What does it bring?

• It is faster (uses dual core)
• It takes longer to startup – probably fills a lot into the memory
• Some nice visual effects in Finder and the dock
• Spaces (also known as virtual desktops)… but I don’t know yet whether I will use this
• it does not hurt ;-)

The upgrade went very smoothly. After one hour I logged into Leopard and everything was like before. Some applications don’t run anymore, like Tinker Tool System and my VPN client, but that’s it. Not too bad, I have substitutions in place until there are new versions…

What amazed me most so far is the upgrade process. This is really cool – nothing to reconfigure or to fiddel around with, no stupid questions on “would you like this or that or what?”… just place the DVD into the drive and let it run for approximately 45min (on my MacBook Pro). Very nice… I’d recommend it.

I have experienced serious problems with threaded Itcl on my dual core machine with Tloona. Probably the multithreading must be done completely different with Itcl or substantial amount of work needs to be done for debugging. I decided to give up on this feature because I don’t have time to maintain it anymore. Well, nobody from the Itcl maintainers was interested in this feature anyway… eventually they had good reasons for that, which I now experienced.  Tclkick contains the standard Itcl/Itk distributions now, instead.

The new release 1.1 of Tloona does not make use of threaded Itcl anymore. Some features are still multithreaded, e.g. deployment of starkits, but the parsing does now work in the same thread as the rest of the application operates in. I have some ideas to make multithreaded Itcl work via proxy objects (companion objects to every Itcl object that sit in a different thread, do the hard work, and message to the current thread) – but this is not completely cooked so far and I definitely don’t have time to implement it in the next weeks and months.

BUT the new release has some good side effects :-). Tloona does work with standard ActiveTcl distributions now and does not rely on Tclkick anymore. With the new binaries of Tclkick it works as well… currently only available for Windows (but can be built for Linux too). In addition there is a new feature for parsing .ws3 files, the scripts for Websh (http://tcl.apache.org/websh/). This means that web::command is recognized and parsed, and thus can be browsed from the code/kitbrowser.

You can get Tloona from the sourceforge project site: http://sourceforge.net/projects/tloona/

I recently spent some time to check out virtualization capabilities on the Intel Mac. There are in general two commercial products to use: Parallels Desktop and VMware Fusion. Both of them promise that you can run Windows and other operating systems in parallel to the Mac OSX – and of course each one of them “is better than the other”.

I currently evaluate both. For this, I freed 32GB on my hard disk and installed Windows XP professional (a legal copy!) via Boot Camp. This is a boot manager which allows you to choose the operating system at startup, similar to grub for Linux etc. Currently it is beta, but according to Apple, it will be official part of Leopard somewhen in the end of this year. It was a bit scary to install it in the beginning, especially when you know it is beta, but it went very smoothly and all the hardware works on Windows… bluetooth, wireless, sound, remote control etc. Great!

Then I installed both, Parallels and Fusion on the Mac OS X. With Parallels, you need to create a virtual machine and specify the bootcamp partition for startup. For Fusion, you just tell that you start the bootcamp partition as a virtual machine. The first way is a little cumbersomely but anyway. The real evaluation can start. Here are some of the results that I gained:

Startup of the virtual machine

Both products let you install a set of programs for easier communication between host and guest OS, called Parallels tools or VMware tools respectively. This went fine in both cases, took longer for Fusion. Then you need to startup again.
Parallels takes very long to initialize before the actual startup process starts. Also, there is an annoying warning all the time that “Parallels tools are initialized” and “you should not switch off the VM”. Informative the first time but annoying from the second time on. Startup of Win XP went very fast after the long init phase, but it sometimes happens randomly that you need to reinstall Parallels tools to make this warning go away.
VMware Fusion starts as fast as if you would start from real hardware. No initialization phase and no strange warnings. When you know VMware workstation or player from other operating systems, you are used to that.

Working with the VM

Both products let you switch to different operating modes. You can have a full screen mode, so that nobody guesses that the guest OS is actually a VM inside Mac OS X. Also you can run it inside a window and – most interestingly in the first place – you can run Windows applications and make them look like they were running inside OS X, minnimize them to the dock etc. This seems to be interesting, but when I tried it once, I lost interest in this feature. The comfort and speed in graphics rendering and display is so much worse compared to windowed or full screen display that it is a pain… I concluded that the unity view feature is just a nice to have but it does not need to be there. This applies to both products – but eventually it will get better in one of the next releases? I like to know in which environment I am anyway, so I wouldn’t use it anyway probably.
Parallels has nice effects when you switch from windowed view to full screen view. But the shortcut to get back to windowed view seems to be a bit awkward to remember… I had some trouble to get back to windowed view. There is currently no DirectX support for windows and therefore no support for 3D effects. I can imagine that this makes in half interresting for Windows Vista users or gamers to use it on Parallels – but personally I don’t care too much. I don’t play graphics intensive games on the computer and I don’t want to have Vista in the near future. Everything else regarding graphics goes smoothly and sufficiently fast. One problem that I recognized is, that whenever I start Parallels, Windows tells me to install two security patches (I don’t remember their KB names right now) although I have installed them many times before. This must be a bug in Parallels, it does not happen in BootCamp and also not in Fusion. Remarkably, my VPN client (Cisco) works on Parallels, this means I can connect to the VPN at work.
VMware Fusion has also a nice blending effect when switching from/to full screen view. Not so nice as parallels moving cube effect but still ok. Here we have experimental support for DirectX and 3D effects, so VMware is a little ahead. Apart from this everything runs smoothly (no need to reinstall patches after every startup) – but the VPN client does not work. A workaround is to connect to VPN via the host OS… then I have access to it in the guest OS as well. With VMware fusion it was also very easy to create a pure virtual machine for Ubuntu Feisty, which I use mainly just to have a look at it. Very fast and smooth working without any trouble. I experienced this before with VMware workstation on Windows too… But to be fair, I didn’t try this with Parallels so far.

