What’s that little slot for?
Do you own a Mac? Do you develop for Windows? If so then you're in the same bucket that I am. I worked for the evil empire for two years of my life, and ever since I have been completely hooked on their development stack. The beauty of C# easily surpasses any statically typed language I have ever worked with, but I digress. This is not a post on C#, but a post on a little gadget I found that can make VMWare work "more better" so you can stay within the UI bliss of OSX but still work the evil empire day job effectively.
Those of you with MacBook Pros, look on the left side of the laptop. What do you see? Well, probably a single USB port (thanks Steve...), a mag-charger port, and some weird flap thing. Most people have no idea what the slot behind that flap is for--and I venture a guess that it sits vacant on 99% of the MacBooks in existence. Well, it shouldn't anymore. Why? Because of this.
That little guy sits flush in the PCMCIA slot on the left hand side of your mac resulting in an instant (as in instant gratification) 48GB boost to your lappys hard disk space--and it's an SSD to boot. The PCMCIA interface is not quite as fast as a SATA 2/3 solid state disk, but still faster than a traditional 7200 RPM hard drive connected via FireWire*.
You can use this extension of space for anything really--I was using it as an onboard TimeMachine drive until inspiration struck me today. There are even reports of people installing OSX on it, which has a wicked cool factor when you pop the card into someone else's MacBook and happily boot your instance of Lion/Leopard to continue with whatever you were working on.
So how can we use this little guy to make VMWare faster? Well after googling around a bit, I found that one of the major recommendations to make VMWare faster is to boot it from an external drive (duh). It's funny that I didn't think of this immediately because I used to do this all the time with my old XP machines--I guess the utility of always having a Windows VM on-board the laptop precluded installing it on an external drive; there's less things to carry around that way. However, thanks to this tiny $128 wonder, I can now place all my virtual machines on a different drive and reap the marginal performance boost of freeing up the system drive to handle OSX functions while controller on the card handles VM read/writes. As an additional bonus my MacBook sports a smaller 128 GB SSD and placing my vm's on the card offloads the tremendous storage hit from housing a full blown Windows 7 virtual machine to the tune of around 32 GB on the system drive.
After moving the VM to the external drive I have noticed some real performance gains. Nothing super, but OSX is certainly snappier than it was before while running the VM. Also, take into account that my MacBook is almost 4 years old and it still sports a 2.2ghz barely dual-core intel CPU. I imagine newer hardware will realize even more gains. So tweakers and VMWare users looking for a snappier VM: definitely invest in one of these. After all, unless you have a 3G netcard you probably aren't using that slot anyway.
Before/After pictures:
* I realize theoretically this is not true, but empirically it is. My personal benchmarks have shown that the FileMate outruns my 1TB WDD Caviar Black in an OWC Mercury Quad interface enclosure by around 20%.
Yet Another Vista Flame Thread
As I sit here with my Mac dock lit up like a Christmas tree and enjoying total and smooth functionality of OSX, I look across the table at my poor little Microsoft standard issue Dell running Vista Ultimate and frown. The little guy is equipped exactly like my Mac, with 4GB of RAM (although only 3.5GB registers in the Vista Process Explorer), a 2.20 ghz Intel Core 2 Duo, and a Nvidia 6800 GS, yet it has to work so hard to provide me with a decent OS experience. To my Dell's credit, it does have to deal with Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 and the many background processes that come along with it--but nevertheless I am highly disappointed with Vista's memory management, overall responsiveness and user experience. At this point I'm probing the Microsoft ranks to find out what it takes to downgrade to good old Windows XP. Below are screen shots of my Mac's system profiler and Vista's ctrl+shift+delete magic. I will say that I am impressed that the Dell is as responsive as it is with less than 100MB of RAM available--were this XP it would be in a hard lock.
deh ipwn
So according to last post I got an iPhone--affectionately referred to as my ipwn. This is also apparently ironic because of my new job in Micro$ofts Premium Mobile Experience (PMX) group. Sweet. Irony is fun. My relationship with my ipwn has been mildly rocky, and as with all Apple products I own, they infuriate me by announcing a new one not long after I get mine--the UMTS iPhone is due out in July. Meh. Back to the topic at hand: the top five things jduv loves/hates about his ipwn.
