This is really no big deal, but I just submitted my first Digg story. It was no big deal, just an article on CNET regarding a new beta of Parallels‘ Virtual Workstation for OS X (a very good product which I’ve blogged about before).
At the bottom of the artical was a "Digg this" link which I did and it turns out it hadn’t been submitted yet. I revised the provided text a bit and clicked submit.
Does that make me cool? Probably not.
Yeah, yeah another WWDC post, but the truth is, I’m stuck in a hotel room alone all week so I get to catch up with my posting backlog. While watching this morning’s keynote I couldn’t help thinking that Steve Jobs was looking really thin. Sure, I was at the back of the rather large auditorium and he was just a speck from my naked eye, but there were two large projections over the middle of the crowd and he looked and acted off-the-mark. Having seen dozens of keynotes over the years, I also noticed that he
deferred to other presenters far more often (and for longer) then
anytime I can remember.
Two years ago, Steve Jobs was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer which was was caught early and removed with surgery and fortunately, he did not require either chemotherapy or radiation therapy. Technically, he should be in good shape. Maybe, he’s not? Perhapse there is nothing new here and it just looked funny on screen but I hope and pray that his health is good.
Did you see the keynote? Watch the first few minutes and tell me what you think?
In today’s keynote at WWDC, Steve Jobs presented 10 features in the upcoming OS X 10.5 Leopard. My favorite (and as an IT guy, the most important, IMHO) is Time Machine which works similarly to NetApp‘s snapshots but for a consumer desktop. The interface is quite cool, too. A little flashy, sure, but a good way to present something which can be difficult for some to conceptualize.
I’ve been a Mac user since 1985 and have been in IT for about 14 years professionally. This week, I have the opporunity to attend Apple’s World Wide Developer’s Conference in San Francisco. While its primary audience is OS X developers, there is a fairly substantial IT track of sessions for the week covering all sorts of client, server, and storage needs. Among my many other responsibilites at work, I also am responsible for the OS X infrastructure, gathering the 150 or so OS X workstations in our campus into a managed group and attempt to provide the same enterprise-level management and support that is currently available with our Active Directory domain. As a result, many of the sessions are very apropos for our situation.
Additionally, we’re trying to get Apple hardware to a “first-class” status so that hardware can be purchased more easily. Not that it’s hard now. There is just some additional justification that you need to go through which could be avoided if it can be shown that Apple is indeed serious about the enterprise and is not just the consumer oriented “iPod company” that also makes other hardware. As an interesting aside, the IT department, which I am a member, is going to be getting quite a few MacBooks as they are just so gosh darn versitile for us geek-types. Mac OS and Unix all in one box and with the addition of Parallels (and soon VMware) Windows, Linux, or any other Intel OS is just too cool.
Another favorite of mine is Blue Man Group. I first saw them years ago on the Tonight Show (I believe back when Johnny Carson was hosting). Becky and I saw them in Vegas and really enjoyed their show.
From the ever fun Podcast About Nothing I found a website that shows you how to make many of BMG’s PVC-based instruments. I don’t know if I’ll ever get around to doing it, but it’s good to have plans.
What I’d really like is a set of BMG samples to be used in Garage Band. That would be fun.
John Gruber at the Daring Fireball wrote a very well thought-out argument for Apple to extend their newly announced Boot Camp into a Classic like environment in the upcoming OS X 10.5 (aka Leopard). That is to say, rather than having to reboot your machine into Windows XP (or Vista), you’ll instead just double-click your Windows apps in OS X and they’ll run like OS 9 apps have under Classic since the original OS 10.0.
Of course, he goes into details on how this would benefit Apple but he is just simply a better writer or at the very least has more time to articulate himself. Give it a read.
Parallels released this past week a virtualization product supporting OS X called Parallels Workstation. I’ve been playing with it and wouldn’t you know it, it works. I was able to install without too much trouble Windows 2000. Since it’s using the virtualization options of the Intel Core Duo CPU the client OS runs at pretty much full speed. As a disclaimer, I haven’t put the thing through any serious benchmarking, but it’s clear that this is virtualization and not emulation going on here. The only thing that doesn’t currently work is audio or a convenient way to exchange files with the host OS.
I still think WINE is the ideal, but this is a product I’ll probably end up getting (it’s only $40) so I can easily have multiple virtual machines available (Win2k, CentOS, Fedora Core, etc.) without the hassle of rebooting.
Of course, for fun, I tried to install the hacked version of the OS X install DVD (the one that supports BIOS) and it started booting but crashed quite quickly. That’s O.K. since it isn’t a supported client OS. It would have been neat to have OS X running in OS X. Could I install Parallels inside the Parallels client? It would be like the Russian nesting dolls but geeker.
Here’s a screenshot for those doubters. ;-)
I’ve finally gotten around to selling our old 15″ G4 iMac. We’re fortunate enough to not really need the money, but I hate to see something with even a fair amount of value just sit around.
I also have a 15″ Powerbook that I’m going to sell but am using it quite a bit at work and really like having a “spare” laptop. Maybe in a few weeks.
If you would like a Powerbook, let me know I’ll be happy to make you a great deal. If you know an organization that may benefit from it, let me know as well.
eBay: iMac G4 15″ LCD 800 MHz 768M/80G w/Superdrive
I switched to Firefox for my primary browsing needs years ago as I was tired of IE‘s problems with compatibility and security. I’ve even started using it on my Mac over Safari.
It appears that the Mozilla group are working on the next generation of Firefox. Click read more below for two pictures of it in early development.
Ever sense Apple announced that they were transitioning to Intel last year, questions began if the Apple produced hardware will be able to boot Windows. While I don’t personally need that option (I have other machines available with Windows), I do think it is a worthy effort as it would allow people and organizations to buy a Mac and have the option to dual-boot Windows which makes the “risk” of buying Apple hardware much less.
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