Jules Says

Installing Vista on a Mac: finally, all systems go

At long last, I'm running Vista on my MacBookPro. My previous posts about installing windows (part 1 and part 2) and  installing Vista described a disastrous and ultimately failed attempts to install Vista Home Premium on my iMac. The short answer: if you're running Parallels Desktop for Mac, the only Vista that will work is the big, fat, most-overpriced Ultimate version. Don't even think about using the upgrade model.

So I reluctantly sprung for yet another copy of Windows. As if there weren't already enough flavors of Windows Vista (there are 7, not including upgrade versions), I opened the clumsy packaging to find I have to choose between two install discs - 32-bit and 64-bit. Since I have a brand new beefy MacBookPro and the latest rev of Parallels, I went ahead and assumed I could use the 64-bit install disc. Yes, I should've checked first. I don't remember the error, but my Mac wasn't one bit happy with it. I barely got into setup, had a nasty crash that seemed to even affect Parallels. I didn't even bother looking up what might have gone wrong. I just reinstalled Parallels and used the 32-bit disc. It installed without a hitch. Given my track record, getting Windows installed on the second try is pretty good.

Why Parallels thinks I have a floppy drive, I don't know. It's running fine on 512MB of RAM, which is way less than it takes to run it on a PC. Gotta love that :)

My quickie review of Vista - it's slow. It's really testy - it asks permission for everything, often several times while installing a single piece of software. I don't know who said this - I'd love to attribute this quote to the orinator... "Vista is XP in a skirt."

Here's a screen shot (click to enlarge to 1440 x 900) of my MacBookPro running Parallels in coherence mode. Coherence mode lets me run windows and mac programs side by side without having to deal with the windows desktop. My Mac doc runs along the left side and the Windows task bar along the bottom. (this is my preference - you can leave your doc at the bottom - it'll run below the Windows task bar.) I'm running VPchat (Windows only), Adium (Mac only) and Twitterific (Mac only).

Yes, I named my Vista virtual OS Parasite Rex, after the most excellent book of the same name. Parasite Rex : Inside the Bizarre World of Nature's Most Dangerous Creatures - it's fascinating, extremely readable science.

Verizon V640 Wireless Broadband for Mac: a review

Well, it's been a couple of weeks and a couple of trips out of town, and I now feel qualified to rate the Verizon V640 Broadband Wireless card for Macs (known as the EVDO ExpressCard).

The short version: it's now working well everywhere I need it to.

The longer version: it's been glitchy getting going, and still has problems. The first problem:

After a week or so of using it successfully in Austin and San Antonio, I lost connectivity. I called Verizon, and had to explain to the tech person what a V640 is, that I couldn't possibly be calling from that device. I was told there seemed to be an outage in my area.

I was on hold for so long I forgot about the call, and disconnected the call.

I called back, again explained that the V640 wasn't a phone, and this time was directed to tech support. I basically had to reinstall everything, after which the card worked fine. There was no outage after all.

A week later, before I left for Wisconsin, I was synching up my Macs, and for the first time tried to send mail from the laptop. No go. I could send mail from my .mac account, but not from any other email addresses. My Time Warner SMTP server wasn't working.

Again I called Verizon. Again I explained the device. I was told I needed to register separately for SMTP server access. It would take several days to implement this. Several days!? The rep told me to check for messages on the device for a temporary password. Messages on the device? Apparently if I use their software to connect (which I didn't and don't) there was a place for Verizon to message me. I loaded up the software. I found no messages, indeed no place for messages.

So I had connectivity on my trip, but was only able to send from a single email account. I never heard from verizon about smtp service, and was simply too busy to deal with it. And now that I'm home, it's not as urgent. But I do need to deal with it. Seems like a crazy system, not automatically offering access.

I have 2 other complaints about the V640: I've had several hard crashes while it's live. At first I thought I was just crashing when I had the card in and I ran out of juice. But no, just this afternoon I had a fresh charge with the card in. I closed the Mac, and when I reopened it 15 minutes later, it was crashed. The other issue: it's hell on battery life. I get just over 4 hours on a charge with Bluetooth disabled, and not even 2 with the card running.

Still, I can get online everywhere I've tried except for at 35,000 feet somewhere over Missouri. Had to try, though :)

Mac sync magic

Wow, I can't believe I just now discovered this. It's easy - no-brainer easy - to sync your iCal, Contacts, Mail (all accounts & rules), Keychains, and Safari Bookmarks across multiple computers.

