scott

Back to GSM

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After a false start earlier this year with Cingular I finally made the switch and went back to GSM. I picked Cingular over T-Mobile because of higher speed data network and a better selection of phones. I still don’t like some of the business practices of Cingular but high speed data is high speed data. I went with the new Treo 680 with the Palm OS. My switch also means I decoupled my account with my companies corporate account. It worked out since we needed to give someone a data plan that didn’t have it already anyway.

I love the 680 but I have two issues. First is the fact that it is very sluggish sometimes with its input. Not all the time, but enough to be a pain. jayson said that his Treo 700p did the same thing but my 700p never did. The other issue is with poor battery life. It is not as good as the 700. I ordered a spare battery that should help, but I would like to make it a day without switching batteries.

Another good thing about GSM is that for $30 I took my locked Cingular Treo and had it unlocked. Not bad since the unlocked model costs $400, and Cingular only charges $199 (after rebate).

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My New Macbook

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I haven’t written about it, but over a month ago I decided to sell off my personal Macbook and pick up a new Core 2 Duo Macbook. It is still the black one. I am one of those people apple gets an extra $150 out of in order to get a black one. I supped it up to 2gig’s of RAM, and bought a 160gig hard drive to give me extra space. I am using it as my primary home computer. So far I am very happy with its performance. I will see what Apple has in store when they have Macworld. For now I don’t want to goto a desktop since the pro line is too expensive even for my blood. The mini is still a bit under powered, and the iMac is an all in one and I like having a KVM at my desk. I tried the iMac twice and both times I ended up getting rid of them because of the whole multiple computer need.

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Parallels & VMware Fusion Head to Head

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Late last week I finally received the email I was waiting for giving me instructions to download the VMware Fusion Friends & Family Beta. It is the same version I saw a demo of at VMworld. My first impression is that I wish it was faster. To VMware’s credit the issue is that by design the beta build has debugging on. It is a closed beta after-all.

My first use of the Fusion was a test for my own personal edification. I cannot get Parallels to sync my Treo 700P with an XP VM. The main reason to use a Windows VM on my Mac at home is to use the windows version of Quicken. I cannot stand the Mac version. This get complicated when I want to sync my Quicken with Pocket Quicken on my Treo. I sync everything else with the Mac, so I just need this one windows program to sync. Up until now I have a Windows XP desktop around with an XP VM on it for me to sync my Treo to. I took that VM with Quicken on it built and run on VMware Workstation 5.5.3 and simply copied it over to my Macbook. I told Fusion were to find the VM, and let it run. After a minute of updating the VM Tools the VM was working perfectly. Within 5 minutes I was able to sync my Treo with the Windows VM. The trick I found was that I disabled the USB sync in The Missing Sync, since I have that software start when the Mac starts. This trick didn’t work with Parallel’s but was exactly what Fusion needed to see the USB device.

My work requirements are a bit more intensive for what I need in a VM than my home needs. At work since I use a Macbook Pro, I still need to access some Windows only tools. From time to time I also need to simulate our users working environment, so I need a Windows XP VM with our corporate software build on it. Getting the software build working in Fusion was as simple as copying the XP VM we have ready with sysprep onto my laptop and turning it on. After joining it to our domain, and updating the VM Tools I was up and running. This template VM of Windows XP SP-2 was built to work with VMware workstation as well as Server, so I had no problem getting it running. The drag and drop copy between host and guest worked exactly as advertised. Rob wanted a copy after I showed him how I can move stuff around between my Mac and the VM. The auto resizing of the VM window was also very helpful for day to day work. I didn’t have any stability issues with the beta, but I did have a very noticeable performance loss in the VM. Debugging does give you a noticeable speed hit.

If I had to rate the Fusion Beta against the current final build of Parallels I would say Fusion has all the advantages except for the fact that it is beta, and Parallels has been out for months. Fusion beats out Parallels in basic features. Add on top of that the fact that I can use existing VM’s we build for Workstation & Server it puts Fusion over the top. Of course if I had to rate the Fusion Beta against the beta of the next update to Parallels that I just downloaded I am not so sure. The Parallels beta offers a conversion tool from VMware to their format. Helpful yes, but not as good as having full two way compatibility between Mac, Windows, & Linux versions of VMware. Then there is the Coherence feature. The few minutes I had to play with it tonight has me wanting to give it a full workout tomorrow at the office. They say a picture is worth a thousand words, so take a look at this photo posted on Flickr by someone to explain what Coherence does. And yes my friends it works just like as it looks. The video is a bit choppy, but it is beta.

So the jury is out on what features VMware will add to Fusion as it gets closer to release. Parallels also seems to be adding more features as they roll out updates. For me, if VMware can compete with Parallels on features they have the advantage simply because of the interoperability between their other products. For now I look forward to the next versions of both Beta’s. More opinions as I get them.

