www.nickhodge.com

Apple finally releases Intel Core 2 Duo ver­sions of the 15 and 17″ Mac­Book Pro. The concept of 200Gb of disk space and 3Gb of RAM is attract­ive, but we’ll have to see … I don’t think Santa is that gen­er­ous. Unless someone wants a 5 month old 15″ Mac­Book Pro.

Myriad of things from Adobe. Apollo gets US$100m of back­ing from Adobe; but still no code to get your hands dirty. Flex Builder 2.0 for MacOS is out. Woot!

DigitalEd­i­tions com­ments from Ryan Stew­art; in fact, Ryan has some excel­lent com­ments on Adobe Apollo too.

How­ever, the biggest announce­ment is a parry to Microsoft’s XPS: Adobe Mars pro­ject. This is a rep­res­ent­a­tion of PDF in XML, but packed in a ZIP con­tainer. This one has been bump­ing around for a while: and it seems the SVG might just be get­ting another run at Adobe.

Just as Adobe starts to head toward the moon in the Apollo, we have another space meta­phor to deal with: Mars. Or mabye it’s just a pen­chant for Roman Gods?

Fit­tingly, Mars is the Roman god of war.

Too much stuff, my brain hurts. Espe­cially as I have some ser­i­ous Javas­cript and Adobe Extend­script revolving in my head.

Tech­nor­ati Tags:
adobe, apple

Tim Kleemann, Man­aging Dir­ector (no less) of Next­Byte, responds to my post on “iShonky”

Tim’s reply goes to show that you must buy from a retailer who cares.

So, armed with the facts from the horses’ mouth: one must ask what data Choice has used to determ­ine their “shonky-ness”?

The last thing we need in Aus­tralia is a magazine out for column-centimeters rather than the truth about products.

The CHOICE iSHONK for Dual-level Shonky­ness is awar­ded to the Apple iPod, mainly relat­ing to the repair “procedure”

Choice Magazine has been the respec­ted voice of Aus­tralian con­sumers; and with strong con­sumer pro­tec­tion laws in Aus­tralia: you must com­ply with the laws.

This comes on the back of the RMon­virus on 1% of video iPods sold after 12^th Septem­ber. Now, that’s doubly shonky. Who was spot checking?

Repairs to tech­no­logy where the mar­gins are slim and the volumes are large can wipe out profit in an instant. The key is to make the product cor­rectly in the first place. Qual­ity sys­tems, W. Edwards Dem­ing.

Someone at Apple PR should be get­ting cranky about this — there are com­pet­it­ors on the hori­zon; and cus­tom­ers expect more than Aus­sie Post style repairs.

Down­load the 21Mb update to Par­al­lels (to build 1884)

Boot Win­dows XP to ensure all is OK before I install Vista. Win­dows XP “seems” to boot a little faster. Unable to quantify exactly how much.

Backup exist­ing 15Gb Win­dows XP .hdd, just in case. Cre­ate a new 15Gb image to install Vista into.

Pararl­lels settings:

Install into the fresh 15Gb image, 1024Mb of RAM alloc­ated to image. Vista is marked at (exper­i­mental) as OS. Installing onto a Mac­Book Pro with 2Gb of RAM and MacOS X 10.4.7

• Beta 2 Build 5384 DVD (thanks, Frank Arrigo at Microsoft Australia)
• Star­ted install at 11:05am
• Vista install auto-restarted at 11:35
• Vista install auto-restarted at 11:43am
• Ques­tions (loc­a­tion, time, user­name) at 11:46am
• Vista install auto-restarted at 11:47am
• Into Vista Beta 2 at 11:50am
• Install Par­al­lels Tools from the Par­al­lels VM menu. Note that these don’t seem to be signed drivers, so ignore all the warn­ings and install away
• Manual Vista Restart
• On restart, if the “Wel­come Cen­ter” doesn’t appear, choose it from the Start menu. Click on Add Hardware.
• Vista found net­work card, and auto­mat­ic­ally con­figured net­work. Also note that Vista also finds “PCI Bridge Device” which I asked Vista to ignore
• Restart; Vista found net­work card, and auto­mat­ic­ally con­figured net­work. Note that the Net­work Adaptor set­tings for the Par­al­lels VM set “Bridged” worked OK

In short, it works. Note that I haven’t stress tested this; and the Par­al­lels guys say its exper­i­mental. Beta OS on exper­i­mental hyper­visor vir­tu­al­iz­a­tion. Your mileage may actu­ally turn into inchage quickly.

