Mac

Easter Sunday Shopping

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Today I took advantage of the Easter holiday to do some cleaning, and some shopping. I have been pondering upgrading my computer monitor for some time. Apple just lowered the prices of their flat panels this week so it sparked my renewed interest in upgrading. I have a 20″ Apple Cinema Display, so many would say why in the world would I need to upgrade? I believe you can’t have enough screen real-estate. My vision isn’t so hot so the bigger the screen the better. I was looking at several 23″ & 24″ models during the week. Most of them are noticeably cheaper than the Apple ones, but they don’t look anywhere near as nice as the Apple displays. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to shell out $600 for a big piece of ugly black plastic.

Since I was on the fence with my decision I went down to the Apple Store. The 5th ave. store in Manhattan is open 24/7/365. And sure enough on Easter Sunday there was a line to get down the stairs into the store. It was packed. I found a 20 & 23″ display to compare side by side. The 20″ looks small compared to the 23″ one. Of course the 30″ is massive, but none of my computers could handle that display. I also like to put my desktop and laptop on a KVM and no KVM that I know of would ever handle the resolution of the 30″, so that one was out of the running for the foreseeable future. After standing in front of a 23″ display and browsing on the web for a few minutes I was convinced that this was the monitor I wanted, and that it was well worth the hefty price tag. I bought the monitor and caught a cab home and was up and running with the new display in 20 minutes. So far it is fantastic.

I have cleaned up my old 20″ display and put it back in the original packaging (yes I try to keep all of that stuff since I know I upgrade more often than most people) and it is ready to be sold to a needing friend or ebay.

Once done setting up the new monitor I continued to clean up my apartment. I pulled my Mini I had been using as a DVR computer. It was working great but I decided that wasting a Vista license and my Mini as a DVR was not worth it. I put back the old DVR box, but realized that the power supply was making rather nasty sounds. I never realized how bad it was until it was off for a week and then I turned it back on. I ended up pulling that computer also and I will use my Cable box DVR for now until I figure out what I want to do with the computer DVR setup I have.

Now I am off to mop and empty my dish washer!

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Battle of the Mac Browsers

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I read a few reviews regarding performance showdowns between several browsers on the Mac. I was very surpised by the results. Both reviews I looked over said that OmniWeb was the fastest browser overall. I currently use Camino, and I like the general functionality of it, but I was not happy to see that it performed horribly compared to other browsers. Safari scored well, but one of the tests did note they used a “daily” build of the browser that is significantly faster and newer version of the RTM version currently going around. I personally don’t care about using some kinds of beta software, so that note didn’t really matter to me.

Late this week I decided to swich over to Safari to see if I could notice the performance difference. I used to use Safari but switch for some reason that I cannot recall at this time. That was until about an hour ago when I realized that last year when I bough OmniOutliner & OmniGraffle I purchased the bundle from the OmniGroup, thus I already owned a copy of OmniWeb. With a 5 second search using spotlight (really), I found the email with my key code. I downloaded the latest version of Omniweb and now I am going to give it a try for a while. If I don’t like it or don’t see a major performance boost I might switch back but I will give it some time for now. I just hope I don’t run into any sites that don’t like the browser since it is a non standard one, but I heard that it appears to sites as one of the more common browsers so I am hopeful.

(For some reason my blogging software ecto decided to crash on me as I was finishing up this post the first time, so I will hopefully be able to recreate what I wrote)

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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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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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Mooing Macbook Pro

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My Macbook Pro has been causing me problems for almost a month now. It sounds much louder than it should during normal operation. Every once in a while (more often than not now a days) it will start getting much louder like an engine for a while. After a while it eventually goes back to normal, but as I said normal is still way too loud. Last week I got fed up with the sound (when my office is quiet all I hear is this dam laptop and it drives me crazy) and had it taken in to a Apple service center. I got it back in the middle of this week, and early on it was apparent that the replaced fan did not do much good. Yesterday when it started sounding really loud again I knew whatever they replaced didn’t fix the issue.

I called Apple support today and spend almost an hour on the phone. At first the level 1 support guy was giving me the normal song and dance about how they need to bring it to a depot and take a look at it. He couldn’t shed any light on what was going on. Something must have clicked because after a while he put me on hold and sent me to a specialist. I actually spoke to someone who knew what he was doing. Now it is hard to explain a noise problem. The system functions without any issues, but it is just abnormally loud. I can’t localize the sound. It seems random when it gets really loud, but it is constantly emitting a low hum that it should not. I know it shouldn’t because at work we have a few Macbooks and Macbook Pro‘s. My luck that my personal computer would be messed up. The guy I spoke to supposedly made some special notes on my ticket and I am now waiting for a box to arrive to send it in. They said something about the logic board, but they will run it for a while when they get it to see if the can reproduce the issue. I hope they can, but based off of how often it happens to me I don’t think there will be a problem with them reproducing it.

Now I have to go without my work computer for probably another week. It isn’t too bad since I have my personal Macbook I will bring to the office. The downside is that I normally leave my Macbook on at home when I am at work and run a bunch of different processes. I shouldn’t complain too much since I at least have a laptop to use. I know I get a bit spoiled with the gear I have access to at work. I just hope this unit comes back and works. More news when the unit comes back!

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VMware on a Mac?

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The rumors are flying that VMware will be announcing something at Macworld this week. Rumors are rumors, but VMware has said they have been testing their product on the Intel Macs. I for one would be very happy with an announcement being a mac user who uses VMware on a daily basis at work. VMware Workstation and VMware server tools running on the mac would give me one less reason to need a windows machine. Well honestly it would really be one less linux machine since I got fed up with my windows desktop at work last week and ended up trying to reinstall windows xp 3 times before giving up and putting Suse Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 on my computer.

I will keep my fingers crossed this week!!!

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The Perpetual Upgrade

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Since I am perpetually upgrading I am now sporting a new Apple Macbook Pro. Well honestly it is not mine. it is my new work computer. I have given up the small size of my Powerbook 12″ for the power and the Core Duo intel chip of the 15″ Macbook Pro. It is big, but that means the screen is also big. I am hoping not to carry it home every day like I did with the Powerbook. That may make me not care so much about the size. Every so often I swap back and forth between wanting a nice size screen and a small form factor. Neither are perfect, so I never know what I want. I am at a point where I want a nice size screen so I can work off the laptop anywhere.

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