Parallels vs VM Ware Fusion

At home, I use Parallels on a MacBook Pro 2.6Ghz with 8GB RAM. Guest OS = Win XP, 2 CPUs, 2GB RAM.
At work, I use VMWare Fusion on a Mac Pro 8x2.6Ghz with 12GB RAM. Guest OS = Win 7 64bit, 8 CPUs, 5GB RAM.

In both cases, I have a second monitor and run the guest OS full screen on the second monitor.

For a while I preferred Parallels, but I put that down to familiarity.

However, just recently, I've started playing a game (League of Legends - lots of fun). So I've got quite a good comparison point now. And basically Parallels is the clear winner. Here's a few reasons why:

• Way better audio. VM Ware has a terrible audio latency, which makes working any form of media just plain annoying.
• Way better graphics. Interestingly enough, LoL claims to do 45fps in VMWare Fusion and 30fps in Parallels, but the experience of watching it is clear: Parallels is way smoother. Frame rates vary, and VMWare is really jerky and unresponsive.
• UI responsiveness. Really important for games, the machine needs to respond to keyboard and mouse events quickly. Parallels does, VMWare doesn't.
• Mac-Windows integration is just more clever in my opinion. I get one app switcher (CMD+TAB) for mac and windows apps using Parallels. In VMWare I get a mac-switcher and a windows-switcher. There's more than that, but I'm not going to go through them all.

There's lots of other more technical comparisons between them, but I think what I've mentioned above is very relevant because it's how I as a user experience it.

So, if you want to play games, or use anything media related (even watching YouTube), then go for Parallels and not VM Ware.

How to Import a VMWare image into Parallels

I spent ages reading around on the web for the best and easiest way to import a VM Ware vm into Parallels. Parallels Transporter is an option, but it requires the guest VM to be running, which may not be useful if it's a downloaded appliance image or whatever.

The answer is frightfully simple (although hard to find).

1. Launch Parallels.
2. File -> Open, and select the VM Ware image.
3. Save.

Done, converting. It'll take a while, this image is big. Let's see how it goes...

Hard Disk recovery

Just the other day I had a hard drive "stop mounting" with this type of message:

Disk Utility was no help. So I took it to a friend who has Disk Warrior. Again no luck.

After some research into other products, I saw that Data Rescue II by Pro Soft Engineering had a demo version. Download away.

Seems that it's a great product. At first it found no files - but I was trying to scan the partition. When I scanned the whole drive (not just the partition that wasn't mounting), then it provided a list of files for me to recover to another hard drive!

One interesting part of their philosophy is that recovery is a read-only operation. This is great because it prevents anything from being further corrupted by a repair gone wrong.

So now I'll be buying a copy and another 200+GB drive to recover my data onto.

Thanks Pro Soft Engineering for a great product.

On thing is odd though... why is it called Data Rescue II version 1.2? Wouldn't it just be version 2.2? :)

ADSL but only 1

We finally have an ADSL connection at home.

Our mobile broadband has been pretty good. It has similar specs, which is great to achieve over mobile network, but the ping time and responsiveness of the service was terrible.

I guess that's an advantage to using a real (good) ISP than a phone company.

3 Mobile Broadband

Today we got a 3 mobile broadband USB modem.

So far it works great. Here's our speed we're getting initially:



1224 kbit/s download is not too bad. It's no adsl2 or cable modem speeds, but given the crap we're going through at the moment getting a hardwired connection this interim solution might be what we keep!

More Thoughts on Australia's Internet Censorship plans

I sent a letter to Stephen Conroy expressing my view that ISP level filtering in Australia would cause a significant negative performance impact on the internet and that the resources (money) spent on the filter would be better spent elsewhere (ie: law enforcement).

I wonder if Stephen Conroy would like to drive a car with a speed limiter that automatically set it's speed limit based on signs on the side of the road....

If it performed like the ISP tests have shown, then it would certainly get the speed wrong some of the time, perhaps limiting him to drive at 80km/h on a freeway or allowing him to drive at 100km/h in a suburban street! Not good for the traffic, and certainly not going to eliminate the possibility of him speeding.

I also support the letter written by Mark Newton, which you can read here. The guy has clearly done his homework, obviously more so than Senator Stephen Conroy.

Say no to censorship of the Internet! Spend the resources on police to catch people doing illegal activities instead of hampering the online performance of an entire country.

