Supportus Maximus Blog

I have just purchased blogo by a company called brainjuice, and and I'm using the Browser Integration, which is described her in this video that I posted here using Broser Integration. Get it?
Check out this video. This is a wonderful product that makes blogging much easier on Wordpress, Drupal and other Blogging tools. For the Mac, this is the best I've found so far. It also has a real sense of style that I appreciate greatly.
The reason I've moved to this tool is because Wordpress seemed to be having trouble with my Safari 4 Beta browser. When I went to add a picture, it froze. That was kind of a drag.
This is a Drupal site but I find that Blogo works great here too.
Previous to using blogo, I actually was booting into Windows to use Windows Live Writer, because I couldn't find a blogging application that worked as well. Now I think I've found it in Blogo.

VMWare Fusion and Parallels Desktop 4.0 are the two major players in the virtualization of Windows on the Mac. Virtualization in this context means running an operating system on top of another operating system. In this case it’s for the purpose of running Windows on a Mac without having to leave the Mac operating system.

To be fair, this wasn’t much of a competition. For me this was a hands-down win for VMWare Fusion. The main reason being that Parallels let me down early on in the process.

I have had a PowerMac G5 for a number of years now, so I haven’t been able to do VMWare or Parallels. Both require Intel Macs. So now that I have a Mac Pro, I finally get a chance to put my PC in the closet and virtualize it on my Mac.

The great thing I found is that both VMWare Fusion and Parallels Desktop give you tools to migrate your physical PC to this virtual world. This saves large amounts of time because you don’t have to install the operating system and then all the programs all over again. Also your settings and everything are right there.

Because I remembered the Parallels name first (it’s definitely catchier) I downloaded it at once. I found that I also had to install a Windows version on the PC. It boasted that it was going to be able to migrate my PC right across the network to its new virtual home on my Mac Pro.

Well, to get straight to the heart of the matter, it didn’t work. After Installing the latest version on both, when I went to get the PC information, I was met with an error message that said the versions of the Parallels software on my Mac and the Parallels software on my PC were not the same and I would have to make sure I had the same versions on each. I went back and rechecked, downloaded them again and found the same message. When I looked on the Parallels site, I saw that the PC version (which was very difficult to find) was very new. Perhaps no one bothered to test the migration? I don’t know. It seems like it would be very important. After messing around with this for hours, I finally gave up and decided to search for the other one.

I looked around and found VMWare Fusion. Their website looks much more corporate, and I think probably the Mac Version is something they added after doing a lot of Windows Virtualization. By the way, it is very useful these days to virtualize servers on top of other servers for various reasons. One reason is that you can run two or more servers using one physical server. It’s pretty incredible when you get into it. But this is a topic for another article.

So I installed VMWare Fusion. I had to use a hard drive and install VMWare on my PC and have the VMWare make a virtual machine on the hard drive first. This is just a folder with files in it. You can see all the details of what I did by looking at this video I found about how to do it Migrate Your Windows PC to your Mac with VMware  Fusion. Incidentally, I had a little trouble with the part where he has you open the package contents of the virtual machine and put the source files in the package. I prefer to leave them in their original folder once I create the machine. This is because when I add another virtual drive or change the configuration it seems to look for this old folder. I suppose a tour through the manual would help. For now I keep it simple.

I liked this VMWare so much I decided to download the Windows 7 Beta and test it out . It seems to work great. Right now, as I type this I’m using a Windows 7 with Windows Live Writer. I intend to use this as a machine where I test out living in the cloud exclusively. More to come on that topic.

I am unable to use my Apple Computer this week so I've been exploring my Windows XP computer and trying to make it work like my Apple. Here are some observations about email. I have many email addresses. This hasn't been a problem because in Apple mail, no matter how many email addresses I have for myself, I can look at all my emails in one Inbox. This is a huge bonus that I've gotten used to because it keeps me from having to look into a different mailbox for each address. I can do that if I want by looking in the main inbox sub-folders. Incidentally, this is not the case with my iPhone. I assume they will fix that at some future time, but as of now I have to check each email box individually. It turns out that I cannot find a way to make the unified email box on my PC, as it is on my Apple Mail. This is primarily because I like to use IMAP accounts. For those who may not know IMAP stands for Internet Message Access Protocol. IMAP is ideal if you like to look at your email on more than one device. With IMAP all your viewed messages, deleted messages, unread messages synchronize so when you go to another device you know what you've read, or otherwise dealt with already. In Microsoft Outlook 2003, for instance, if you do IMAP email, you get a separate email box for each email account. This is not so great if you have, say four or five different email boxes. You find your self going from one to other like some kind of bee pollinating flowers. I also tried Thunderbird and it was the same way. The only real solution is to use POP accounts in Outlook or Thunderbird and make sure you check "leave messages on server." This way you can download all your emails to one inbox. The only problem is that it doesn't sync read emails across devices, so when you look at the emails on another device, you don't know what you've read. This is my first trouble that I have encounter here in Windows XP land. Don't get me wrong, I do work with XP when I'm on the job in office locations, but I haven't used it as my main computer for a while. In Windows favor, however, I am writing this post on Windows Live Writer. This I like.

I'm using Mars Edit to make this post. In order to see what kind of functionality I can get. I can do a link to Drobo?

Can I do bold text? I can, but I'm not looking at a wysiwyg. There is a preview in another window, however.

I wonder if your typical non-web-person will be able to use this.

Can I put a picture in?

Looks pretty good.

I'm pretty happy with that.

Okay so Mars Edit is a program that allows you to make blog postings directly from you computer, using the Content Management System's API.

You can get it at http://www.red-sweater.com/marsedit/

 I have been using my Powermac G5 (June 2004) since I purchased it in 2004. Last week I was in my office, when my iPhone started ringing. I unplugged the iPhone from the usb cable and answered the phone. Then I heard a "bang!," the computer turned off and high pitched alarm sound came out of my Belkin Universal Power Supply (UPS). There was the smell of electrical burning. I unplugged the Belkin to stop the sound. I plugged my computer into a power strip and found that my computer would not turn on. I assumed it was the Belkin UPS blew up for some reason, but I filed a claim,  drove it to Compton, had them test it, and it passed all the tests. 

In the interim, I took the computer to the Apple Store at the Grove. They gave me the worst case scenario -- $2400 to repair it.

Today, I dropped it at another Apple Store at the Beverly Center. They are going to fix the power supply, and if it's more than that, they said it's probably totaled. If the power supply doesn't fix it, they'll call me and we'll declare it dead. If the power supply replacement does fix it, it'll cost me about $250. At this point I hope it's that. The thought of buying a new Mac Pro is daunting, especially considering I believe they are going to come out with a new design soon.

Needless to say, I'm not happy to have my four-year-old computer blow up and possibly total itself. I want to upgrade because of innovations, not failures. I'd like to choose to upgrade rather than be forced to. From my research I know that there was a replacement plan for certain Powermac power supplies, but the Genius at the Beverly Center said it would not be honored for my computer. I also found that when these power supplies blow, they often take the logic board with them.