I’ve just started being a beta tester for Mailplane, and it seems pretty cool. The only things I’d like to see:
That’s after a couple of hours of playing, including some time stripping out redundant features using CSS, which is kinda nice.
If you weren’t paying attention, today was a big day in terms of running Windows on a Mac. Boot Camp was upped to beta 1.3, and will be included in Leopard. VMWare Fusion went to beta 4, and Parallels was bumped to version 3. I’ve only finished downloading Parallels, with the single aim of getting Eve Online working with this virtualisation system. I have managed to get it working well in Boot Camp 1.2, and Cross Over Office, but couldn’t get VMWare Fusion to work on my Hackintosh. I’ll try with the newer version when that finishes. So, after installing Parallels 3, I’ve played a little bit with Eve Online. And was very disappointed. It runs, granted, after turning on DirectX, which took me a while to figure out (you have to stop the virtual machine and edit it’s settings). But it’s way slower than CrossOver Office, which is almost realtime. And the graphics are very screwed up. Like every progress bar having white blocks, and unless you are in full-screen mode you can’t click on stuff properly, the mouse pointer just doesn’t line up. It’s a while away from being usable for playing Eve in any way shape or form.
I didn’t notice this anywhere else on the net, but when I started downloading the latest Boot Camp beta, I got this response:
Thank you for your interest in Boot Camp and for downloading the Boot Camp Beta software. We hope you enjoy evaluating this software and appreciate your comments and suggestions. Boot Camp is just one of many new features in Mac OS X Leopard, the next major release of Mac OS X, due in October 2007.
The bold text is the bit that appeared new to me.
I’ve got a new (well, soon to be replaced, apparently!) MacBook Pro on order, and due sometime this week. I’m seriously deciding whether to move away from Google Calendar, and back to iCal with the new machine. With a laptop, which I may have with me a fair amount of the time (we’ll see!), the requirement of a web-available calendar application may subside. It might also be time to reconsider Mail.app over Gmail (still using Gmail for hosting, though). There’s just a few things I don’t like about Gmail/Google Calendar. The main one is that I can’t edit the calendar in iCal, and that occasionally when I go to edit a calendar entry I get all sorts of non-registered clicks. Kinda hard to explain, but if you’ve come across it, you’ll now. I’m actually a bit tempted to go down the hosting route, with someone like DreamHost, and perhaps move this blog there, and run some other stuff off the same account. Including web-available calendars, which are controlled/uploaded by iCal. I think I’d like the flexibility of my own Wordpress installation, with the availability of plugins, and updates. And better XMLRPC support (I can no longer upload images via ecto to Blogsome). Not to mention my own domain working better than here.
Born Again • Supergrass • Supergrass ★★½
I had an incident nearly two weeks ago where I injured my back at work, and when I went to the doctor, which is walking distance from work, I found a turtle. Yes, that’s right, there was a ~20cm turtle just walking along the footpath. I took him into the doctor’s surgery, and asked if they could try to find who he belonged to, since he was clearly a pet. I kept asking how he was going each time I went back. They didn’t have any luck finding a missing owner, so I took him to work, where the Biology department said they will look after him. However, the enclosure he will be going in doesn’t quite hold him, so he’s staying with me. And he’s taking up heaps of time. We were planning on buying and assembling some of the kitchen, but it’s after lunch already, and we still haven’t left the house. Oh, and he has a name now: Wilfred. Like the dog.
Well, after two days of trying, I finally got OS X to install on my Dell Dimension 4600. In the end, it seems my installation DVD was slightly corrupted, enough to fail on trying to install a particular package. Which, it turned out, was the one that stops kernel panics on boot. Kinda handy. The way I got around it was to use Pacifist to unpack the package on the iMac, and copy the files across using my iPod. This was after countless reboots. I wish I’d thought of it earlier. Like yesterday morning. So, now I’m typing this from the lovely place that is OS X. I managed to get Sound working, just by changing the plug location. Only in-built AC97 sound works, but that’s mainly what I’ve been using anyway. I had been using the PCI soundcard for TeamSpeak, but not for actual system sounds. At the worst, I can just build a cable double adaptor and leave it plugged into both locations. Networking required the download of an extension - AppleIntel8255x.kext, and that worked fine too. In the short term, I just plugged in a Firewire cable to the iMac, and used Internet Sharing to build the network. But this is better, and it even picks up the same IP address (and hostname) from my DHCP server. Graphics still isn’t perfect, but I’m only a few minutes away from downloading a potential driver. In fact, it’s just finished now.
I was saddened to hear last night of the passing of an influentual man in my life. As a beginning teacher, I was posted to a “hard to staff” school, but had a fantastic coordinator and faculty that supported me. We did quite a lot of exciting stuff back then, including working with a retired engineer called Don Atkinson. Don’s specialty was electric motors, and he spent every Friday for most of my five years at that school coming in and designing and building them with a small group of students, and myself and my coordinator. Don passed away on Monday morning. Don led an amazing life. From going to Jazz Clubs as an underager during the war, to being one of the founding members of Flinders University’s engineering department, and finally working with children in a largely voluntary capacity, he will be missed by many people from many walks of life. I’ll miss you, mate.
How cool is this.
When you insert a CD into your iMac G5/iMac Core Duo, this makes it so the disc appears “in” the desktop. Not the icon representing the disc, but an image that looks like the disc. It’s in sync with the disc as it goes in, apparently, and looks just like the disc is actually appearing on the desktop…
Powered by ScribeFire.
I haven’t tried this software yet, but it looks great: Versomatic is automatic version control for all of your files. What it does, is set a service running that monitors changes in the filesystem. When changes are scheduled to be made, the service automatically backs up the previous version of the file. Of course, there’s some flexibility bound to be built in. After all, you won’t want to be backing up cache files, and so on. I suspect you’ll be able to choose particular file types, particular locations, or even just particular files to control the revisions of. Of course, the less work the user has to do, other than install it, the better. Getting back a previous version appears fairly simple, too. You can either right-click on a file and choose a previous version to edit, or use the Version Manager to see all managed files. You can, apparently, set the amount of disk space that will be used (I assume that after this older files will be discarded, or some method of choosing which ones to keep). Apparently there’s little extra resource usage, since it just copies the files to the revision archive, however this would also make disk usage more of an issue. Having a difference between files stored instead would save space, but use a lot more CPU time. Oh, and it’s OS X and Windows.
From the Synergy FAQ:
How do I stop my game from minimizing when I leave the screen? Many full screen applications, particularly games, automatically minimize when they’re no longer the active (foreground) application on Microsoft Windows. The synergy server normally becomes the foreground when you switch to another screen in order to more reliably capture all user input causing those full screen applications to minimize. To prevent synergy from stealing the foreground just click “Options…” and check “Don’t take foreground window on Windows servers.” If you turn this on then be aware that synergy may not function correctly when certain programs, particularly the command prompt, are the foreground when you switch to other screens. Simply make a different program the foreground before switching to work around that.