Let me back up. I've worked on multiple computers for years. I've always had the problem of certain info living on a desktop computer at home, and different info on my laptop. Email was the worst. Getting mail on both and leaving/deleting from the server from the other is far to cumbersome with any significant mail volume. Back in my PC days, I was never able to get iMap to work for email. I tried numerous times, as did our netops guy, all to no avail. For awhile I was fine using GoToMyPC, which essentially let me work on my desktop remotely from any other computer, even a Mac. (Sadly, they don't have a client for accessing a Mac, but I highly recommend it to all you PC folks).

Then I switched back to Mac. No more remote access. Vine Server is simply too unreliable for me. I guess I've been afraid to try iMap on the Mac - I just didn't want to go through what I went through in the past trying to get it to work. I keep running up against the fact that despite several months back in the Mac world, I still don't expect things on my computer to work as they should. I bumped up against this the other day when I had messed up my font folder. I called several Mac nerd companies looking for immediate help. Finally one of them said "Have you called Apple?". Doh! I simply am not used to thinking that the makers of my system software are available to help me. I even have an AppleCare plan and I still forgot. I called. They fixed my problem in 5 minutes.

But back to iMap. I went upstairs. First I tried to change my existing mailboxes to iMap. No go - I had to set up new mailboxes. I did so. It worked. I came out to my patio and did the same thing. It worked. Then I discovered the little option at the bottom of the mail preferences window: Synchronize with other computers using .Mac. I did so. It worked. I ran back upstairs and did the same thing. It worked!

There was one surprisingly cryptic dialog message along the way - I got this for several sync operations. I was really surprised - I rarely encounter poorly-written dialog boxes in Mac software. Or am I being blinded by the light?

30 minutes after deciding to tackle iMap, I not only can now get my mail on either computer without losing it on the other, I have access to all my appointments and contacts, so I can sync with my Treo (using The Missing Sync) while I'm out of town :)

I'm having one of those "I'm so glad to be back on a Mac" days.

DRIVE director commentary via Twitter

Last night's Twitter experiment was interesting. Drive is a new Fox show made by Tim Minear, the same guy who made Firefly. It stars Nathan Fillion, the same lead actor. Fox decided to offer director commentary during the premiere of the show Sunday night.

Sadly, the show itself was pretty lame. I'm sure there are some very disappointed Firefly fans out there. It definitely didn't hold my attention well, so you'd think I could have easily kept up with the tweets. It didn't really work that way, though. Twitter is very fast, but it's not real time. Doing standard DVD-style commentary and saying "we wanted to do x here..." doesn't work. By the time the tweet is delivered, "here" has passed. I'm sure sometimes it was the 140 character limit keeping any more descriptive info from being included. If that's so, then perhaps this isn't the right medium (or 140 characters isn't the right cutoff point) for real time commentary.

That said, I think this was a clever experiment. I'm sure we'll figure out better ways to do this sort of thing. We'll look back on this first attempt and why some things weren't more obvious to us. I still think advertisers have to love this sort of thing. They're all scrambling to find ways to deliver ads to people with DVRs. Well, here's one way. Normally I'd record the show so I could watch it later and fast forward through the commercials. Instead I watched it in real time so I could get the commentary, which means the advertisers got my partial attention.

I'm sticking with Twitter. I still believe it (or something very similar) is going to become an important tool.

The screen shot is obviously not the Twitter web site - it's a sweet little Mac desktop widget called Twitterrific.

Previous posts about Twitter

Bullish on Apple

Leander Kahney writes in Wired News about the change in how people are thinking about Apple in the last few weeks. There certainly does seem to be a widespread shift an attitudes about Apple. He points out that Wilkes University in Pennsylvania is switching to Mac to save money, and experts are recommending Macs for the enterprise. There's no longer an argument that there's not enough software available for Macs, since Macs can run Windows software perfectly well. Even Wall Street thinks Apple is a good deal these days.

Kahney attributes this sea change to the iPhone and the fact that it already looks to be a massive hit. I disagree.

More and more people are having to make the decision about upgrading to Vista. If they're forced into upgrading to Vista when they buy a new computer, they also have to make the decision about any other computers they own for compatibility reasons. And then there's MS Word 2007, which will require a translator to play nice with previous versions of itself.

With a Mac running Parallels Windows apps run right alongside Mac apps, and the two OSs can share files with a simple drag and drop. You no longer have to worry about viruses. A Mac desktop doesn't cost much more than an equivalent PC laptop. And there's that whole "ease of use" thing, and the fact that for the most part things just work on a Mac. Why would anyone buy a PC any more if they didn't have to? No wonder Mac sales are up.

