.:justwerks software:.

Wowsers!
The new beta of Parallels is just, um, amazing. It can mount a Boot Camp partition and let me virtually work in Windows (XP Home SP2) without needing to reboot!
The only downside to all of this is that you cannot "Pause" the virtual machine, but booting takes mere seconds on the i(ntel)Mac and the ability to drag and drop and copy files easily from OS X to the virtual XP box is a HUGE time saver.

This tool eliminates the need to have separate computers for OS X, Linux, XP, Solaris, etc. Simply virtualize and go!

This is definitely going on my list of handy to have tools. As a total tangent it runs Solaris 10 (x86) Update 3 perfectly well.

I would recommend you max out the RAM in your system before you start seriously using virtualization otherwise you may find your harddrive churning and slowing things down significantly.

I was reading through Arstechnica just now and saw hints of Google Maps integration in iPhoto. But what really peaked my interest was the comment, by Luis Alejandro Masanti, about having a slideshow following your path.

Now, take that idea a step further and integrate with Google Earth. If you rememeber last Xmas Google had Santa flying all over the world in "real time". It was fun to watch. Imagine if you could see "what Santa was looking at" as he landed.
With Picasa, Google has access to a lot of photos. When GPS tagging in the EXIF data starts up in full force Google will have the ability to show you the world in pictures at street level - in somewhat real time for more popular locations. You would even get cool information like direction and altitude so you wouldn't only see the south-east side of buildings as current mapping tools display.

So, Apple released the latest and greatest version of iTunes! Version 7.0!

So, what is good -

• the new interface is a little more clean, nice
• the new album art feature is nice
• the new gapless play feature is kinda useful
• the iTunes Music store is now the iTunes Store - I am pretty sure they will migrate to the iMedia store in the future... what does iTunes have to do with Movies??? (and so on)
• ummm, the iTunes icon has changed to a Blue eigth note on a DVD icon image...

What is bad -

• Podcast navigation is gone? - I can't surf the chapters in my CBC Radio 3 podcasts from the little icon next to the top "scrollerbar" (check that, much like Browse; podcast chapter navigation has been relegated to the controls menu and a keyboard short-cut)

I finally got Mercurial 0.8.1 (a distributed SCM) up and running on my intelMac. It is not difficult but requires some additional steps that don't seem to be noted anywhere obvious that I could see.
The issue is that Mercurial will not work on a standard 10.4.6 install. Everything compiles, installs and kinda runs but every time I went to clone a remote repository the app would blow up.

So here is quick little how to:

1. Acquire Mercurial 0.8.1
2. Acquire the most recent Python build. I used the Universal Python 2.4.3 package from the folks at Pythonmac.org
3. Install the Python 2.4.3 package and ensure you are using version 2.4.3 (type python in a Terminal.app window)
4. Follow the instructions on the Mercurial site, they will work now

I hope this saves you the time it took me to fiddle around with things.
To make a wild stab in the dark guess as to why things didn't work I would say it's to do with the use of GCC 3.3 on the standard OS X Python distribution and GCC 4.0.1 in the above linked Python package.

The reason for all this is that I am trying to see if the Spam module is ready for Drupal 4.7 (Spam is the only module that I will delay upgrading for).