Canucks go to Round 2!

Roberto Luongo, Trevor Linden and the rest of the Canucks put in an outstanding 2nd and 3rd period to squeak out a 4-1 win against the Dallas Stars. This was really a 2-1 game as Pyatt and Smolinski potted a couple of empty net goals with about 90 seconds to go.

The Canucks finally found a way to put a couple of pucks behind Marty Turco which they hadn’t been able to do for almost 9 periods.

The entire series was a goaltending duel, Luongo vs. Turco, and game seven was no different. This was really just a one-goal win and Turco and Luongo were both lights-out the whole game again tonight.

The playoffs will resume on Wednesday night when the Canucks fly south to play the Anaheim Ducks. We’re coming for you Brett.

Visual Studio 2005 on Vista Requires Admin Rights

I finally got the chance today to get back to working on PowerTray, this time with my Visual Studio 2005 installation on my Virtualized Windows Vista setup. The first thing I ran into was this warning dialog:

To me, this is the kind of issue that shows immaturity in the OS. Though it is possible to run the environment without full-blown admin permissions, some of the functionality of the environment is limited as a result. There is an MSDN article on the subject which outlines the difficulties that are faced without admin rights.

Most of the problems are only resolvable by running VS2005 using administrative permissions. Ross Dagan has a post on his blog on just how to set this up using the VS2005 shortcut.

Admittedly this is just another front in the battle between security and usability. I understand why most of the security features which cause these issues exist in Vista, and admittedly the option to run only Visual Studio in administrative mode does keep the computer quite secure. It’s just disappointing that there isn’t a more elegant solution.

Lets Get Virtual!

Several months ago I picked up a new machine, a MacBook, from which the bast majority of these blog posts have flowed. I absolutely love my MacBook and I can see myself becoming a regular Mac user with future computer purchases. That said, for about the past 15 years, I’ve been a devout Windows user. I do still on occasion develop Windows-based applications and it really is much easier to do that on a Windows machine. So, what’s a geek to do? It sure wouldn’t look very technology savvy of me to carry around a second laptop when I have this sleek MacBook so… Virtualization to the rescue! Apple offers a Beta of its BootCamp product to work with OS X 10.4. It would allow me to install and boot Windows directly from my Mac. Not a bad option, but I had some issues:

All the rebooting to switch OS’s would be annoying at best.
The partitioning magic that ships with BootCamp wouldn’t work. To use it, I would have had to wipe and reload OS X and Windows.
Couldn’t use BootCamp to boot from my brand spankin’ new external drive.

So the other options I was left with are Parallels and a new offering from VMWare called Fusion. Parallels has been around for a while and does a decent job of supporting Windows, and a few other OS’s as well (Linux, Solaris), but lacks 64-bit Windows support. Fusion also has similar support capabilities, but does come with some bugs as the product is still in a Beta cycle. What finally sold me on Fusion were three separate things:

VMWare’s support for virtually any operating system I could throw at it (including 64-bit versions of Windows)
VMWare’s website contains tons of pre-built “Virtual Appliances” which are self-contained operating system/application bundles which can be up and running within about a minute of the download completing.
Portability. VMWare has an application called VMWare Player which is available for both Windows and Linux which will allow me to port my virtual machine instances to other computers. Geek factor? Yes.

Screenshot of me installing Visual Studio 2005 on Vista in Fusion on my MacBook with the blog post in the background. For those of you interested, here’s the configuration I’ve got for this VMWare client:

Microsoft Windows Vista Ultimate Edition
Microsoft Office 2007 Enterprise Edition
Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Professional Edition
1GB dedicated system memory
1 Virtual CPU (may switch to 2 for some operations (ie large compiles)

In getting everything setup there are already three unexpected features of VMWare Fusion that have impressed me. These are features that were either undocumented, or listed as missing in the last few reviews that I’ve read. The first thing that I noticed by accident is that the Command key opens the Start menu! For me, this is a major selling feature, I use keyboard shortcuts for literally everything. This feature is also missing from Microsoft’s own RDP client for OS X. The second is a bit more intriguing: when you resize the VMWare window, the resolution of the Windows Vista client is adjusted to match. No scrollbars. No distortion. Genius! Finally there is automatic drag-and-drop support for transferring files between my OS X installation and my Windows Vista installation. In fact, the two screenshots above were dropped into vista, stitched together, and then dropped back into OS X. Though it’s only been installed for a short time, I think that this VMWare environment will solve my mobile computing issues, allowing me to port a Windows installation with my Mac and live in both worlds.

