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First of all, please don’t hate me. This isn’t a post by a trendy mac-using hipster who uses Photoshop exclusively. I’ve been using Windows since booting the machine opened a DOS prompt, and you had to type ‘win’ to get in. I went through Windows 3.1, 95, 98, ME, 2000, XP, Vista, 7. I’ve never been a user of Apple products (although the middle school I attended had a Apple 2e and some old iMac’s). My first experience with Linux was a copy of Mandrake 7.2 I purchased at K-Mart to fix my broken W98 install (damn you I-Love-You virus!) when I was about 14, a year later I was re-compiling the Linux 2.2 Kernel on a 90Mhz, 80MB, 2.1GB laptop.

The biggest thing I noticed about silicon valley (and even the city I was living in before; Ann Arbor, MI) is that EVERYONE uses an Apple. Of about 200 hackers I get the pleasure of meeting with every week, about 190 of them use either a MacBook Pro or a MacBook Air. These are some of the brightest developers of our generation, all with awesome ideas and highly employable app development skills.

If you’re rolling your eyes at that paragraph, chances are you haven’t given Apple a fair chance. You just rolled your eyes again, didn’t you?!

I used to hate Apple products. Then again, I used to love IE. But then I gave it a fair chance and I can honestly say I’m never going back. People are always telling stories about how they switched to a Mac and can never go back to a PC, but you don’t really hear about the reverse happening.

Anyway, the reason I personally made the switch is because I love LAMP, I need to work in a command line, and I hate it when I break a Linux machine (sudo apt-get upgrade; init 6; GRUB ERRORS). I will never switch away from a Linux based server, but for a development machine, I need something more stable. One argument Linux users have against OS X is that it doesn’t have a native package manager, but grab something like HomeBrew and you’re good to go. Thanks to this utility, I’ve got Node.js, Redis, CouchDB, and MongoDB all running locally with minimal effort.

Questions and Answers

Why not just install a virtual machine and run Linux in it locally? Emulation is usually not the right way to go about solving a problem. It does work great in the dedicated hosting world, but for a dev machine it means you have to boot a system within your system, which takes time and system resources. It does work, and can more accurately resemble your server environment, but the convenience just isn’t there.

Why not just run Ubuntu or Fedora or RedHat? I really like knowing that everyone using my OS has the same window manager, same kernel, etc, and that any binary app I download just runs without configuration and compilation. It’s really easy to download a dmg file and double click a program and get it working, which is awesome! Windows users do get this benefit, too.

Not compiling your packages makes them slow. I know! But this is merely a development machine. I would never run OS X as a server (or Windows for that matter). Fine-Tuning performance is a definite need on the server, but on the dev machine it’s not as important.

The version of PHP / Apache / Python / Perl / GCC shipped with the OS is outdated. This is easily alleviated by installing the HomeBrew package manager and grabbing the newer versions. They will be stored somewhere in the /opt directory and remain separate from the versions shipped by the OS. This way when the OS upgrades your packages aren’t destroyed, and if you install an unstable program it won’t interfere with your OS.

Closing Notes

OS X isn’t for everyone. There are some startup teams which build software that needs to run on PC’s, and you’ll see one developer on a Mac and the other on a PC. Mac’s also cost about double of their PC counterpart.

I had a PC with nice specs (and 45 minutes of battery life) which cost me about $1,300. I sold it a month or two ago for $500 after 11 months of ownership. My Mac is a lot nicer as far as specs go, and cost about $2,400 (plus $50 for 8GB of aftermarket RAM) and will probably sell for $1,800 one day. Mac’s tend to sell for more, which is nice.

Owning a Mac and owning a PC is a lot like believing in the tooth fairy and not believing in the tooth fairy. I will leave it up to the reader to figure out my parable.

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First, you’re going to grab an FM transmitter. Amazon has one with a range of a half mile or more for around $100:
0.5 W Fail-Safe Long Range FM Transmitter – CZH-05B – WITH NEW HI (0.5W) LO (0.1W)

Next, you’ll want a little computer to connect it to. Check out the Raspberry Pi (should be out by 2012, $35):
Raspberry Pi

Stick the whole thing in a box, install an audio player, connect a double sided audio cord, and let it broadcast!

