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 -
What is bad -
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:
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).
I have just finished the longest install session of Drupal ever. 20 minutes.
As I am still learning Tiger (OS X 10.4.x) and more specifically the Intel release I have had to find/update some of my base utilities used with Drupal. This is also the first time I have used MySQL 5 (5.0.18 in my case) with Drupal and what follows here are the steps I had to follow to get it up and running on my iMac (Intel).
I am assuming that your install is fairly new and that you have installed MySQL at this point. Once installed you will be running MySQL 5.0.18 and the default Apache and PHP installed by 10.4.5.
Step 1: download Drupal 4.6.6 (or 4.7 Beta 6)
Step 2: setup your database, load the schema, configure Drupal
Step 3: update the php.ini file in /etc/ to put the mysql.sock file in the same location as MySQL places it. In my case, this was /tmp/mysql.sock. If you have not already created the php.ini file you can copy the php.ini.default file to php.ini and edit that.
See this Apple Tech Article for more detailed information
Step 4: reload Apache
Step 5: continue Drupal'ing
Now with this out the way I can finally test my changes that add ATOM support to the 4.6.6 Aggregator.
I just wanted to follow up on my early post about my joy with my iMac Duo with some things I have encountered over the past few days.
Lack of Universal binaries can be a bit limiting
For instance my preferred iPhoto export utility doesn't work under iPhoto6 on the iMac Duo. This is (I assume) an issue with PowerPC plugins and universal binaries. I am going to further guess that any compiled plugin for any application would have to be recompiled to get things running. I will look into this a bit further.
Also, some applications (NeoOffice, Firefox, Skype, NetNewsWire) that I regularly use have not made an appearance as Universal binaries yet.
My new iMac 20" has finally arrived and after a bit of data transfer time I can finally give a bit of an off the cuff review.
System : iMac 2.0GHz duo core. 256MB video ram. 1GB RAM. Everything else is standard.
Build Quality - fantastic. Feels solid, quiet like a mouse, everything feels top notch. Good keyboard.
Speed - fast. Really, really fast. Applications that use Rosetta are noticably slower; a big exception is Skype - it takes both processors up to 95%+ while it is running. I probably will be avoiding Skype until the Universal Binary version comes out. Diablo2 and Warcraft 3 run nicely though! Overall the system is probably not 2x faster than the iMac G5 but waaaaaay faster than my old iBook, which is all that really matters.
