Crosswalks to Nowhere

Yes folks, this weblog is still alive. Things have been really busy over here, and since so many of you have whined asked about when I was going to start posting again, here I am.

A quick update and hints of things to come on the blog:

- The new job started in mid-January, and it's all looking good;

- The Cheap Date podcast is doing very well, with many new listeners every week;

- My latest toy is an Intel Core Duo Mac Mini, and no, I have not attempted to load Windows XP on it yet;

- Everyone is happy and healthy here.

There will be updates on these and many other topics in the coming weeks, so stay tuned-- Crosswalks to Nowhere has returned.

Apple Computer released a beta product called Boot Camp today. This is a component of their upcoming operating system OSX 10.5 ("Leopard") which allows the user of an Intel-based Mac to run Windows.

This is a brilliant move on Apple's part for several reasons, not the least of which is the fact that Microsoft's next version of Windows ("Vista") won't be available until next year. Now, people who are looking to buy a computer this holiday season are presented with an option: they can buy a Dell or HP like everyone else, or they can buy a stylish Mac to go with their cool iPod. They'll also have the bonus option of working with a superior operating system, OSX.

I became a UNIX-head in 1986 (SunOS 3.2 was my first exposure to it), but I learned within a few years that Windows was the way of the business desktop world (does anyone else remember WingZ or FrameMaker?). Since then, I viewed Windows as a necessary evil: I have some apps that run only on Windows, so my main computer at home-- the "Big Computer" as the kids call it-- is an XP machine.

Buying a dual-core Intel-based Mini last month brought OSX to the Big Computer's screen. (Through the magic of a KVM switch.) And as of today, I have the option of running the Big Computer's programs on my Mini.

Apple was smart enough to wait until there was a lot of buzz generated from members of the hacker community who managed to cobble together a solution to this a couple weeks ago. Today they were able to pull the Boot Camp rabbit, all ready to play, our of their hat.

Perhaps trying not to completely prove John C Dvorak's theory that Apple will switch to a Windows-based platform, Apple says that through Boot Camp they will provide the means to dual-boot your Mac to OSX or Windows, but they won't actually support Windows. Fair enough.

And now that Apple has given its hardware the capability of running Windows, it's in Microsoft's (and their business partners'-- hello, Dell) best interest to make sure it runs well, lest they lose customer after customer with calls to Apple Tech Support that finish with the recommendation "Well, boot into OSX and let's see if the problem goes away."

Of course, there are limitations: your Mac environment may not be able to write files to your XP space unless you set it up correctly, and your XP space won't be able to access your Mac files at all. I think it's only a matter of time before this problem gets resolved, though. And on a related path, it seems there's an announcement expected later this week from a company which is planning on releasing a new virtualization product for OSX, allowing you to run Windows within OSX. Microsoft's Virtual PC does this today, albeit only on PowerPC Macs and not rather well.

While I may be too hopeful that this will start to chip away at Windows' stranglehold on the desktop, I'm always glad to see competition. I've known way too many corporate IT managers who have burned out with constantly patching and repatching an operating system that was never meant to scale in the first place. Maybe this is the beginning of a trend.

I downloaded Parallels Workstation 2.1 Beta 2 and loaded it on my Intel Mac Mini. This is a brand-new product that lets you run Windows (and several other operating systems) in a window on your OSX desktop. (Click the photo to see a larger version of the screen shot.)

Having used Microsoft's Virtual PC before, I always look at products like this with a cynical eye: Virtual PC ran okay on my iBook, but the performance was generally lacking. Parallels is supposedly designed to take advantage of the virtualization capabilities within the Mac's Intel CPU, so I was hopeful when I loaded it.

Installation was fairly simple. Parallels grabbed about 4 GB of disk and 256 MB of memory by default. Both of these parameters are easily changeable through the configuration screens. I loaded Windows XP Professional, and it seems to run fairly well.

I did not load any applications yet; I wanted to see how it handled simple things such as Internet surfing, and it did just fine.

For some reason, I could not get it to recognize the Macs on my network (including the host Parallels was sitting on), and the Macs didn't see the XP instance. The XP instance could see the Macs in Windows Explorer, but when I tried to connect to them the application hung.

