Time Machine and Parallels

I recently (like yesterday) converted my Windows 7 BootCamp partition over to a virtual machine. There were many factors that led to this, but ultimately it boiled down to the fact that I ran out of hard disk space on my partition and there was no way for me to increase the capacity. In the past I would have to go back and uninstall a bunch of applications. However, this was getting old and it was a never ending battle. I was living on the edge (of disk space).

My solution was to virtualize my Windows 7 machine and scrap my partition. This would allow me to give more space to my Windows 7 OS whenever I want to (along with other benefits). The whole process took about 2 hours. I started the process @ Barnes & Noble and then ended up driving home with my laptop open in my passenger seat. The process finished as I was driving through Newark. :)

One of the first things I noticed was that Time Machine was backing up my entire 50 gb image every hour. It actually did this 3 times (which is now hogging up 150 gb on my Time Capsule). I ended up having to "Exclude" my vdd file from the backup process and now my backups are normal again.

I feel much more confident about having my Windows 7 machine as a virtual hard disk now. I still have a lot of learning to do in regards to cloning a base image of it so that I can install other software without affecting my MAIN image. But for now, I'm just happy to be able to "Suspend" my image and free up some resources whenever I want now... without having to "Shutdown" Windows 7. :)

Saying Goodbye to McAfee

Back in the day, I was die-hard Norton AnitVirus. If it was anything other than Norton, it was crap. My Dad was a die-hard McAfee user and swore by it. So, about 6 years ago, I switched to McAfee AntiVirus and have been a happy (and loyal) customer ever since. It didn't popup unimportant messages to me and I liked that. It just worked. A few times, I found it helpful when things would go wrong and I was able to track down certain activities of "suspicious" behavior over my network that made their way into my computer. I can't remember exact instances, but I do recall feeling fortunate to have the utilities that McAfee offered me when I got paranoid about other people hacking into my machine.

Recently, I've been spending most of my time OS X. There just aren't as many vulnerabilities that I can see with the Mac. Maybe I'm being naive in thinking this, but I feel more safe on my Mac. (?) Almost all of my daily use and personal computing has been done on my Mac in the last 2 years. I'm even trying to transform my dev skills to be more Unix-savvy so that I can (one day) rival my own Windows development skills. :) I live in OS X, and only use Microsoft Windows for work now. In order to use Windows, I have a separate partition setup and then I load the OS through BootCamp into my Parallels 6.0 application. It works great, and I'm even using a UI skin called "MacLook" to make my Windows dialogs look and feel like Mac dialogs. The problem with this configuration is that I have to allocate a certain amount of RAM to my VM. It can't just take all of my RAM and divy it up between my Mac OS. If it were up to me, I'd drop Windows and become a Mono head, but I can't; my job requires that I work with Microsoft .NET Framework. Therefore, I am forced to have Windows installed as a Virtual Machine. It pays the bills, and... well let's face it: Businesses run on Windows. In order for me to provide "business solutions" to "businesses", I need to develop applications on Windows. Period.

The other day, my Windows VM came to a screeching halt and I wasn't able to do anything on it without inferring a 15 second delay of every action. This went on for about 3 hours or more. Amazingly, my OS X environment was working great and was still very responsive. I was only running Visual Studio 2010, Total Commander, and FireFox (to debug my ASP.NET project). I had just installed a new tool to allow me to interface with Microsoft Office from inside my C# projects, and after doing that, my machine became incoherent. I checked and made sure that McAfee wasn't running a full virus scan, and it wasn't. I couldn't make sense of it!!

Eventually, Bob and I had to do a GoToMeeting and I had to give him control of my Visual Studio environment. How embarrassing!! My machine was behaving like a 1990's Tandy T1000, and he had to wait for simple operations like I had been doing for the last 3 hours. He and I decided to find the problem... Low and behold, it was McAfee's "Real Time Scan" feature. Since I'd downloaded all these new tools, Real Time Scan was going through and making sure there were no viruses on them. Not sure why it took so damn long and required so many resources, but it did. I decided to turn off the Real Time Scan feature, but as soon as I did, I began getting all kinds of red prompts stating that MY COMPUTER IS AT RISK! WARNING! WARNING! WARNING!... Is that really necessary? C'mon! I've been putting up with all of the slowness from this thing, and now when I try to turn it off, it annoys me even more with false panic prompts.

Once I disabled the Real Time Scan, my VM started to respond better. After voicing my frustrations to Bob about this happening more and more lately, he pointed me to a free alternative called Microsoft Security Essentials. It's free and it doesn't hog up resources like McAfee does. Yesterday, I took the plunge. I uninstalled McAfee (only 1 month left on my subscription anyway), and installed Microsoft Security Essentials. So far, no big red prompts and I've not had the "bog down" problem yet.

We'll see...

Hacking Like Neo

Have you ever wanted to skin your entire computing experience to be completely monochrome green and black like the Matrix? If you are a Mac user, you can.

Honestly though, I do a lot of coding in the dark and use this display a lot. I don't like sitting under bright lights. However, I used to get nasty headaches when looking at a glowing white screen in the dark. To solve this problem, I used to use a shortcut key combination built right into my Mac that would turn "White on Black":

> [CONTROL]+[OPTION]+[COMMAND]+[8] (try it now)

> or navigate through System Preferences -> Universal Access -> Seeing -> Display

Unfortunately, this would just negate all of the colors much like a negative from an old 35 mm roll of film. This wasn't very useful actually. My colors would all be out of whack with some pretty crazy colors (magenta, baby blue, purple, pink, lavender, yellow, etc..) and when I would visit a page that was originally black, then I would get the nasty white glare again.

