This will have no interest to many of our readers, but I couldn’t resist writing this. Perhaps I will find it useful later.

As many of you may know, I finally made the “switch” and got myself a shiny new MacBook Pro. I love it. I think it’s a solid-piece of hardware with a pretty solid operating system. So now, on a daily basis, I use Mac OS X at home on the MacBook Pro, Kubuntu Linux 6.10 on my home server, and Microsoft Windows XP on my computer at work. I’m having the fun experience of discovering all the quirks on all three operating systems.

Throughout using the various operating systems, I found a program for Linux that lets me use remote file systems as if they were locally mapped on my computer (called sshfs, using the FUSE framework). This is a totally-awesome program for web development, as it allows me to have a locally-mapped folder that is actually a remote folder. Thus, I can edit and save all of my website-related files from the comfort of my Linux computer, using editors that are locally installed and not resorting to shell editors such as pico/nano or emacs (although I love emacs, even though I’m not knowledgeable of all its whistles and bells).

Most web development programs, such as Dreamweaver, rely on pulling down a copy of the website to your local computer, designing/developing the pages on your local computer, and then pushing them back up to the website. This is fine, but you have to worry about synchronization issues. They also often use slower and insecure protocols like FTP. I now don’t have to worry about those issues since I maintain a separate development server from the production servers, and I do all my editing/testing on a development server specifically set up to be a development server (instead of running a LAMP/MAMP/WAMP installation, for instance).

When I “moved” to Mac OS X, I got excited because underneath the glitz and glimmer it runs FreeBSD, a Unix variant. Linux and Unix, of course, have some shared history, and there was a FreeBSD port of sshfs. Unfortunately, however, it didn’t work on OS X. This was bad news to me since I had gotten used to working with sshfs and having my productivity soar.

Just today, Google announced a port of the underlying framework for sshfs (called FUSE, recall) for Mac OS X. Man, was I excited! I went and downloaded all the source and followed the very tedious instructions for building the silly thing, but in the end, it worked like a charm. This is great news and I plan on following the thread of development closely, as most of the commands only work in the console and are not by any means bug-free. But it does provide a workable solution to a problem that I had before. Thanks, Google!

If any one is still reading by this point, I’m amazed and thankful. Thanks to the geeks in the crowd (I think I counted one, maybe two) and happy coding/developing/etc.!