Learning to program on OS/X

Ages ago, I used HyperCard on a Mac SE.  Now, I'm trying to get back into programming on an iMac running Leopard.  My first observation, Holy Cow! This is a fast workstation.  This absolutely blows away my workstation at work.  At work, I'm (still) running XP with Office 2003.  Outlook is a complete hog: between Outlook, Windows checking for updates, and virus scanning, just logging up takes a few minutes.  All day long, I am listening to my hard drive chatter as I work on as Pentaho BI Server site, so once I get Tomcat, Eclipse and a browser or two running.  I boot up, log in, and go get coffee.  

But on my Mac, Netbeans 6.5 comes up faster (under 15 seconds).  Learning Grails is a joy with a workstation that responds quickly.  I am quite happy to pay my 'Apple Tax',  I get OS/X, iLife and iWork.  I also get a faster JVM.   The biggest downer is that I can't run IE, so its hard to tell if my valid web pages will break on the world's dominant browser. 

To get started, I followed these instructions at ShiftEleven to get up and running with Apple's developer tools, the MacPorts tools and PostgreSQL.  However, I didn't want to start PostgreSQL by default.  So rather than using lauchctl,  I'm just going to type  

sudo -u postgres/opt/local/lib/postgresql83/bin/postgres -D /opt/local/var/db/postgresql83/defaultdb

in iTerm.