Well, it’s into spring and summer is fast approaching here in SoCal. Things are in flux as always but in a few weeks, there may be some big news listed here. How is that for a teaser?

The more I play with Parallel’s software, the more impressed I am. I have two virtual systems on my Intel right now, WindowsXP and Fedora Core5. Both run pretty well but panic now and then. So there is a new beta out today, beta 6 so tomorrow, installing we go again. Each time it gets better.

I did a quick intranet web site for work the other day, the irony is that the site is an internal resource for hosting Windows script files Built on a Mac of course. I hit some walls with the limitations of the templates of iWeb but I did find a way cool resource that offers the XML code as documented code, free blank templates, graphics and some cool templates for sale. Drop by 11Mystics and check out the site for goodies!

How many times has your ISP screwed up and lost mail for you? They crashed their own servers, lost their internet connection or worse? Mine did this several months ago, they blew up the RAID, lost a drive, lost power and then had bad backups. No site and no email for three days. So now I run a Mac mini as my email server but I still use the ISP for now to piggyback some spam filtering since I have to pay for the site anyways. But I went to DynDNS and bought their MailHop service. The MailHop service puts in a secondary MX record so when the first one fails, the second one will take delivery at their servers and store it for a few days until it can be delivered. In my case, I pointed it to my own email server directly. So my ISP will be first and then MailHop takes over if and when they drop off line again. Cheap insurance when you run a biz off email. They are not the only ones who do this, but they have been very reliable for me for the past year.

The iSite has been absolutely reliable with the Belkin powered firewire hub since I installed it a few weeks ago as I mentioned. Everything so far has worked on the hub without a problem.

I have spent the past week playing with Parallels for OSX which is a VMware like software package for forty bucks (special right now) that gives us a way to run a virtual PC (windows, Linux , Solaris etc) on OSX. It’s beta right now but looks very promising. It is for OSX on Intel only since it works to hook to the hardware using kernel level calls and some special features of the Intel chip.

Even in beta, the speed of Windows is very good and I did manage to break it by trying to run LiveOffice on XP in the virtual session. To it’s credit, it tried valiantly to do it for about 15 minutes before it gave up the ghost and crashed.

I was not able to get XP with SP2 installed but I did get XP installed and then apply SP1 to it. I will do SP2 later this week. I also had to bump my Intel box from 512Meg of RAM to a gig and things worked alot better. I imagine it would ALOT better if I had a dual core instead of my hacked P4 but beggers cant be choosy at times like this. I did put in my pre-order to get the ten dollar discount

Everything I’ve tested so far on XP works as expected. I did not like that all the various parts like NIC cards are not installed by default. This is most unlike VMware and I think a problem. They should default to common parts that almost everyone needs like a NIC, Sound etc. I caused a few crashes because Windows died trying to join a domain without a NIC in place and Windows is too stupid to warn about it.

I will say this sure beats having to dual boot and do that nasty partition crap. I have heard rumors that VMware is coming out with their own version which would be slick since I’m a big fan of their Linux and Windows software.

My iSight camera finally came back from Apple repair after close to 5 weeks. And then it’s a replacement, not the original camera. So to refresh you all, my original camera worked when I brought it home but after a while, it stopped. I’m not sure when since I dont use it alot but it would sit there and constantly click on and off and it killed iChat to the point I had to reinstall iChat. That is a whole another topic, that reinstall. But anyways, I get the new camera and it works for the first few minutes till I update the firmware. No mas.. gone.. kuputz. The update killed it.

Move the clock forward a few days, I get a new 2.5 drive with USB and Firewire. The drive works on my MacEll OSX clone and the Mini and the iBook but refuses to spin up on the iMac. So I get a powered firewire hub by Belkin and try it, success. Then I get to thinking about the camera and how warm it gets which means how much POWER it’s trying to suck down. I hook the iSight up to the Belkin, and.. SUCCESS!! The camera is alive and well.

So, the iMac G5 has weak firewire power, too weak to drive the new firmware in the camera and some other devices. But the Belkin makes it all better.

Also, get a copy of iGlasses to make it work better than new. This software adds alot of features to the camera that Apple should have added but didnt. And at 9 bucks, the price is great

I knew Apple had this up their sleeve. Much like Crossover for Linux, Apple today started a public beta of a “emulator” to run a virtual session of Windows XP on an Intel based Apple. Sort of a virtual PC in reverse. Yes, I know you can buy a crippled version of Virtual PC from the Evil Empire but MS has never taken the time to really make it work well. Apple has decided to include this “virtual PC” into the next release of OSX as part of the OS. As someone who uses Crossover with Xandros, it’s always been impressive on how well it works and how fast it is. Inquiring minds want to know if Apple has borrowed the same idea of using libraries for the API calls rather then emulate the hardware. I would think they could given both OSX and the new Virtual PC use a common Intel base. Apple can probably give direct access to the CPU for certain tasks which would add speed to the virtual session. Anyways, the link is up on Apple’s site but it’s dead right now, I expect by midmorning it will be live and I will be one of the masses trying to get my copy going today

Update:

I’m soooo dissappointed with Apple. Here was the chance to really shine and all we get is a lousy but fancy dual boot method from within OSX. Crap!! I would think someone would translate WINE to run on Drawin/BSD so we can have a real way to run Windows apps within OSX and not have to leave our OS of choice. Better luck next time Apple.