www.nickhodge.com

Rarely does soft­ware become easier to use, dra­mat­ic­ally change, add fea­tures and gets faster. Par­al­lels rocks.

Devel­op­ing sys­tems in COBOL is the next major leap in Agile pro­gram­ming. Or maybe not. Return­ing to ser­i­ous pro­gram­ming:.

First topic: Why Microsoft’s Zune scares Apple to the core

“Apple faces the pro­spect of com­pet­ing not with the Zune alone, but with a mighty Windows-Soapbox-Xbox-Zune indus­trial complex.”

Speak­ing to a new XBox360 user on Fri­day, he stated that the Media Center-XBox360 inter­con­nect works just like Apple stuff. Seem­lessly. The Microsoft Indus­trial Com­plex that all com­pet­it­ors fear. Adding the advert­ising announce­ments, which also state the plat­forms, it is going to be an inter­est­ing 2007.

“The iPod is the soul of Apple’s entire busi­ness. Apple has been rel­at­ively suc­cess­ful at win­ning con­verts from Win­dows to Mac OS X, for example, in part because its whole product line basks in the glow of iPod’s suc­cess, hip­ness and ubiquity.”

Microsoft has star­ted to come out the IT geek­dom of mak­ing things more com­plex for the sake of mak­ing things more com­plex, and enter­ing the world of cool­ness by design: XBox360, Zune, Live.com.

And Zune is going to be a range of products. Wire­less is the killer tech­no­logy; whilst ini­tially hobbled by peer-to-peer only; in the future this could really go over the top.

Wire­less con­nectiv­ity, ini­tially peer-to-peer, for­tells sig­ni­fic­ant plat­form innovation:

• ima­gine playl­ist com­pat­ib­il­ity check­ing and prox­im­ity check­ing. find your per­fect part­ner, just by the music you like!
• zun­e­hubs; retails stores where you can go to a safe loc­a­tion, buy more points and get free music
• last.fm + zun­et­ags auto­mat­ic­ally uploaded
• go to a live music gig; a zun­e­hub emits sample/rare music tracks for attendees. Or maybe points for attending.

Would I buy one? Prob­ably not. Firstly, no avail­ab­il­ity out­side the USA. My SCRLTT (the red MINI) has an iPod con­nec­tion inside; and I have yet to fill my 40Gb Revi­sion 2 iPod. Then again, I am not in the tar­get demo­graphic.

Secondly, from the sub­lime to the workori­ented. In the now dis­tant past (earlier in 2006), I was a major spread­sheet user: Excel was used as much as Out­look as a means of decision mak­ing and com­mu­nic­a­tion. Now dis­con­nec­ted from the old job, I still have a need for spread­sheets: but not big old clunky spreadsheets.

Enter Google Spread­sheets and some­thing I only tried yes­ter­day: Edit­Grid. Save my spread­sheet as .xls from Google, open in Edit­Grid and I am away.

From Team and Con­cepts in Hong Kong, it has some extra cool­ness miss­ing in Google Spread­sheets. Remote data (share prices, exchange rates) NetVibes integ­ra­tion. And it looks better.

Thirdly, as pre­dicted here, Microsoft is releas­ing the latest “CTP” of Visual Stu­dio code named Orcas as a Vir­tu­alPC pack­age.

So, into the 10^th month of the year. Hop­ing for a bet­ter month than the last, this end of the blog-posting and wish­ing well to all readers.

Panasonic does a deal with Con­nex­ion, spe­cific­ally so you can GSM/GPRS whilst Qantas flights.

Peter Jack­son to dir­ect “The Hob­bit” movie? Oh the horror!

Par­al­lels for Mac is now at build 1910. For those who want to keep their feet in both worlds, you can run Win­dows XP and Vista at the same time.

Vista RC1++ (alias build 5728), the “show and shine” / “spit and pol­ish” or most cor­rectly, the Rule#12 “Fit and Fin­ish” releases have started.

Microsoft Office 2007 Beta (and the fol­lowup Beta 2 Tech­nical Release) is now avail­able for Aus­trali­ans to down­load. Aus­tralia was miss­ing for the first month or so.

I may have killed SVG off too soon, or at least taken an “Adobe-centric” view; and AndrewS com­ments that Search Engine Optim­isa­tion (SEO) and Flash is bogus. Read­ing some of the posts from the Flash­For­ward Con­fer­ence, the cur­rent, mod­ern mech­an­ism is to use SWFOb­ject.

Watch­ing the Par­al­lels web site, I noted that the engin­eers had pos­ted some more info, and a later build. 1896.2 I don’t know what the .2 means; prob­ably that .1 wasn’t quite right.

