After a bunch of restarts and a lot of patching and installing I’ve now got a virtualized Windows XP installation which can access the network and has Office 2003 installed on it. I’ve got a couple more programs to install, but I’m at a good point where most of my work should be possible. I’ve made a backup copy of the hard drive image just in case anything goes wrong.
Author Archives: Pat
Parallels Desktop
Now that I’ve got the external storage working I’ve started on getting Parallels Desktop running. It’s a software package which does virtualization of just about any x86 based operating system, including my choice: Windows XP.
Installing Parallels, like all of the other Mac apps that I’ve installed is completely painless. Configuring it on the other hand has been a little bit of work. It’s not that it’s difficult to get through the configuration screens, just that there’s so much you’ve got to keep in mind when virtualizing a computer that I’m catching mistakes. The good thing is that I just reformat the virtual drive and start over.
I haven’t yet run in to any performance issues with keeping the hard drive images on the external drive. I’m just having a little trouble with getting the Student Edition of XP that I bought last year to register, but that’s because I’ve had to reinstall it a couple times on the real PC so it looks like a call to Microsoft is in order…
LaCie d2 Extreme 250G
I’ve been working towards getting a virtualized Windows installation running for those few things that can’t run under OS X, like Visio. Since it needs hard drive space just like a real OS, I decided to pick up an external drive instead of using up some of the internal space. External space also gives me extra storage and backup room, so it’ll be good for more than just running a virtual XP machine.
I went down to the Southlake Apple Store and picked up a 250G LaCie d2 Extreme external hard drive. One of the bigger reasons why I bought the 17″ MacBook Pro was because of the FireWire 800 port and the LaCie has a FireWire 800 port on it, so access speed isn’t an issue. I’ve got it installed, which amounted to putting the base on the unit’s body (a solid feeling aluminum case) and plugging in the power and FireWire cables. After turning it on and plugging it in I now have an extra 240 gigs of space to play with. The drive is fast. It took me about 3 minutes to copy 5 gigs over to it, so I’m not worried about access speed.
POS/440 Down, Two To Go
I just finished POS/440 C++ Programming, and I’m really glad it was in the degree plan. I didn’t know much about C++, having come from doing purely C programming and some exposure to Objective-C years ago. C++ is pretty interesting, and I think that with the new Mac I’ll be writing some software using it soon.
More Jetting
I had to go up to American Eagle Harley-Davidson to pick up a 180 main jet today. The 175 just wasn’t cutting it, pinging all over the place, running really hot, and fuel mileage in the mid 50’s. I’m not going to trash my new engine running like this, so it got swapped. It looks like the 180 main/45 slow plus 93 octane’s cured the problems. It’s still running a little warm so I’m going to put on an oil cooler at some point.
Missing Sync
I finally got my Palm TX to sync with the MacBook tonight, thanks to Mark/Space‘s Missing Sync software. It allows you to sync your Palm (and other handhelds and phones) to the native Mac applications like Address or iCal. Setup was painless, everything just worked the way it should, and now I’ve got all my contacts and calendaring backed up again.
Done With The Break-In
I rolled past the 500 mile limit of the break-in on the way home today so I spent the evening changing the oil once more and replacing the 170 main jet with a 175. I’m getting a little pinging and so I’m hoping this will cure it. If not, a 180’s next and then I’ll start messing with retarding the timing a little.
Unison
Since The University of Phoenix‘s on-line classrooms use NNTP I’ve been looking for a good newsreader for the Mac so that I can get away from Windows as much as possible. Well, I think I’ve found it. Panic has a program called Unison which seems to have most of the features I’ve been looking for at a great price. It does threading, understands the write only Assignments group, and seems to handle attachments almost right. The only things it’s missing are the ability to handle HTML in posts (coming from what they said) and the ability to attach a file to a reply. I’m still not sure if I’m going to stick with it or go back to Thunderbird, which does just about everything except handle the Assignments group. But it’s nice to have options.
It’s Here!
The MacBook arrived a day early. I’ve done the basic setup on it and started messing around a little. It’s a lot faster than I thought it would be and there’s no problems with heat, whine, or the display. I’m actually pretty impressed with how good the display looks, the colors are sharp, the fonts look great, and the brightness is amazing.
Now the fun begins, getting everything running on it, especially mail and news so that I can start using it for school.
The MacBook Shipped!
I checked the tracking info on-line and the MacBook has shipped! It’s coming in from Shanghai and the expected delivery date is the 17th. Not bad for half way around the world! And kudos to Apple for getting it out early. The expected ship date was the 16th with a delivery of the 23rd.