RC1 Note from 8:20pm

You can­not install Vista RC1 on Par­al­lels. Bug­ger. ISO, DVD burnt or upgrade from Beta 2 to RC1. None of these paths work.

***STOP: 0x000000A5 (0x0001000B, 0×50434146, etc)

“The ACPI Bios in this sys­tem is not fully com­pli­ant to the spe­cific­a­tion. Please read the Readme.txt for pos­sible work­arounds, or con­tact your sys­tem vendor for an updated bios.”

I am not a Mac fan-boy. Been there, done that. And to be truth­ful, I think I am a little too old for zealotry. The inno­cent dog­mat­ism of youth has been replaced with that prag­mat­ism to the point of pess­im­ism middle age.

My 15″ Mac­Book Pro runs MacOS X 10.4.7. The last time I rebooted was the install­a­tion of the MacOS X 10.4.7 update. That restart was so long ago, I hon­estly can­not remem­ber rebooting.

Pop over to a Ter­minal win­dow, uptime: up 22 days.

Up until May this year I had been a Win­dows per­son. Dell this, Win­dows that. A clean shut­down or restart at least once per week would keep the Dell going. After con­stantly sleeping/hibernating, things just didn’t feel stable any­more under Win­dows XP. Maybe it was all the weird VPN net­work­ing stuff that I had to run. Or memory not being freed up.

This Mac­Book Pro gets an equal amount of digital thrash­ing. It’s turned on and being used at least 14 hours per day. Dur­ing the day, there are mul­tiple shut-the-laptop lid hiberna­tions, run­ning mul­tiple applic­a­tions. Installing, launch­ing Mac apps; de-installing (drag-install, drag to trash dein­stall). Mad as hat­ter cats pulling out the mag­safe power con­nector; Dash­board wid­gets are added, removed and refreshed. PowerPC (Rosetta) applic­a­tions launch­ing, force-quit Sheep­shaver. Wire­less net­work router recon­fig­ur­a­tion. The screen in bril­liant for spread­sheets — the per­form­ance on the Mac and Win­dows under vir­tu­al­iz­a­tion are excellent.

Dur­ing these 22 days I’ve booted Win­dows XP at least 15 times using Par­al­lels. Most recently to run a TRS-80 emu­lator, and to take a look at a per­sonal email in an archive .pst file. Even back­ing up the PC is easy. Drag copy the disk image onto our fam­ily file Debian server.

Under Par­al­lels, everything I’ve installed has worked first time. Office 2003, Office 2007 Beta. Adobe Flex 2.0, Adobe Premiere Ele­ments 2.0. Microsoft XML Note­pad.

In a smartly organ­ized cor­por­ate envir­on­ment, and some smart con­fig­ur­a­tion cre­ated by some smarter infra­struc­ture cook­ies, a single stand­ard Win­dows XP image could be cre­ated on a server. This could be pulled down when people come into work as their stand­ard “office” suite. Sep­ar­at­ing the envir­on­ments for exec­ut­ives could be a mech­an­ism of sav­ing costs.

Without the apple-coloured glasses, there are some defi­cien­cies: the Mac­Book Pro has an integ­rated video cam­era in the lid but there are no device drivers for Par­al­lels; and ACPI is yet to be sup­por­ted under Par­al­lels: so no Vista Beta/Vista SP1 yet. Not a big gamer thank­fully as games performance/Direct3D sucks.

It’s still not a real Win­dows XP machine. There is no little laser-etched blue OEM badge (the Win­dows XP Pro­fes­sional installed is a box copy). So 22 days uptime or not, there is some­thing that just doesn’t feel right: run­ning Win­dows on a Mac is like listen­ing to Coun­try and West­ern in a Fer­rari. You feel, well, dirty.

Still, this Mac­Book Pro has been the most stable Win­dows laptop I’ve had the pleas­ure of using. So, by defin­i­tion — is the safest way to run Win­dows XP is under vir­tu­al­iz­a­tion on MacOS X?

His­tory revi­sion­ists state that Apple had to buy NeXT as they could not write their own pre-emptive/protected memory OS.

Apple A/UX 3.0 integ­rated the best of Sys­tem 7 and Unix. Maybe not the latest Unix avail­able at that time, nor on the fast­est hard­ware; nor with the best driver sup­port. But it rocked for its time.

