful the first time.

Turn on WiFi (it's not always on for me, the story is complicated; it involves going to a coffee shop.)

Almost everything is perfectly normal and usable on the new machine.

1Password wanted me to login to the App Store to be sure the licenses were all up-to-snuff.

DropBox wanted me to login again to their server.

GPSNavX needs a license key. Their keys are delightfully short, but apparently encode a date or something and can't be reused easily.

Python3.3 was -- of course -- a non-starter. Not surprising, really, since it's not an "app" that can be moved neatly by Mac OS X Migration Assistant.

The Python download and install was painless. The ActiveState ActiveTcl is also important because I do use tinter and IDLE. The Python page is very explicit about the correct release of ActiveTcl for Mac OS X. And I still did it wrong the first time.

while the ActiveState web site refers to 8.5.15.0, the installer dmg link has been updated to download ActiveTcl 8.5.15.1.

Today's job, then, is to put setuptools (easy_install) and pip onto this Mac and begin the process of figuring out what's missing that I really use. I install a fair amount of stuff experimentally; stuff I don't really want or need.  And I always install it "for real" in Python's site-packages because I'm too lazy to simply download the Git repository and update the PYTHONPATH manually.

We're talking about docutils, Sphinx, Django, Jinja2, and SQLAlchemy. To get started. PyYAML and PIL are probably required, but I'll wait until I need them.