Using python to examine your iTunes library

I recently noticed a bunch of music files were missing from my iTunes music library. Here's a simple python program I write to find which ones were missing... (iTunes tells you, but in a modal dialogue window so you can't look at the list and check your library at the same time)

import plistlib
import urllib

filename = "/Users/matt/Music/iTunes/iTunes Music Library.xml"


def check_file(dict):
 location = dict['Location']
 
 try:
  
  # try the url
  u = urllib.urlopen(location)
  
  # close it
  u.close()
  
  # if we get here, it was ok
  ok = True
  
 except:
  ok = False
 
 if (not ok):
  print "file not found: " + location


print "Reading iTunes xml file..."
x = plistlib.readPlist(filename)

tracks = x['Tracks']

for key in tracks.iterkeys():
 check_file(tracks[key])

xbox 360 - first thoughts

Now I have an xbox360, and a few games thanks to the promotional deals on at the moment.

Interesting product. Great out of the box experience so far.

The signing up for xbox live is a bit of a long winded task with the xbox controller. Perhaps it's easier to do on a computer and then simply log in using the xbox.

3 software updates downloaded and installed on the first day. I expect this is pretty standard.

I'm pretty impressed at how quickly game results appear on xbox.com - albeit the xbox.com website is terribly slow (must be running on microsoft software... tehehe)

Nice to see that the network support is easy to use. Pity that they only have media sharing software for microsoft windows based pcs.... but... that is microsoft.

I'll be sure to try out some of the Mac and Linux based media sharing apps soon, and will post how it goes.

No Clean Feed

Say no to internet censorship in Australia! Read here for more information from Electronic Frontiers Australia!

I believe that internet censorship should not be allowed because of two primary reasons:

Firstly, I consider this to be an invasion of civil liberties. Whilst I no way condone the use of the internet for criminal or illegal activities, I believe that the law must be enforced without the hinderance of our civil liberties, specifically including the freedom to access information.

Secondly, I believe that a filter to the internet would be a great negative for the performance of data communications in the country. The infrastructure required to filter a nations content would be extremely expensive, and would slow down the rate of data transfers whilst performing filtering activities. This would ultimately lead to decreased performance of the internet, and increased cost of internet services for consumers.

Additionally, I do not believe that an internet filter would be very effective. It is already very easy to establish a secure encrypted communications channel over the internet between two computers. Banks have this security. The same encryption technologies can also be used to set up secure encrypted gateways between machines. This is virtually impossible to filter.

Support freedom of information in Australia!

iPhoto Library Manager

I've had a hell of a time using iPhoto recently - it's been really really really slow, and buggy - crashing a lot, etc.

After a bit of searching, i found this program: iPhoto Library Manager.

It's a really neat utility, that can manage multiple libraries, and also serves as a utility to rebuild your photo library which makes iPhoto much much faster - and let's hope more reliable.

So if iPhoto 6 is being a dog, then give this a whirl!

read more | digg story

Internet Explorer is the bane of my life.

Internet Explorer is the bane of my life. Need I say more.

Every time I look up a standard for HTML / CSS / Javascript, it works on every browser I have, except Internet Explorer. Almost consistently. It is just terrible.

Wordle and Delicious

I've been using delicious for a while to bookmark things i find interesting.... This page generates a word map of your interests based on the tags you use in delicious.

I think it's a pretty accurate reflection of my interests.... don't you?



Anyone interested can look into my bookmarks at:

http://del.icio.us/soundevolution

-matt

MacBook Pro Internal Hard Drive Upgrade

Today, I upgraded the internal hard drive in my MacBook Pro, using Carbon Copy Cloner to transfer all the data from the old drive to a new one. It wasn't all smooth sailing, but now it's done.

I got the new drive and placed it in a SATA-USB case and formatted it correctly using Disk Utility (with GUID partition table). Then I used Carbon Copy Cloner (CCC) to transfer everything from the old drive to the new drive.

I tested the new drive by trying to restart with it as the boot disk, (in the USB case). It started booting, but then suddenly restart half way through booting.

I had an appointment with an Apple retailer/service centre to do the upgrade, since I had read that the installation was quite tricky. So I went ahead and got the drive installed - placing the old drive in the SATA-USB case.

So, still no full booting... crash restart half way through. I tried again using single user mode (CMD+S during initial boot) and noticed an error message about `devfs`.

I booted of the old drive and noticed that the new drive was missing '/dev/'. I created this, making sure to copy the permissions and user:owner as on the old drive:

sudo mkdir /Volumes/NewDrive/dev
sudo chmod 666 /Volumes/NewDrive/dev
sudo chown root:wheel /Volumes/NewDrive/dev

I also noticed that '/.vol' was missing, so I repeated the process for that directory.

After that, the system boots correctly off the internal drive. There's still something funky going on just as the Finder loads, but I haven't figured that out yet.

