Technology

My Mistery Trip

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I am writing this on the return leg of my “semi” mystery trip. I say that because no one at work really was supposed to know what we were doing this week. Apparently others are not good at keeping things quiet. I told who needed to know in my group but they always are privy to corporate secrets. that is just the nature of the jobs we have, but the rumor mill is running rampant it seems. I wrote a post all about exactly what we are doing, but it is on my private work blog right now. There it will remain until I am long gone from my current employer. I feel that the smart way to write about stuff from work. I want to write about it but cant publish it.

I can say we were doing some research. It was a very busy 3 days, and then we took yesterday to relax a bit. On this trip we ate very well. Man the food was good. Traveling always lets you eat well and gain weight. I also got the chance to see some really cool technology in action.

We rented an Iridium phone for the week because we were concerned about mobile coverage and the price of service even if we had good signal. It turned out that the Iridium phones are huge, and only really work outside. On the flip side my Cingular GSM phone actually worked so we simply used that. I don’t want to look at my bill this month since the price per minute was very high, but when you need to make an important cal you need to make a call.

I went the almost the entire trip without needing my migraine medication. Right before I got on the plane I felt like I needed to take something. At least I had a good run without the extra medication.

The trip out was uneventful. our short mini trip was nice. I have to say even smaller foreign air carriers have better service than american carriers. In the US you would never see a hot breakfast on an hour long flight but we had one.

On the return trip I went from having an asle seat in the very back of the plane to a decent window seat in an exit row. And I actually did someone a favor with that change. Go figure. The leg room is nice, especially since the carrier we are on was cramped on the way down. Hopefully the remainder of the trip will be uneventful.

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Parallels vs Vmware Fusion Update

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Vmware released the public beta of its Fusion product since I wrote about the closed beta I had. In that time Parallels has come out with 2 more beta versions of their software. The last time I wrote I said that the Parallels beta had the leg up in features over the Fusion product. With the latest versions of each software now installed and running on my Macbook Pro I can say for now that Parallels still has the lead. I still think that VMware will eventually win the feature race, but for now Parallels is on top. Why you might ask? Coherence mode for one still rocks in my book. Also the new ability to create a shortcut on your mac that when launched will run a VM and then open the specified application. If that wasn’t enough Parallels now lets you see each application that you run in a VM its own dock icon. They also are on par with VMware now with there ability to drag and drop applications between VM and host.

VMware Fusion still works better in my opinion with USB devices. I cannot get my Treo to sync with Parallels but it worked with Fusion since day one. Unfortunately Fusion is still slow. Partly due to the mandatory debug mode they impose, but it is still slow. Hopefully the production version will be allot faster.

I will write more as I have more feedback to give.

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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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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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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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