the musings of a tall man…
Robbro and I have agreed to live blog the upcoming Christian Life Conference at 2PC on Jan 19th - 21st. Yes, I have further decided to embrace my inner geek and provide this service to all 4 of my readers, but I could not resist the temptation. Check the site for updates and links.
HT: Topic Announced ; CLC Announced
[tags]Christian Life Conference, Second Presbyterian Church, CLC, 2PC[/tags]
I have for some time been fascinated by virtual machines. I have been reading a great deal about the possibilities that are available for sand-boxing, testing, and otherwise by the use of virtual machines. But this past week was my first true adventure into this new world, and I have to say that I am pretty pleased at this point.
VmWare just announced its full Beta release of Fusion which is their virtual appliance for OSX. Now being a mac guy I could have used Parallels but I was specifically waiting for VmWare to release their version, simply due to the trust that I have in their name and other appliances.
I began by installing VmWare Fusion which could not have been more simple. I have been using Bootcamp for several months now for those rare circumstances when I just had to have Windows. But, it was always such a pain to reboot the machine for that five minutes that I really needed to do something. And was even more painful if I had to be there longer since I no longer had access to all my music. Thus the beauty of Fusion which allows you to run the virtual machine within the same session that you are in currently, in my case OSX.
The first OS that I tried installing was Windows. I must say that it came off without a hitch. Windows installed beautifully and worked right out of the gate. I limited the drive to 8gb and gave the VM 1 gig of my 2 gigs of RAM. It is a little pokey but I must say it is not all that bad to use. I discovered early on that it is important to install VMTools on the new virtual machine as it allows you to change the window size on the fly and allows the mouse to move in and out of the virtual machine seamlessly. Having done all this my experience with installing Windows was almost pleasurable which is the first time I can say that about a product from Redmond.
I have also been wanting to take the opportunity to work in Ubuntu. I am not a Linux guy by any stretch of the imagination but I have the desire to learn more. I have read great things about Ubuntu and wanted to give it a try. I just did not have the spare machine to dedicate to my experiment. Ubuntu was only slightly 
more challenging than Windows. I began by trying to download a pre-installed version from the VMTN website. This is a great resource of already installed virtual machines that are pre-configured and ready to go. I could not find a good one of the new version of Ubuntu and thus downloaded the 6.06 version. I moved the new virtual machine into the vmware folder on my machine, double clicked, and away we went. It was truly amazing. VMTools was already installed on this machine and so all the cool window resizing and mouse tricks worked out of the box. The only thing that did not work was my sound which I imagine was a driver issue with my iMac and could have been fixed but I did not take the time to do so since I was feeling cocky and ready to get the latest version 6.10.
I downloaded an iso of the latest version of Ubuntu and began the full installation process. The process was very speedy with only a few hitches. It took a few minutes to get VMTools working on the machine. I had to do the update process several times and was aided in that by this article. The only inssue that I had beyond that was getting the mouse to work properly. It turned out that the mouse driver that Ubuntu was using was the default and not the vmmouse that is requried. I found this article quickly on VMTN and was again “good to go.”
I have to say that the entire experience has been very positive. I am looking forward to working in x11 on Ubuntu and not having to reboot for those times that I need Windows. Fedora is next so I will post about my experience with it. All in all a great experience.
[tags]VmWare, VmWare Fusion, Fusion, Mac, OSX, Parallels[/tags]
In love with Backpackit…
Several months ago I came across an application that I use so vigorously today that I find it hard to imagine life without it, but then again that is the definition of a killer app. Now I am not sure that backpackit is the next killer app, but for me it comes close. I am not sure whether it is
the simplicity or the accessibility, but backpackit covers a multitude of needs for me. I keep all of my lists there, I store photos, and files, and even manage small projects from there. It is a wonderful collaboration tool and is wonderful for managing information dissemination to large groups of people.
This week I was reminded by a fellow backpackit disciple about one of the major sweet points of backpackit. I had showed backpackit to him a few weeks ago and he was duly impressed. As is normal with technology, he promptly reminded me of one of the key features of backpackit. I was attempting to pass a large file onto him and was explaining to him on the phone that I would upload it to my FTP site and would email him a link, user id, and password to the site. As I was in the process of setting up a protected directory and uploading the file he called back and said, “why don’t you just put it on backpackit?” Long Pause. Well, that would be much easier. So, I clicked on my tab that always has backpackit open, created a new page, uploaded the files, and shared it with my friend. Wow, that was fast.
My point for this blog, is to commentate on how easily we forget all of the functionality of the applications that we love. I have been a backpackit evangelist for nearly six months now and use it everyday, but when I needed it I quickly went to my old path for for doing things. My mind did not leap to the new path that was easier, faster, more secure, and well just better. I simply took the path that I had been using for a decade (still not bad by any means). I guess, I am really saying that even this dog is hard to teach new tricks to. It is a lesson for myself that I need to be more patient with the technology challenged people in my life.
[tags]productivity, backpackit[/tags]