Wait­ing for a bet­ter video driver (to use up the 256Mb of the Mac­Book Pro, without resort­ing to Boot Camp)

Any­way:

Is Vista RC1 build 5600 installed and launched OK. Office 2003 installed per­fectly on RC1; now I am hunt­ing down an installer for Office 2007. Dontcha just love software?

Beta Tech­nical Refresh 2 on Beta 2 on Release Can­did­ate 1 on build 2 of Release Can­did­ate 2 on MacOS 10.4.7. Schwar­zwaelder Kirschtorte.

Speak­ing of cakes, Acrobat 8.0 is announced. I don’t have Acrobat 8 in any form, so I can­not add the cherries.

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.”

Par­al­lels sup­ports Vista.

File this into the why basket.

FreeDOS works with Par­al­lels. So now for the full 1987–1992 retro-experience, the Mac­Book Pro can learn about HIMEM.SYS, FAT32 and other evil that Win­dows has shiel­ded us from.

How to:

1. Down­load FreeDOS ISO image
2. With Par­al­lels, cre­ate a new VM (vir­tual machine), Hard drive
3. Set the CD as the boot device, and select the VM
4. Start the VM
5. Fol­low the onscreen install instruc­tions: note, be care­ful eras­ing your hard disk image!

The VM set­tings screen will look some­thing like this:

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?

Win­dows Vista the last of its kind: Win­dows will go vir­tual, Gart­ner agrees with my assess­ment that the future of Win­dows is com­pon­entised, vir­tu­al­ized and smaller.

Gart­ner expects a sig­ni­fic­ant update to Vista in late 2008 or 2009 that will add vir­tu­al­isa­tion (in the form of a com­pon­ent called a hyper­visor) and a ser­vice partition.

You read it here first, 4 days ago.

In an effort to re-ignite my first love whilst on my leave of absence — I’ve been look­ing for a good TRS-80 emu­lator to rekindle the flames of tech­nical desire. Also over the last 4 weeks I’ve also had a small “side pro­ject” watch­ing the goings on in the desktop vir­tu­al­iz­a­tion space, espe­cially on the Mac. Par­al­lels has been an excel­lent invest­ment to get Win­dows XP run­ning on the Mac­Book Pro; just wait­ing for the ACPI/Direct3D (or VMWare for the Mac) ver­sion so I can run a build of Win­dows Vista.

Admis­sion #1: the first com­puter my dad pur­chased for me was a TRS-80 Model I. Not the pret­ti­est, nor the most power­ful of machines — 1.77Mhz with 16Mb Kilo­bytes (I even acci­dently put Mb!) of RAM. Wel­come to 1981. That’s right, 1981. 25 years/ a quarter of a cen­tury ago.

The best emu­lator for the TRS-80 is writ­ten by Mat­thew Reed. Found thanks to
Ira Goldklang’s TRS-80 web site. So, I have TRS32 run­ning inside Win­dows XP in Par­al­lels on MacOS X. Shells within Shells.

Admis­sion #2: the TRS-80 we owned stored data onto a cas­sette, not a floppy disk. Way-back when I was one of those computer-store kids. Thanks to the sales guys at Tandy Electronics/Radio Shack, we’d spend all day sit­ting on the com­puters typ­ing in pro­grams and occa­sion­ally demon­strat­ing to pro­spect­ive buy­ers. As floppy disks were expens­ive, we didn’t get access to stor­age — so TRSDOS was not an envir­on­ment I was ever exposed to. Get­ting the emu­lator work­ing involved remem­ber­ing how to get BASIC work­ing, and learn­ing yet another OS.

Admis­sion #3: I’ve watched zero minutes of Lord of the Rings. Even from DVD. Ever since the school lib­rar­ian sug­ges­ted I bor­row The Hob­bit, attempt­ing to read a single page, and quickly return­ing the mush — I’ve act­ively avoided the fantasy genre. World of War­craft drives me nuts. Sorry Neil and Mark!

Before this dis­pas­sion arose, I did get into one fantasy-style game on the TRS-80: “Quest for the Key of Night­shade”. It is strange how you remem­ber names such as these for many years. Last week I found a ver­sion of the BASIC pro­gram, ori­gin­ally typed all the lines from a com­puter magazine into Basic and saved to cas­sette, on Ira’s web­site. From memory, this was writ­ten by a Cana­dian pro­gram­mer and won “TRS-80 game of the year 1981″ in some US magazine and was reprin­ted in 1982 by Aus­tralian Per­sonal Com­puter.

The screen dump above is from this game. Ahh, the fond memor­ies of our first loves.