And using CCC is certainly a lot faster than reinstalling from scratch (including all applications!).

Good luck to all,
Matt

Installing MySQL 5 on Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard

Installing MySQL 5.0 was fairly simply on Mac OS X Leopard, with a view caveats:

1. For some reason, MySQL didn't start properly until I rebooted the machine. After installation, I could start and stop the mysql server from the command line (Terminal) but not from the preferences pane. After a restart it all works normally.

2. PHP in Leopard looks for the mysql socket in a different place. So I created a symlink to point back to MySQL 5's default location. Hopefully this allows for both old and new systems to work together regardless of where they expect the socket to be:


sudo mkdir /var/mysql
sudo ln -s /tmp/mysql.sock /var/mysql/mysql.sock
sudo chown _mysql /var/mysql/mysql.sock
sudo chmod 777 /var/mysql/mysql.sock


Now the PHP is talking to MySQL.

Don't forget to enable PHP in the web server. To do this, edit the file /etc/apache2/httpd.conf and remove the comments on this line:

LoadModule php5_module libexec/apache2/libphp5.so

Leopard's Time Machine really works!

Mac OS X 1.05 aka Leopard's Time Machine works before you even open
the box.

Look here, it's arrived a whole 6 hours and 19 minutes before it's
released:

:)

Waves - Poor User Experience

I'm feeling really frustrated after trying out some Waves plugins. Here's a copy of the email I sent to waves about it all:

---

Dear Sales team at Waves.

I am extremely disappointed with the process of trying the waves SSL plugins. Here's a quick score card for you:

9 out of 10 for sound quality.
0 out of 10 for ease of installation.

My 7 day authorisation has expired after 2 days. I have 5 days left to recover the 10 hours of work already done, which I cannot. Not to mention lost studio time.

If the process of trying waves plugins is this complex, I can assure you right now that I will not ever try another waves plugin. You can correctly infer that I would not buy a new plugin if I never try it.

Here is my story:

Two days ago (coming up 48 hours) I downloaded the SSL plugins to try them out for a client who had "heard" that they sounded good and wanted to use them.

After about 10 hours of pre-production with my client n Wednesday afternoon and Thursday day (at my home studio, running Pro Tools LE), we took our mix into a big studio to finish (Pro Tools HD playback into analog console with lots of nice outboard gear, TC|Electronic reverbs, etc).

We discovered that the SSL plugin installer was only for Intel mac. (Whatever happened to Universal binaries?)

We downloaded the SSL plugins again for the PPC mac, only to find that my iLok had a "Waves 5.9 Enabler Intel" authorisation on it which was not recognised.

The waves website absolutely sucks. I ended up with about 7 windows open, because every link opens another window. The new window is not logged in, so I have to log in again. Then a link opens a new window, and those pages have messages like "you must be logged in to use this link" (download). And so on.

The process of requesting authorisations, and how it works with the plugins, back and forth between separate authorisers for enablers and plugins and architectures is completely too complex. I consider myself to be extremely computer literate (I do software and web development as well as being a professional sound engineer) and it took 2 hours to get the PPC SSL plugins installed.

After all this time (2 hours in the big studio, which we're paying for) the PPC mac said that there was "0" days remaining on the waves enabler, and the SSL plugins would not load.

I returned to the ilok website and synchronised my ilok (the only one being used, the same one that was authorised with a 7 day demo less than 48 hours ago) and it clearly shows to licenses from waves: Waves 5.9 Enabler for Intel Macs, and SSL plugins, both expiring 27 June 2007.

We even tried downloading a PPC demo of another plugin in the hope that it would come with a PPC Waves enabler trial that would let the SSL plugins work.

So we gave up on trying to use the waves plugins on the PPC PT HD rig, and hooked up my MacBookPro to an LE system to bounce out the individual tracks.

This time, the intel mac, which was working perfectly earlier yesterday also reported that there was "0" days remaining on the Waves Enabler and the SSL plugins would not load.

So now I have no access to the SSL plugins. All of 10 hours of work I have done with them, at my client's request, is now wasted. 2 hours of studio time has also been wasted.

This experience has been bad for me.
This experience has been bad for my client.
This experience has been bad for the studio we took the mix to.
This experience has been bad for Waves, because I'm not prepared to go through this again. I'm sure many other users feel the same way.

I expect that installing and using a bought waves plugin would involve the same amount of mucking around. If this is indeed the case, I hope to god that I never have to buy anything from waves, because this is ridiculous.