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The Waiting…

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At VMworld I signed up to be in the friends and family beta of Fusion, the VMware product for the mac. I wonder if anyone that went to VMworld and signed up for the beta actually get their email invite to the program? They said to look for the information this week, and it has been over 2. I am not sure if I am being impatient or I got forgotten about:(

I thought about that the other day when jayson was building some VM’s for Parallels to test some new linux software on his machine. I wanted to try it out also, and thought if I had Fusion I could just use the virtual appliance we were trying to replicate in the first place.

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Vista on VMWare Update

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Apparently the newly released version of VMware Workstation 5.5.3 provides experimental support for Windows Vista. I already downloaded both 5.5.3 of workstation and my MSDN copy of Vista. Now I need to find time to try it out and see if it works. This hopefully solves some of the issues I brought up with last post.

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Windows Vista on MSDN

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It looks like Microsoft finally got the Windows Vista RTM ISO on MSDN. I kicked off a download of the DVD iso. Even on my cable modem it says it will take another 11 hours for the 2.5 gig iso to complete. I want to say that is huge for an OS, but Red Hat, Suse and Apple all ship now on DVD.

I am not sure what test box I will put Vista on at work. I want to first try and get it into a VM, but from what I have read it is not fully supported with VMware Workstation 5.5.3. I might have to wait for a Workstation 6.0 beta. There is a hack for getting it to work on VMware Server, but if I get it working I want to get it working correctly. My main focus is getting it in a VM and testing how much resources it needs to see if it can be used as a Virtual Desktop. My gut is saying we will need to stick with XP for the foreseeable future, but I want to at least try.

My next task is to see how the final RTM version performs on our new HP desktops we just deployed. RC1 performed ok, but I want to see how the final version handles. In reality I don’t see using vista at all anytime soon. That is a major departure from my opinion of XP as it was coming out, when I couldn’t get the ISO fast enough.

Further thoughts on the final release once I have it installed somewhere.

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VMware Fusion

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While at VMworld I got to sit through a demo of the new VMware product for the Mac. They are calling it Fusion as a code name now. It looked pretty cool. is it better than Parallels? I am not sure yet. It has allot of things going for it. For one I use VMware products on other platforms and the VM’s being compatible is a huge plus. I don’t need to build new VM’s when I want to run something on my Mac.

Drag and drop between guest and host was also awesome looking. Parallels has nothing like that. The VMware product also appears to have better USB support. Using the iSight camera in the VM was nifty but with iChat and Skype on the Mac natively I don’t know what I would use it for. Well maybe the Cisco video conferencing software with Call Manager so it might be worth it. If I can get my Treo 700P to sync to the VM on my Mac with Fusion I will be completely sold. I cannot get Parallels to do that even with the latest build.

I will say that I am a bit biased for the VMware product (just because of the interoperability with their other products), so unless Fusion really sucks I will be using it. That doesn’t mean that I won’t be critical of it if I have issues with it! So far I like what I saw in the demo. I hopefully will be getting access to the closed beta they offered people while at VMworld. From what I saw it looked pretty stable. The only issue I saw was that NAT networking was the only network option available in the beta. Bridged networking will come in a later build.

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Lack of a Vox Update

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I have yet to find a way to import or export blog entries on the new Vox system. There may be a way but I haven’t found it. If I can’t find something like that in 15 minutes on a site like that, there is no point in continuing to look. Realistically I don’t think it exists. For now I will stick with Six Apart’s other blog platform, typepad. you know the system that you are reading right now. that means that some of my posts regarding work will remain on a private site. Yes, there are in fact posts that are not published to the world right now. not as many recently as I would have hoped, but they do exist. As I sometimes tell Kai, ask me about them after I leave (my current job). until then, no chance they will see the light of day. Nothing overtly bad or anything, just it was clear that certain things should not be public.

Ok, enough on this update. My hands grow tired. More later.

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Core 2 Duo Macbook

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I have no self control. I think it simply boils down to that. That explains why I went out and bought a brand new Core 2 Duo Macbook (in black). My Macbook (Core Duo) is only 6 months old, but it is now in the process of going up on eBay. This Macbook is now the latest in a long line of Mac laptops I have purchased in recent years. It is my second Macbook, and is by far the most powerful computer I have had (desktops included) so far. I upgraded it to 2gig’s of ram (the extra memory from the last Macbook was usable in this one). I also got a fast 180gig hard drive upgrade for it!

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VMworld Update

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I had a great time at VMworld. I learned allot about what the topics I went out to the convention for. Now I need to put concept into an actual working system. I also have to convince the powers that be that they should spend the money on some of these projects because the have a great ROI in the long run. More details on some of my ideas later.

I also signed up for the beta of version 2.0 of Ace. They claim that it will work on Linux hosts, so that makes it a viable option for one of the security enhancements we are looking at. More news on that if/when we get the beta.

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