Snow Leopard

I've been intending to upgrade my laptop to Snow Leopard for ages. Particularly once I got Aperture 3, which I'm told works better. But I never quite got around to it, after all operating system upgrades are usually such a pain. (Although Ubuntu upgrades are much less painful than most.)

But yesterday I finally decided to bite the bullet as I needed to use some software that needs it. As usual I spent ages backing up lots of stuff that was already backed up, but I always get extra-paranoid around moments like this.

The actual upgrade seems to have gone well so far. Ironically Aperture failed to start, and I needed to download the 3.1 upgrade again and reinstall it. Then it launched fine, we'll see if I notice any better performance.

The biggest yak so far was software I'd installed via MacPorts. I tried several times to get MacPorts to rebuild its software but kept failing after long compiles and inscrutable error messages. My moans on Twitter (there's something compelling about sharing your pain on Twitter) led a flood of people suggesting Homebrew. I'd heard people speak positively of Homebrew before, and since the only thing I could think of to fix MacPorts was to completely eradicate and reinstall it, I decided to try the switch. Thus far, it's working fine.