Configuration of virtual machines

The configuration options for virtual machines are mainly very similar for both products. For Parallels you can configure a BootCamp partition for a virtual machine, whereas for VMware, the BootCamp partition is already a virtual machine. Interestingly, you can assign one or two virtual processors to the guest OS in VMware, but not in Parallels. Does this mean you have always one or always two processors in Parallels? The setting option in VMware is useful. BootCamp partitions are, AFAIK, not resizable in both products, whereas pure virtual machines are. You can for both products specify the size of memory and the devices that start connected.

Fazit: Both products are good and easy to use. I have the impression that VMware Fusion runs more smoothly than Parallels (despite from the VPN client on Windows). It is also well suited for running pure virtual machines of other operating systems. So I think I will buy VMware Fusion… The price is, by the way, virtually the same for both products.

Dating portals grow out of the internet recently, like mushrooms grow out of the ground. I sometimes wonder: Do people really need these things to find partners? Is there really no way to make friends and partners in real life anymore, like – lets say – five to ten years ago? Funny times…

Anyway, this site is the topmost dating portal on earth… if you are sick of mumbo jumbo online dating, because you don’t really need it, or it is always the same senseless procedure – go to www.adultsheepfinder.com and have a great laugh ;-)! You will love it!

Over Itunes you get music that you might ever wanted to buy but never did when you stopped by at a music store – because you just forget it or it is not available, or whatever. For me, this album belongs to this class:

It is one of the lesser well known records of Guns N’ Roses… but it is definitely one of the best. I guess it’s this style of music that I am addicted to – with a passion for Mando Diao and similar, too…

I found 4 CD’s in my shelf that I had not imported into Itunes although they definitely deserve it:

Time to be a little nostalgic, I guess… as opposed to be progressive – which I am usually ;-).

As read on BBC news, Iran stops to produce petrol-only cars and starts to produce cars that run on LPG as well as petrol…

I run my dual fuel car since one year now. Pretty much love it, especially when the time comes to refuel the tank… could not imagine to refuel for 1,45€ per litre anymore, as I now pay 0.65€ per litre LPG. It seems that other people like this idea too… Not here in Germany – for some strange reason I met a lot of people around me who rather buy Diesel cars than convert to LPG, although LPG is much cheaper and  a lot more profitable in most cases. But in other European countries the situation is different: in Italy there are around 1 million cars that run on LPG. NL, Poland etc. has a lot of LPG / dual fuel cars too, and now this interesting news about the Iran. I mean, this is good news overall, since LPG is supposed to have ~50% less toxics exhaustion… But I hope it does not affect the LPG price here in Germany… I am so used to cheap refuel ;-).

Fring has a very critical bug: it tries to connect automatically to a random connection when you open it, including GPRS and WAP. With WAP it does not work and hangs. I opened a ticket at the Fring support site already and they mailed me that they are working on a fix to be available “in the near future”. In the meantime you must be careful not to start Fring when there is no WLAN available and to close it when you leave a WLAN area.

When you were not carefully enough and it tries to connect to a WAP access point, you can solve this issue for now by the following steps:

1. Go to an area with WLAN, make sure that you can connect to the hotspot. Createan access point for it, if there is not already one.
2. Change the profile to Offline (Menu->System->Profile).
3. Open Fring, wait until it states that the connection failed and offers to search for alternatives.
4. Choose Search WLAN. It will fiddle around and normally (hopefully) find the hotspot that is available and to which you can connect.
5. Select this hotspot for connection. The next time, Fring will connect to it.
6. Make sure to exit Fring when you leave the WLAN area.

It took me a while to find this out – and it is really very anoying when you can not stop this damn thing from trying to connect to somewhere it can’t connect to. I hope the bugfix comes out very soon.

I actually bought a new mobile phone… Not that I needed it urgently, but there are some circumstances that made the decision relatively easy.

First, I will change my contract with T-Com Germany to Call & Surf Comfort Plus. It includes – besides DSL 16.000 and of course the full wired phone / internet flat rate program – a Hot Spot Flatrate for all T-mobile WLAN spots! Since there are many T-mobile hot spots here, this means that I can go online almost everywhere: in the ICE trains, Mc Donalds (a reason to go there ;-), airports… The other reason was that I was a little annoyed by the synchronizing of my Outlook Calendar with my old Motorola RAZR V3i phone. It often happened that appointments were created twice, moved to different times or deleted. This is not the best thing that can happen when you rely on this synchronization. So it was time to change to a phone with better synchronizing capabilities and also with WLAN connection capabilities.

This is now the Nokia E60 for me. It can connect through GPRS, UMTS (if you want to pay this), WLAN, Bluetooth, Infrared, USB – the whole program. It has no camera… great since a camera is the very last thing that I ever missed in a telephone. It has the Symbian OS inside and a good calendar, so synchronization with Outlook works almost perfect now (the only issue is that time zones seem to be not supported). It is still slim enough to fit in my trouser pocket, so there is no need to carry around an extra bag for it. And it has a normal number keyboard, so that you can handle it with one hand. Perfect fit!

WLAN works great and with Fring I can now use Skype, GoogleTalk and other VOIP platforms directly from my phone. This means I can call home from abroad for SkypeOut rates (1.7c per min) – or call abroad very cheap… or call other Skype Users for free :-)! All this from my mobile with WLAN available… which is the case with the T-Com Hotspot flatrate. This is sooo sexxyyy ;-)

…you find funny things. Not every female will like this ;-) :