Quest for a Clean Machine

My last machine finally died a slow, painful death, so I have the opportunity to start with a new, fresh machine. As usual, I begin with high hopes of keeping things clean and easy to navigate, but I anticipate failure. In an effort to stave off that failure, I'll be blogging specific techniques (successful and failed) that I use to try and keep things organized.

My steps so far:

• Update the system to the latest OSX. Repeat until there are no updates left.
• Install XCode. As an iPhone developer, I downloaded and installed the latest XCode with iPhone support. Failing that, I would have just downloaded the latest from Apple.
• I then went into the Help menu in XCode, opened Help, and subscribed to Core Library, Java 5 API Reference, Apple XCode 3.1, iPhone OS, and iPhone OS 3.0.
• Install MacPorts.
• Install AppZapper. This is the first thing I haven't done before. AppZapper will remove other traces of an application, in addition to the application icon itself from /Applications.
• Install LaunchBar. This is equivalent to QuickSilver, but I prefer LaunchBar. After installing LaunchBar, go into the Advanced Tab in Help and select "Hide Dock Icon". This activates a hack that hides LaunchBar from the dock, while keeping it running.
• Install Google Chrome. This isn't strictly necessary, but I've been playing with Chrome for the past few days and the fact that it avoids long-term memory leaks has helped reduce the long-term degradation of a machine that eventually needs a restart.
• Install and setup Adium.
• Install bash-completion via ports. sudo port install bash-completion. After completing, add . /opt/local/etc/bash_completion to ~/.profile. Also, add +bash_completion to /opt/local/etc/macports/variants.conf. This will cause all future ports to also install their bash completion, if available.
• Install git-core via ports. This will include bash_completion, because we added it to the default variants above.
• Update Rubygems. gem update --system. Wait for it to bulk update your gems. This should be the last time you ever have to do this (thanks Eric!)
• Use Calaboration to sync my Google Calendars with iCal.
• Transfer music from backup to iTunes and setup iTunes to be using the correct user.
• Resync my iPhone with iTunes.
• Remove System Preferences and Time Machine from my dock.
• Trash downloaded files from my ~/Downloads.