VMware Fusion does not play well with a Wacom tablet

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 17 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

VMware FusionI’ve spent a good chunk of this evening trying to build a Windows XP virtual machine within VMware Fusion and struggling to direct any keyboard input to the VM. Eventually I found the answer on a VMware forum thread but, as you need to be logged in to view it, I’m reposting the solution here…

Quoting from the forum thread:

“It transpires that Fusion really doesn’t cope well with my having a Wacom device attached to the system. Unplug that – and everything starts working fine!”

Thanks to leE_b for that fix.

Flash Earth

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 17 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

Many people are familiar with Google Earth and others may use Microsoft Virtual Earth but Paul Neave (who describes himself as a “serial flash fettler and interactive designer”) has produced a great mash-up of zoomable images from all the major aerial and satellite photograph providers called Flash Earth (alongside some other cool stuff on his website).

Flash Earth

One of Flash Earth’s strengths is the ability to switch between services on the fly as I’ve found that some services have better images than others (e.g. Microsoft gets closer to my home, but Google has higher resolution images of some neighbouring towns). Best of all, although Google Earth and competing products have additional functionality (for example, 3D viewpoints), Flash Earth doesn’t require any client software (aside from the Adobe Flash Player, which is a common browser plug-in) – of course, Windows Live Local offers a similar service, without using Flash and including additional functionality, but it is limited to the Microsoft mapping and imaging data.

It’s also worth noting that the images served by these services are not completely up-to-date. Based on new developments where I live and work, I’m guessing that the aerial data which Ask, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo! serve is approximately 4-7 years old (which service is more recent does vary though, according to the area being viewed) but Microsoft’s mapping data is more current than their images, which results in some interesting roads shown across fields in the hybrid view!

I should add that this blog post comes with a warning – browsing the planet looking at aerial photographs can lead to many wasted hours (and much lost sleep)… as I found to my own detriment last night!

Will VMware achieve fusion?

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 17 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

VMware Fusion bannerOver the Christmas break, one of the things I began to look at was VMware’s virtualisation for Mac beta product (codenamed Fusion).

Regardless of the somewhat dubious choice of codename (some might say unimaginative – why is it that every company seems to have a product or project about joining things up called fusion?) this is an exciting new product because it brings cross-platform virtualisation to the Mac (previously VMware products either used a proprietary kernel or were hosted on either a Windows or Linux platform). Until recently, Mac users had a choice of Microsoft Virtual PC, Parallels Desktop, or the open source QEMU (with the QemuX front end) but the product of choice for many seems to be Parallels Desktop and Microsoft’s departure from the Mac virtualisation marketplace (combined with a surge in Mac sales since Apple’s switch to an Intel processor platform) seems to have spurred VMware into taking their place and so far the results seem impressive.

Although many cite Parallels as the virtualisation product of choice on the Mac, many of the comparisons I’ve seen have been centred around two totally different technologies for running Windows on a Mac, comparing Parallels Desktop (virtualisation) with Apple Boot Camp (dual-booting). Even though the recent Parallels beta has taken a huge step with a feature called coherence, that allows the Windows desktop to be hidden so that Windows applications appear to be running within Mac OS X (yes, really!), the major advantage to me of using a VMware product is being able to take a virtual machine and run it on any platform.

I’m not sure how VMware are planning to position this product – it offers far more than VMware Player, and seems to have a lot in common with VMware Workstation (although as it’s a beta product, it’s too soon to see how closely matched the feature sets are); they’ve also yet to confirm whether or not this will be a free virtualisation product (I suspect not). I’ll be watching this space and once I can provide full VM portability between the Linux notebook I use for work and my Mac at home (the release notes for the current beta download state that “Virtual Machines created with this beta release of VMware Fusion for Mac should not be used in production, and should not be shared for use in other VMware products”), I’ll be able to work on my 20″ monitor from the Mac and free up some more desk space where the laptop currently sits. If VMware can also provide an equivalent of Parallel’s coherence functionality then they truly will achieve fusion.

Free backup software for Mac OS X

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 17 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

A couple of years ago I suffered a hard disk failure and I was very lucky to retrieve most of my data from other sources. That should have taught me to keep backups but I’m still not as good as I should be. My work laptop is hardly ever backed up (but most important items are also available in my e-mail) and I should really do a better job with my server at home (although most of the data is software that could be downloaded again). What really worries me is having to re-rip my iTunes library (and re-purchase tracks bought from the iTunes store) or, even worse, losing my digital photos (some of which are irreplaceable images of my family) and so I really must make backups of the data on my Mac.

One of the failings of Mac OS X is a lack of built-in backup software. Actually, that’s not true – there are standard Unix utilities such as rsync and Apple does provide advice for how to back up and restore your files but if you want to use Apple Backup, then you need a .Mac subscription (I believe that software like this should really be included with the operating system).

Thinking that there must be plenty of people who have experienced this issue previously, I went googling for free backup software for the Mac and found a list of backup programs courtesy of Pure Mac. First of all, I tried SmartBackup, which looks great, but it also costs $19.50, and whilst I’d be happy to part with cash for something if it really hits the mark, as I mentioned previously, I could script something from the command line for free. Another option was RsyncX, but this will not run on Intel Macs, so I got looking at automated backups using rsync. Although rsync is incredibly powerful , it was looking as though it would take me some time to work out exactly what I would need to back up (although Pete Freitag’s article on how to backup your Mac incrementally over ssh looked useful), until I stumbled across rsyncbackup – a set of scripts with documentation, designed to simplify setting up an rsync-based backup routine.

In the end, I settled on the easy option – using a program called iBackup, which is free for personal and non-commercial use and seems to do everything that I need it to. It’s pretty basic but all I really need is to make regular copies of my data to a second external hard disk. iBackup supports scheduled backups using multiple backup profiles and features a system of plugins to back up application settings. Above all, it’s easy to use (although it doesn’t run as a service so needs to be running for anything to happen, although it can be minimised).

Of course, I still need to back my photos up to DVD from time to time and store the media off-site (in case I have a fire or something else that wipes out the Mac and both my hard drives) but at least I now have some protection against losing those essential family photos.

Belated birthday wishes to Microsoft Windows

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 17 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

It’s my first day back at work after the Christmas holidays and I’m catching up on my administration. Whilst working through a pile of unread IT news I realised that late last year, in amongst all of the Windows Vista launch news and comment, I missed Windows’ 21st birthday. Whilst I don’t intend to turn this blog into a history of personal computing, I’ve previously noted significant anniversaries (35 years of the Internet, 30 years of Microsoft, 30 years of Apple, 15 years of the world wide web and 25 years of the IBM PC) and as Microsoft Windows has had such a huge impact on my computing life it seems that this is another birthday that should not pass un-announced. For those who are interested to read why this is so significant, Martin Veitch wrote an interesting article about Windows’ 21 eventful years in IT Week recently.