From memory, Apple needed to cre­ated A/UX to per­mit their hard­ware to be sold as “POSIX” com­pli­ant to US DoD. With more internal, less “not-invented-here” think­ing — the need to have a bogus OS (Cop­land) and the ulti­mate reverse take-over by NeXT could have been avoided.

Macin­touch read­ers have repor­ted on the per­form­ance of the new Mac Pros, and spe­cific­ally how Pho­toshop CS2 per­forms under Rosetta vs. old Power Mac G5s.

Tech­nor­ati Tags:
pho­toshop, adobe, tech­no­logy, apple, macpro

An excel­lent art­icle from the New York Times: Weigh­ing a Switch to a Mac. Inter­est­ing, as it goes through the two options: Boot­Camp or Parallels.

You don’t need to leave your Windows-mind behind when switch­ing. Now that I am dis­con­nec­ted from the Adobe-mind, I rarely use Win­dows applic­a­tions. But then again, I’ve not really done much in the last two weeks apart from fill this blog up with stuff!

Mac­World reports from the WWDC and an inter­view with Ben Rudolph of Par­al­lels:

…“What’s more, Par­al­lels Desktop for Mac will see “fast 3D graph­ics support,” pre­sum­ably to help cater to gamers who want to run Win­dows games without hav­ing to reboot their machine”…

I’ve just updated to the latest Par­al­lels beta; it was smooth and you can notice the graph­ics improve­ment. Being able to tweak the vir­tual environment/MacOS X is cool. Not ACPI BIOS yet, so no Vista install. Yet.

Now that Microsoft has left the MacOS X sphere, Par­al­lels seems to be pos­i­tion­ing itself at the con­sumer end of the mar­ket: games and ease of use. And increas­ing its dis­tri­bu­tion was a smart and cal­cu­lated move.

This leaves VMware to the high end. As pre­dicted here, two of the three pre­dic­tions have come true; and accord­ing to a Macin­touch inter­view with Dave Schroeder of VMware, the third is going to need cus­tom­ers to voice their needs to Apple. So it is not off the table, how­ever we have Apple’s mantra/dogma of “MacOS X will never run on non-Apple hard­ware” to surmount.

It is within the realms of pos­sib­lity that Apple could cre­ate a ver­sion of MacOS X Server that had a dis­tinct, non-desktop per­son­al­ity (desktop APIs removed), and checked for either Apple or VMWare “vir­tual hard­ware” — cre­at­ing a stable, enter­prise level Unix. This leaves cus­tom­ers to choose either XServe hard­ware with MacOS X Server, or VMware vir­tual hard­ware with MacOS X Server. The res­ult is a live mar­ket test and ROI of being in the highly com­pet­it­ive and fast mov­ing blade server marketplace.

Leave the desktop MacOS X to run on Apple hard­ware only.

There must be a gaggle Product Man­agers and Finance-types deep inside of Cuper­tino run­ning their pivot tables in Excel to argue both sides of the equa­tion. The sales of the these new XServes in the next 2–3 quar­ters will pre­dict the future of MacOS X Server on a vir­tu­al­iz­a­tion platform.

Sil­icon Val­ley Sleuth writes a short art­icle on the appear­ance of VMware at WWDC. It’s about more than just the desktop OS.

Here is another pie-in-the-sky, non-desktop scenario:

• Apple releases new ver­sions of both their Xserver and the MacOS X Server.
• Xserve becomes a tested and sup­por­ted plat­form for VMWare Server and more import­antly VMware’s ESX Server. This will per­mit new Intel-based XServes to be installed into Data­cen­ters with their heads held high. VMware endorse­ment is cred Apple needs to go to the next rev­enue level with their servers.
• An imple­ment­a­tion of Leo­pard­ized MacOS X Server will run on non-Apple hard­ware on VMware. This is a counter-punch to the recent Xen/Microsoft/VMware wrangling. Now MacOS X Server can run on a stable and sup­por­ted plat­form (VMware ESX) rather than the mul­ti­tude of hard­ware con­fig­ur­a­tions found in the Intel world.

So, what’s the net-net of this? Apple has VMware sup­por­ted as an applic­a­tion on MacOS X desktop; endorse­ment of their blade server envir­on­ment and more sales of MacOS X Server without the sup­port hassles.

VMware gets unique and in-demand server OS with excel­lent cor­por­ate sup­port. Rather than IS man­agers adopt­ing the Linux/Intel “build it your­self” approach; a sup­por­ted plat­form is important.

It is not so much about the desktop, but the server.

The next few days will be very interesting!