A few months ago I stumbled upon a cool utility that allows me to do a lot more than just turn "White on Black". The utility is called Nocturne and it has been a dream come true for me. It works by adjusting tints and hues rather than just inverting all of the colors.

Here is a before pic:

Here is an after pic:

Not only does it look bad-ass for anybody looking over my shoulder, but it saves my eye sight when I'm coding in the dark. Best yet, you are not just limited to monochrome green and black. You can configure it to be any color you'd like. I can set my tint to red and it makes my Mac look like a submarine terminal. Check out my iTunes display:

So there it is. If you code in the dark, or want to code like a real hacker (:P), check out Nocturne (it's free)!

Hi, I'm a Mac

Jennifer and I broke down and got ourselves some MacBooks. She got a standard MacBook for her photo taking, Facebooking, eBaying, and CraigsListing. We got all the photo's moved over to her machine, since she's the one that manages the pictures. They sync up to our Time Capsule so we have a pretty solid backup solution now. She switched from Picasa to iPhoto and she seems to like it. Other than that, she mainly uses Safari for everything else...

I on the other hand got a MacBook Pro, and it acts as my new development machine. Already, I'm loving it. It took a while to get used to the new keyboard setup, but I'm getting better each day. As a programmer, I rely very heavily on key combination's, and the Mac keyboard is quite a bit different from what I'm used to (to say the least). I installed Windows 7 on a second partition through BootCamp. I then purchased a license for Parallels 5.0, and run my BootCamp partition through a virtual machine. My Windows 7 setup has everything needed to be a full blown development machine. I have SQL Server 2008 with Analysis Services, Visual Studio 2008, Office 2007, SubVersion, Total Commander, Daemon Tools, Paint.NET, Reflector, ReSharper, etc...

Aside from my Windows VM, I also installed Ubuntu on a separate VM so that I can play around with MySQL and learn the basics of Linux. My goal is to use it as a database server while I play with with Ruby on Rails. I'm using SSH for the first time in my life, and it's quite the learning curve for me. I'm forcing myself to to keep my Terminal.app console on my Mac open. I'm also forcing myself to NOT install TextMate and learn VI. I think it's safe to say that I've been spoiled with Visual Studio's IDE for waaaaaay too long. :)

Also, I purchased a family pack license of the iWorks suite and I'm really liking it so far. Numbers has some pretty cool functionality in it. I especially like how you can add multiple tables on a blank canvas and size them independently. The summary feature is slick too; it allows me to highlight a range of cells, and drag / drop one of the summary values into a new cell to build a separate table of summaries however I see fit. The presentation options are much better than Excel in my opinion, and it's much easier to get a spreadsheet into a "report mode" using Numbers than Excel as well... again, in my opinion.

Of course, the girls really like the Photo Booth app. Of all the things this Mac can do, they ONLY want to play with Photo Booth. Both Jennifer's and My MacBook are polluted with pictures of little warped kid faces. :)

MindMapping with MindNode

I was just turned on to a new application (for Macs) that allows you to easily create mind maps; the tool is called MindNode and it's free! They also give away another app called InfiniteCanvas which is very similar to WebCanvas, but oddly deals strictly with comic drawings. Anyway, I thought that MindNode's freeness was worth the post.

Mac Daddy Luc

I'm officially Mac'n. I've had this MacBook Pro for some time now, but I've procrastinated for too long on getting all my stuff moved over to it. To be honest, I've just dreaded the whole process. I've been on this Tablet (Toshiba Portege m200) for almost 4 years now and have everything I need on it (and then some).

This week, I dedicated some major hours to getting it setup. At work I would have it setup on my desk and install all the apps I needed on it, while I did my "normal" work on the Tablet. When I was home, I just installed update after update for the Vista in between surfing the web inside OS X. I must say that I'm gonna miss my tablet (which I'm using now) and I know it will miss me too. Even though I don't use the pen too much anymore, I just know where all the keys are and can do anything on the keyboard without ever looking at it. I drive Jennifer crazy because I can fly on this thing. For example, right now, my fingers are going about 120 mph right now and it's nothing for me...

Aside from my mad tablet skills and relearning a whole new keyboard configuration, I gotta say that I'm pretty excited about the whole new get-up. James and Pilgrim helped me get setup with Boot Camp and Parallels. I'm basically running Vista on a separate partition through the Mac OS. With a couple of keystrokes I can switch from Mac to Vista without rebooting. Major props to Pilgrim and James for that, thanks guys! They helped me big time through that whole process. I told James at one point that I felt like that guy that had an empty cup and I was standing at the sink totally clueless as to how to fill my cup up (it was the only analogy I could think of, but hit the nail on the head). I was yelling his name every 2 minutes for silly questions; I felt like a total noob.

My Vista is setup with Office 2007, VS2008, Sql Server 2005 with Analysis Services, Starteam, TotalCommander, and Firefox. I still have to put Visual Basic 6.0 and all the components that I can't live without on it; you know... DynamiCube, ActiveBar, SharpGrid, and ActiveReports.

Bottom line, I'm Mac'n baby!