What is wrong with doing a 7 day demo straight of the ilok like every other manufacturer? It seems that there is a completely sufficient copy protection and authorisation. If this is a money saving activity by not involved the guys at PACE, think about how much you've lost in unhappy customers.

I would consider hiring the plugins for a short time (week) if a client requested them but I didn't want to purchase them outright. Especially if this was less hassle than this demo stuff. Refer to the digidesign site where you can hire plugins for 2 / 14 / 31 day periods, for an example of how this might work.

Surely you'd rather a few dollars in the bank for people to try and use the plug-in than lose customers over a crappy trial authorisation system?


Your plug-ins sound great. The user experience is absolutely terrible. For your own sake, I hope you do something about this quickly.



Yours sincerely,

Matt Connolly
(frustrated) Sound Engineer.

Installing Windows XP on a Macbook Pro with Parallels

I installed XP with a friends' license whilst my genuine XP license was on order from the supplier.

I managed to successfully get windows running in bootcamp and parallels (2.5).

My XP cd arrived and I went through the process of changing the key code (using Microsoft's key update tool), but I foolishly did this from within parallels. Windows would run fine under parallels, but as soon as i rebooted natively, it was no longer active and stopped working.

In the mean time, I had upgraded to Parallels 3.0 which seems like it's working fine.

I also upgraded to Bootcamp 1.3

I couldn't figure out how to activate windows using the same license code directly as I had used when running under Parallels.

So I decided to reinstall windows. Here's a list of glitches.

- There's no page down key on a MacBook Pro, so you cannot read the EULA (but who reads it anyway)
- The Win XP Pro installer crashes if you have a mighty mouse plugged in. ( copyright 2004. yay)

I also reformated the win partition as NTFS.

Needless to say, I'm not in a happy place. Some combination of NTFS, Parallels 3.0, and Bootcamp 1.3 means that it's just not working, and I'm installing Windows for the third time today in a last ditch attempt to get it working.

At one stage it all looked good running natively. I installed Bootcamp drivers, windows updates, I got the activation thing sorted out, thanks to Sharon (my name for any non-human voice system.)

But as soon as I tried to boot it under Parallels, hang after hang after hang. Windows wouldn't even do a safe boot. Kept hanging after loading 'MUP.SYS'. Great.

Where to get I-Bench?

Is it I-Bench? or iBench? The answer is "I-Bench".

I was very interested in downloading i-bench myself and having a go at a speed test between Apple's new Safari browser for Windows and Firefox and Internet Explorer 7 (IE7).

Took me ages to find out where to get i-bench.... seems that the product has changed hands a few times recently.

I did find on this Lionbridge page an End User License Agreement, with a link that goes straight to the download.

The link points straight to the files:

ib50.exe
ib40.exe

Anyway, the file is downloading at the moment. I'll post my results as a comment here when I have some....

-matt

Sound Evolution a part of Smart State Innovation

Minister Jon Mickel, Minister for State Development, Employment and Industrial Relations, made a press release this week: "Smart State’s i.lab incubator still has eye for innovation".

Sound Evolution was mentioned alongside other innovative companies at i.lab, including Snowsports Interactive, Locatrix and BioChip Innovations.

See the full article here:

http://www.cabinet.qld.gov.au/MMS/StatementDisplaySingle.aspx?id=52060

Ten Things I Hate About Myspace

1. Customer service sucks.
   I've never once received a response from Customer service. And I don't know anyone who has.
   
   
2. Safari support sucks.
   Functions like Customer Service requests don't work at all using the Safari browser.
   
   
3. Can't convert memberships.
   You can't convert memberships from normal to music. Once you've signed up as a normal member, you have to delete your account and sign p again as a music member.
   
   
4. Registering URLs sucks.
   Plenty of URLs are available, but you cannot register them because of no good reason.
   
   
5. Content license sucks.
   Here's a license summary: You give it to us for nothing, we make money out of it. Sucker. (Thank goodness it's a non-exclusive license)
   
   
6. You must be logged in to do that.
   WTF? I just logged in. How many times do I have to log in before I can proceed?
   
   
7. Poor web design.
   Pages are made with oodles of poorly nested tables, with terrible use of CSS for styles.
   
   
8. Slow pages.
   Pages quickly become polluted with ads and are terribly slow to read / navigate, even with a fast computer. (This could easily be attribtued to the users posting on the pages, but it still sucks)
   
   
9. Profile editing sucks.
   Terrible profile editing system. Difficult to navigate with poor feedback of results of edits. Plenty of fields, once entered, cannot be removed from your profile page.
   
   
10. Customer service sucks.
    I had to say it again because it really really really really sucks.