If you want to stream audio from the internet, as opposed to playing a collection of MP3 files, you’ll want to grab a USB wifi antenna. This one has a very long range:
Alfa 1000mW 1W 802.11b/g USB Wireless WiFi Network Adapter With Original Alfa Screw-On Swivel 9dBi Rubber Antenna

Have fun!

Anyway, here’s the first thing I saw:

(You can click the graphic for a larger version). If you look closely at the URL, you’ll notice a ‘getpage’ GET paramater. You’ll notice that it contains a relative path to a document. You’ll also notice how it begins by using the parent directory operator (../). If you click around the site a little, you’ll notice the getpage paramater changing each time. This means they load pages by grabbing them from the filesystem and display them on the page, even with parent directories included. If you can’t tell by now, this is pretty bad.

Most web apps which make this mistake prepend the file to be included with a path, which means if you wanted to grab files from throughout the OS and in higher paths, you need to keep prepending the path with parent directory operators (../../../), but in this case, they are blindly grabbing files based on the GET paramater, so one can stick an absolute path operator into the URL and access any file on the OS (assuming you can guess the file paths). The ActionTec modem is running a super simple Linux based OS, and all the usual suspects are available:

Step 1: Try to retrieve password

Step 2: Look at the broken Comcast message

Another funny thing about paying Comcast… Apparently their billing keeps screwing up and I’m forced to alternate between paying two payments at the time and skipping a payment. Which is fine by me, as long as it doesn’t fuck with my credit.

Buy this laser module from Amazon for ~$13: Mini Blue Laser 405nm 5mw 8x13mm exclusive AixiZ

This is a pretty simple modification. Pretty much all we’re doing is sticking a battery pack, switch, and laser inside of this little plastic NERF gun. There’s a few tricky things to over come though; they did a good job shoving a lot of gun components in such a small little space. Thankfully, the handle is just the right size to hold a battery pack and the tip of the gun (after some drilling) barely holds the laser. Keep reading to see pictures and explanations of what I did, and be sure to watch the video above.

Here’s the gun. Notice how badass it is compared to the orange and yellow or the blue and yellow ones.

This is the guts of the gun. It’s just like the other NERF Maverick guns you’ve torn apart, so no curve balls.

Here’s a picture of the gun after I first started drilling into it. The hole should be just big enough for the laser to fit in it (mine was a little too big). You may need to dremmel the sides of the gun around the laser so that it fits. The plastic piece on the bottom of where the laser will sit in the above picture was removed completely. I had to run the wire through the front of the gun (there was too much complex mechanics in the middle to run the wire) and it was a pretty tight fit.

Here’s another shot of the gun being torn apart. The battery pack I found was just a little too big, so the plastic piece in the lower left needed to be drilled out (if not, the trigger wouldn’t slide back far enough for the gun to fire). Luckily, it wasn’t used to hold a screw, just for structural integrity. I glued the battery pack in on the bottom and left the top so that the cover could easily be slid on and off. In this picture you can see that the wires are attached, but that was just to make sure the electronics were still working, there will need to be more wire added before it is completed.

Here’s what the laser looks like inside of the gun, notice how tight of a fit it is. Expect to spend 15 minutes smoothing everything out and another several minutes lining the laser up and gluing it in. Be careful though, it can get off-centered when the gun is closed.

Here you can see the trickiest part… I had to dremmel a path for the wires to follow (otherwise the gun wouldn’t close properly). Also, the wires for the laser had to wrap from the back of the module to the front, and get run behind the orange barrel (a super tight fit). The barrel had to be dremmel’d a little too so that the laser module could sit next to it.

Here’s the sucky part; the wires were soldered and taped at the worst locations, right in the tight joints. This causes the gun to be a little too wide at the front and it looks a little shoddy. Also, notice how the laser sits right where one of the important front screw sits. I got lucky and that part of the gun looks normal, but it does make the gun a little weaker in that area. You can see where the switch sits, I looked all over the gun for a better location but couldn’t find one. It does sit behind the important trigger area and doesn’t interfere. The outside of the gun looks goofy by the switch though, since that part of the gun extrudes for show (that extrusion had to be smoothed down with a dremmel).

All in all it’s a pretty solid mod. I first planned on using a mercury switch so that the laser would turn on when the gun was set up-right, but it wouldn’t fit in the gun. Another thing that could make this cooler is if the trigger would activate the laser when half pressed, but this was a lot easier. I’d like to pain the gun some more so it’s entirely black and white, but I don’t have the patience!