And I agree that in the case of Wall Street, buzz about the iPhone helps, but you really have to give the iPod a fair amount of the credit as well..

Have your views about Apple changed? How? Why?

New Parallels: Seamless!

The recent Parallels Desktop for Mac upgrade makes you feel like you've gone completely Mac. In the previous version, Windows ran in its own window on your desktop. This upgrade lets you run Parallels in coherence mode, which means you can run your Windows programs directly on your Mac desktop. The familar Windows taskbar sits along the bottom of your screen, just above the Apple dock. This screenshot (click the image to view it at 800x600) shows VPchat and Yahoo Instant Messenger running on my Mac desktop. Both programs are running smoothly and seamlessly.

Other great new features include:

• Resizable guest OS window (and automatic resolution adjustment when you resize)
• Capability to copy & paste between Mac and Windows screens
• Create multiple virtual machines

Full feature list

Installing Windows on a Mac: the short version

My original post on this was rather a lot to slog through, so here's the short version of my recommendations for installing Windows on a Mac using Parallels. More info here.

• If you're going to install Vista, make sure it's either Ultimate or Business. Home versions, even premium, will not work with Parallels. More info here.
  If you're installing XP, I'm assuming you're starting with a legitimate copy.
• Do the installation offline. You'll need Norton installed before you connect to the net.
• If the CD you have happens to be SP1, you'll need to upgrade to SP2 and install Nortons before going online
• SP2 is hard to find. I had to hit up a friend with a private server to find a copy.
• Burn a copy of SP2 and Nortons to a CD (I've done this - you're welcome to borrow my CD if you live nearby :)
• Install SP1
• Copy the SP2 installer and the Nortons installer to the desktop before installing
• Upgrade to SP2
• Install Nortons
• Go online when Nortons goes to upgrade LiveUpdate.
• Update Windows

I've had no trouble since my first successful installation.

Installing Vista on a Mac: lessons learned

Here's a newer post of my successful installation of Vista.

(Originally posted Feb. 15)

This is really more an update to the original post about installing Windows on a Mac. I've since learned that the version of Vista that I bought - Windows Home Premium - is not compatible with a Mac running Parallels. According to Mary Jo Foley of Zdnet,

"Here's the back story: Parallels Desktop for Mac product allows users to run Windows and Mac OSX side-by-side on Intel-based Apple machines. But due to Microsoft licensing restrictions, Parallels users are allowed to run only certain versions of Windows Vista - namely Windows Vista Business, Windows Vista Enterprise (available to Microsoft volume licensees only) and Windows Vista Ultimate - in a virutalized environment. In order to run Windows Home Basic or Vista Home Premium using Parallels, users must buy additional licenses of these products in order to not violate their end-user license agreements (EULAs), Microsoft officials said. Full story.

Apparently Vista Home Basic will work with BootCamp - the license issue focus on running Vista on a virtual machine. I wish I would have found the Parallels official statement about it before I bought the Home Premium edition.

I found nothing about additional licensing anywhere I looked. Basically, you'll need to buy either Enterprise or Ultimate to run it with Parallels on your Mac.

Delicious Library: Yummy!

(Originally posted Feb. 12)

Well, if I hadn't already made the switch to Mac, Delicious Library would probably have pushed me over the edge. This sweet little program catalogs your books, music, movies and games. Each product is identified by Title/Author, ISBN, or (here's the best part) UPC Code. What good is identifying by UPC code without a scanner, you ask? That was certainly my first question. I may be a gadget slut, but I'm not likely to invest in a UPC scanner. Turns out the built-in cameras in the new Macs can function as a scanner. You just hold your book/movie/game/CD up to the lens, and BEEP! it's scanned in, and the cover art is placed on a shelf. The artwork, as well as supporting information, a summary, and recommendations for similar items (all via Amazon lookup). I've mostly scanned in books so far, and it's been a breeze. You need a bit of extra light for the scanning - using light from the screen in a dark room isn't quite enough. An extra lamp lighting the item does the trick. The actual images were well-scaled. They're not to scale, per se, but coffee table books are bigger than hardcovers are bigger than trade paperbacks, etc. The sizes appear appropriate, and subtle shadows and cover reflections are added to each image, giving your shelves a rich, deep feel. You can view by covers or as a list, in pretty much any sort order you can imagine.

It's only $40. I plan to waste lots of time scanning in my libraries :)