I had some spare cycles today so I decided to kick the tires on Dashcode - the Dashboard "widget" creation tool that you can use in OS 10.4 and later. The widgets are little applications that sit in your Dashboard and can do simple or complex tasks.
I decided to create a little widget that displays my bandwidth usage for the current month. This widget will post the request to my ISP (Northwestel Cable) and then display a little gauge to indicate how close I am getting to going over my usage cap and incurring usage charges.
It was fun to play with Dashcode but I have to say it is a little buggy (controls stop responding in the IDE after a while) and the help is rather sparse - or at least the stuff I like was not great. The environment is HTML, Javascript and CSS. I definitely wouldn't want to call coding in this environment a full time job as it is just too unstable for long term development efforts.
So - if you are on NWTel Cable - download the little widget - configure your MAC address, choose your Usage Cap and never have to view the NWTel Cable website again!
I recently posted about Sun's great virtualization platform and had some comments about the Mac functionality, mostly to do with networking.
Well, those comments are now moot as the newly released 2.0.2 has Host Interface capabilities which means, to the lay person, that I can have a distinct IP assigned to my Virtual Machines and don't have to use port forwarding tricks! Awesome!
The upgrade was painless - download and install - and after I enabled the Host Interface I rebooted my Linux Test Box. It booted with no problems and now lives on the same sub-network as the rest of the computers on my home network - Happy Day!
So run and get the new update for your Mac box and enjoy free virtualization. It's not as slick as the other alternatives - Parallels or VM Fusion - but it's free and works "Good Enough for me...for now..."
I am now consulting for myself and one of the things that I need to have is a test Linux box to play with. I am also lazy and do not want to maintain yet another computer (with it's associated costs) so I immediately turned to my good friend, virtualization. This also came around because my Leopard MySQL, PHP and Apache configuration is not working very well these days.
I had heard VirtualBox (1.6.2) had recently acquired Mac OS X support so I decided to give the platform a spin on my Intel-based iMac and report the results.
Easy as download, mount the disk image and run the installer.
I wanted to create a new Ubuntu installation so I grabbed the latest Ubuntu server ISO. While that was downloading I started to configure the new VM image. The wizard walked me through the steps fairly painlessly but I do have to admit to being a bit confused by some of the defaults selected. I had to boost the amount of RAM allocated to the image to 512MB. I had to ensure I enabled PAE/NX (for Ubuntu to even start) and I also had to use NAT (Network Address Translation) to for network connectivity as the other options do not work with OS X yet, or at least that is what the documentation says. Once I had my image configured I set the guest VM's CD/DVD drive to point to the ISO image I downloaded, set the drive boot order to CD/DVD first and Blamo! I was installing Ubuntu.
The use of NAT for the networking makes for some headaches if you want to actually talk to the Guest VM from the host VM, as I wanted to do - this is my LAMP test box after all, and it requires the use of port forwarding on the Guest VM.
The documentation is a little light on how this is done on OS X so for my future referral the commands I ran are as follows:
evan@foo /Applications/VirtualBox.app/Contents/MacOS
$VBoxManage setextradata "Linux Test Box" "VBoxInternal/Devices/pcnet/0/LUN#0/Config/guesthttp/Protocol" TCP
VirtualBox Command Line Management Interface Version 1.6.2
(C) 2005-2008 Sun Microsystems, Inc.
All rights reserved.
evan@foo /Applications/VirtualBox.app/Contents/MacOS
$VBoxManage setextradata "Linux Test Box" "VBoxInternal/Devices/pcnet/0/LUN#0/Config/guesthttp/GuestPort" 80
VirtualBox Command Line Management Interface Version 1.6.2
(C) 2005-2008 Sun Microsystems, Inc.
All rights reserved.
evan@foo /Applications/VirtualBox.app/Contents/MacOS
$VBoxManage setextradata "Linux Test Box" "VBoxInternal/Devices/pcnet/0/LUN#0/Config/guesthttp/HostPort" 8080
VirtualBox Command Line Management Interface Version 1.6.2
(C) 2005-2008 Sun Microsystems, Inc.
All rights reserved.
After I made these changes and restarted the guest VM I was able to setup a Drupal 6 install with no problems. It is visible at http://localhost:8080 and is running entirely on an Ubuntu server install. I get the bonus of running a true LAMP install that can be instantly restored to a previous running state as well as the great features of Ubuntu! All for free.
I have been playing with the new beta of the Safari web browser for about 2 weeks now. 3.0.3 I think...
Anyways, it has finally replaced Firefox completely. It works with all the banking sites I use, with my online money things I deal with and with my online pay stub viewing site.
The transition is complete. I can drop Firefox and happily go on Safari on the Mac. I just prefer the integration on the Mac, the speed, and the look n' feel.
Double Speak Disclaimer: This statement may be rendered completely false in the near future when Firefox 3 comes out with it's funky new technique of managing bookmarks but I am pretty sure my "web" of interest is only about 20 sites large these days so managing bookmarks is not a high priority on my list. Also, Firefox 3 may be just cooler than sliced toast so I may start using it again in the future.
There, just to cover myself in case I look foolish in a few months :P
So, Apple released the latest and greatest version of iTunes! Version 7.0!
So, what is good -
What is bad -