Apple Delays Leopard until October

In a somewhat expected move, Apple announced today that their much anticipated next-generation OS will be delayed past the promised “Spring 2007” ship date. Speculation was that the new version of Mac OS X codenamed “Leopard” would be released during Apple’s World Wide Developer’s Conference in June. Ironically, this message is also the first time Apple confirmed its plan to release during WWDC.

iPhone contains the most sophisticated software ever shipped on a mobile device, and finishing it on time has not come without a price — we had to borrow some key software engineering and QA resources from our Mac OS X team, and as a result we will not be able to release Leopard at our Worldwide Developers Conference in early June as planned.

So after all their Microsoft bashing for the delays with Windows Vista, it looks like it will be nearly a full year between Vista’s October 2006 release, and Leopard’s October 2007 release.

Want a Jersey? GoCanucks.ca

Some crazy Canucks fans have put up a website to give away a Canucks’ Jersey for every Canucks’ win in the Playoffs. The tradeoff? A few product-centric emails from their sponsors.

Since all the emails should be coming from the guys that run the site (in this case a “friend of a friend”) I feel reasonably secure about signing up. I can handle some extra spam for the next 8-10 weeks.

Check it out at http://gocanucks.ca/

Getting WGET for OS X 10.4.x

!!! Geek Alert !!!

Sometime ago Apple removed the tool wget from the OS X toolset and replaced it with the arguably more powerful curl tool. This new tool is great, and it has many new advanced features that the older wget tool lacks. However curl has one thing against it: it’s somewhat more complicated to use (and its man page is much longer). As a result, I find I use wget far more frequently.

So the question is, where to get wget?

The answer? Right here!

You can download a package of the binaries and an install script/readme file from here. (Thanks to Quentin Stafford-Fraser for doing the initial version of the binary pack).

Alternately, you can follow these steps (shamelessly cannibalized from wincent.com) to acquire and build wget for yourself. Note: This does require that you have the Apple Developer Tools (XCode) installed.

# Make a working directory somewhere, anywhere in fact.
mkdir wget
cd wget# The original instructions called for you to get the source from the cvs repository
# but it looks like that copy of the code no longer exists.  I believe they switched to
# a subversion repository, but since OS X doesn't come with SVN by default, we'll
# just have to do things the old fashioned way
# Download a copy of the source code for wget.  I found mine at
# http://ftp.gnu.org/pub/gnu/wget/
# (pulling down a file like this is a perfect use for wget)
curl http://ftp.gnu.org/pub/gnu/wget/wget-1.10.2.tar.gz -o wget-1.10.2.tar.gz

# Uncompress the archive
tar -zxvf wget-1.10.2.tar.gz

# Move into the new wget source folder and perform the build actions
cd wget-1.10.2
./configure --with-ssl
make

# Run the installation command.  This will require the root password to complete
sudo make install

# Exit the sudo
exit

# The default installation folder is /usr/local/bin. In Mac OS X 10.4.x, this folder
# is not a part of the $PATH variable by default.  You can add it with the command below
export PATH=/usr/local/bin:$PATH

Again, a big thank you to those whose articles I ~~plagiarized~~ referenced. These binaries above were compiled on the MacBook (Intel Core Duo, OS X 10.4.9). I would think that they will work on any Intel-based Mac for sure, not sure about PowerPC versions. Let me know if this works out for you!

EDIT (2007-06-02): Judging by some of the comments, it appears that this build does not work on PowerPC-based Macs. I’m looking into the steps required for creating a universal binary now… Stay Tuned!

EMI Kills DRM

Today, EMI and Apple announced the availability of the entire 5 Million song EMI catalog on iTunes DRM Free. This is the first major step towards a DRM free music Universe.

This undoubtedly was affected by Steve Jobs’ open letter to the 4 Major RIAA partners, and is an extremely important development in the world of music sharing and the ability to discover new music through the network of your friends.

This step will hail a new wave of iTunes consumers because people like me want to have copies of music they can freely move around without the worry of DRM getting in the way. This has been the main reason that I have not purchased anything (except for Mine Again for BRTC) from the iTunes Music Store.

The message is simple: Trust your consumers, and they’ll be more likely to buy your product.

Edit (2007-04-02 22:10 pdt): The one thing I did forget to mention is that this will be treated as a premium service, with iTunes offering higher bitrate tracks (256kbps it would seem) without DRM for $.30 (US) more per track. Money well spent if you ask me.

MacBook Tip – Drag Files to the Dock

Here’s a quick tip that will be a bit un-intuitive at first for those of you converting to Windows, but makes life much easier once you get used to it.

If you have a file that isn’t automatically associated with a particular program, or you want to open it with a different app than usual, you can simply drag the file onto the app’s icon in the dock!

The reason I say this is unintuitive for Windows users is the infamous “You can’t drag an item onto a button on the task-bar” message. Well, I got over it and you will too!

kdmurray.blog

The crossroads of life and tech

Monthly Archives: April 2007