Love (from least to most awesome):
The Camera and Photos application. One thing Apple definitely did right was in their design of most of the applications on the iPhone. The photo application is loads of fun to show off, and even play with when you are bored. The camera isn't half bad either.
Landscape view. Turn your ipwn on it's side and it landscapes the current application you are using--in most cases. How cool is that? Now if they could only make it work for the SMS application so I have bigger buttons to type with.
The sleek design. Face it. The iPhone is down right sexy. From it's sleek aluminum design to it's uber cool but mildly annoying touch based interface.
The Maps application. This little guy has saved my butt many a time--for I am known to get lost often. It will even use GSM tower triangulation to figure out where you are--haha take that GPS.
The Phone application. Calling someone is as easy as poking their name in the phone app. You can't get any simpler than that. Plus it's pretty. It's also easy to accidentally call someone, so I have to make sure the phone is locked before it goes into my pocket.
Hate (From least to most annoying)
Edge is slow as hell. Being a former Danger employee I have been spoiled by the backend transcoading that the Danger Service provides for interweb surfing. This makes for an impatient jduv when surfing facebook on his ipwn. Fortunately the UMTS version of the iPhone will fix this issue--if you want to spend the cash to upgrade and deal with even crappier battery life.
Audio Quality. Sometimes it's hard to hear people, but hopefully its a speaker issue and a decent bluetooth headset will fix this problem. The AT&T network doesn't help either =/.
Battery life. My old HTC 3125 would go for around 2 days without a charge. If I turn on wi-fi then I can guarantee a dead battery in less than 8 hours. Okay, so that is to be expected since wi-fi chip sets are power hogs, but my battery life still maxes out at 1.5 days on strict edge browsing and a talk time of less than two hours. Pathetic.
Dropped calls. This irritates me. It has only happened two times, but both during key points in a conversation I was having with the lady and with full radio service. Not good. Of course this could be easily blamed on AT&T (strike two guys...).
Random lockups. Nothing is more encouraging when your in a hurry than a nice hard lock followed by a pretty blue screen. Oh, we aren't talking about Windoze. So far deh ipwn has locked up completely at least 2 times, and most times it's Safari's fault. The radio has also died once or twice, requiring a phone reboot to get it to work again. Looks like Apple's "it just works" mojo isn't exactly working for this product in some aspects.
So the conclusion is, I like my ipwn, but it's a love/hate relationship. There are things it does that it does better than any other product in the market, but it's full of shortcomings as well. I must say that I don't have a problem with the touch keyboard--I thought that would be at the top of my "hate" list. I have gotten used to it and I'm pretty darn fast on the little sucker. I do, however, hate the little text suggest box. It never guesses correctly when your texts are mainly in l33tsp34k.
Lastly, for whatever it's worth, utoob is good fun when you forgot your laptop, are bored in a meeting, and on corporate wi-fi. =D
Attention World: I have Defected
Welcome to the first post from my MacBook Pro. I'll try to make it as shiny and hyped as Apple's products are. Warning, contrary to my current theme this post is in fact, not green. If anything, it's a total waste of power given the servers required to run my wonderful website.
I'm not quite a Jobs fanatic yet, but I have to admit the interface on this big guy is pretty amazing. I even have a terminal. I also don't understand the adamant PC users who tout that Macs don't have any good software. They must not be looking in the right places (ahem, Google) because I have found more than I can process in the past couple of days. Some of them cost a small amount of money but are totally worth it like SuperDuper backup, and others are all time free favorites like VLC.
Anyway, I took the red pill. I'm about to see how deep this rabbit hole goes. Too bad for the MacBook Air though. I can't justify paying 2k for a computer that is totally inferior to my already beefy MacBook Pro.
iHype
Owning a 4GB iPhone with a basic 450 minute AT&T plan and unlimited text messages will cost consumers around $2000 over the course of two years.
The hysterical bids on craigslist where people pay other people to stand in line for them to procure an iPhone confirms something that I have observed over the years since Apple has made a rise to market: Apple fans do not possess common sense. I don't care if my phone has wifi, surfs the net, plays flash in the browser, or even calls down meteorites from the sky in the event I'm being mugged; it's not worth 2 grand + "bum shipping and handling."
Okay so maybe if it called meteorites.