Another fairly serious challenge I ran into is the fact that Parallels crashes my Mac every couple of hours.

Another issue is that there does not seem to be any sound drivers within the Parallels environment. This presents a problem if I want to view or listen to Windows-only media.

Of course, this is beta software and I should expect some trouble, so I can't whine too much about it. Regarding that point, I see that a new version of the software is up on Parallel's site (I am running version 2.1.1658.24 and the version up as I type this is 2.1.1658.30) so maybe they addressed some of the weirdness is there.

All of this is abhorrent to Lisa, of course, who believes that the only thing that should run on an Apple is OSX. She just shakes her head when she sees a screen like the one above. :-)

I took the leap yesterday and installed Boot Camp on my Intel Core Duo Mac Mini.

Installation was very straightforward: I had to upgrade the firmware on the Mini to the latest version, and then I ran the Boot Camp installer. It walked me through partitioning the hard drive and creating a CD with device drivers on it, and then it went through the Windows XP installation process. An hour after I started the process, I had an XP environment running on Apple hardware. The video, audio, network, bluetooth, and wireless were all configured perfectly.

One annoyance I've found is that the clock in the XP environment is always wrong when I boot up. This may not seem like a big deal, but it's disconcerting to see "3:00" in the corner when it's 10:00. It's also a pain to have to reset it each time I use it.

Basic web surfing and accessing other computers on my network all work fine.

My next step is to install some intense applications (I'm thinking of loading Adobe Audition, which we use to record the Cheap Date Podcast)-- I want to try to slam the computer's CPU and see how those Dual Cores deal with it.

So what does all this prove? Well, that you can run Windows XP on an Apple computer.

From the bigger picture, I'm not sure what it means. I'm beginning to see what some in the Mac community are saying, that this could be a big misstep for Apple. My guess is that this is a novelty that's going to wear off. I just hope Apple has some sort of strategy for bridging the worlds-- I'm thinking that stable virtualization would be the best selling point.

Meanwhile, my coworkers and my beloved are pressuring me to de-contaminate my Mini as quickly as possible. We'll see. :-)

After a few days of messing with Boot Camp on my Mac Mini, I decided it was time to remove it.

No, I'm not giving in to the peer pressure of friends, coworkers, and loved ones (well, one specific fangirl loved one)... I decided the experiment was over.

A big contributing factor was the Mini's performance with Adobe Audition. I used it to mix the latest Cheap Date podcast, and I was very unimpressed with its performance. The main issue was that scrolling across the project was slow and choppy, probably due to the video card/drivers built into the Mini. It looked like I was running it on Windows98. (As a reminder, my Mac Mini is a Core Duo with 2 GB of memory.) To be fair, when it came time to crunch the project down to its final MP3 file, the Mini finished up in about half the time my regular PC (with an Athlon 1700+ processor and 768 MB of memory) usually does it.

Other things that really bothered me were the fact that the clock always reset itself to 5 hours ahead (corresponding with GMT) every time I booted into XP, and the fact that it couldn't see the OSX side of my Mini. This latter point is probably a blessing, because otherwise I would be worried that my OSX partition would be subject to viruses brought in while running XP.

Then there's the fact that I had to shut all the way down and bring the machine all the way back up every time I wanted to switch environments. It's not a very efficient model in which to operate.

Finally, there's the question of why I bought a Mac in the first place: why run Windows on this machine when it's designed to run something better?

The decision has been made. Boot Camp will be removed from my Mini over the weekend.

Last night, we saw Elevation, at U2 tribute band, at Peggy's.

I've never been a huge U2 fan, but I've seen enough bar bands to know when a group has it together. These guys really did, especially the dude playing Bono.

The photos in this entry were taken with my new Motorola RAZR phone. The images look really cool on my phone's display, but on this screen they're kind of tiny.

Here's a photo I took in the afternoon at Peggy's-- we were standing next to this bar for part of the evening.

The best part? The Harp was really cold. :-)

...and it's looking good so far.

I took a long walk at lunch today, starting at Buckingham Fountain and walking north to Millenium Park, home of The Bean:

Another beautiful day in Chicago.