Heimic

I’ve had VMware Fusion 2.0 Beta1 installed now for a few days and managed to give it a good test in that time. Below is a few screen grabs which show some rather nice changes to the products GUI, unfortunately I cannot show it in comparison to what they use to look like. Unless I wanted to reinstall it and capture them.

VMware has revamped the Virtual Machine Library window, and I must say I do like it. Although I think the image shown to the right could do with a bit of work to make the scaling of it work a little better. It looks a little wrong.

Further more, they have improved the dialog for editing the settings for the guest operating systems and I do like this too.

Unfortunately one thing I do think that is lacking is the that when I add another Hard Disk, it doesn’t prompt you to create a vmdk that is split or not. This is a bit fustrating, as it only appears to do this during the inital configuration of a guest from scratch. Something that needs to be improved.

It would appear we still haven’t had the development of a network configuration tool to manage the virtual network interfaces, it would appear we still have to edit this stuff via the command line.

On the whole, an improvement. But I would love to see certain things fixed as suggested (and I hope they do in future builds).

We’ll for the first time in a long time I am down to a single system. I recently decided to sell my Mac Mini 1.66 Core Duo. The machine had served me well and was 2 years old. Since I was using it a little less then I had hoped, I figured why not just sell it so someone else can use it more then I do.

I had every intension of selling it in a years time anyways, so I just did it earlier. I also decided to sell my ACD 20″ Display which had served me extremely well. So both items got a new home.

I use my iMac 20″ 2.16 Core 2 Duo for pretty much everything, so this machine will continue to be used for everything day to day. The plan has been to pickup a MacBook to replace the Mac Mini (and use the MacBook for day to day stuff which doesn’t require me to be tied to the desk at home). I think it’s going to be fairly important to break free of the desk as much as possible and use computer via wireless as much as possible (especially when we have kids).

So I am expecting to purchase white MacBook mid-range model and bump it to 4gb ram, since ram is so well priced atm. This machine will suit me perfectly. The way extra ram will allow me to continue running a number of virtual machines via VMware Fusion with ease. I don’t really need a MacBook Pro for the beefed up Video. Maybe I can step upto this at a later stage if and when it’s required. Maybe to replace the laptop + iMac down the track. We’ll see what happens.

As per subject, I’ve compiled and packaged the latest GNU Wget 1.11.1 for MacOS X. It’s a universal binary too.

Download a copy from here.

If you download this, please make a comment. Feedback is most welcomed.

Finally had the chance to do some maintenance, so I have upgraded to the latest WordPress. The site appears to still be working, so it seems to have been a success so far.

I didn’t appear to have any errors during the upgrade, so will keep an eye on it in the meantime.

Well my wife finally got her new notebook/laptop. She opted to get an MacBook Air. I must say I am very impressed so far.

Job for tonight is to do a reinstall and remove the extra install items that we don’t need so we free up some space. Then I will move over all her data which is currently sitting on my iMac.

Unfortunately, the 1Tb Time Capsule I ordered with it has been delayed. It appears Apple are having troubles making enough of them for demand. So the reseller is filling orders as they arrive. So eventually we will make it to the front of the order queue. I believe they said they got 5 units in stock earlier in the week and fulfilled 5 orders. I am looking forward to this item arriving, then I will be happy to know the MacBook Air is being backed up every so often (without the need to manually do it each week).

If it wasn’t for the VMware Tools package being as good as it was, then running Virtual Machines would be alot more difficult.

Below is a screen grab from my Xubuntu install which has since had the VMware Tools installed, thus the resolution of the Virtual Machine is running at the resolution I dictate. Could make it full screen, but I still like to be able to see my desktop for other tasks.

Click for High Resolution version.

If you require a burning application for Mac OS X, then I highly recommend you download a copy of Burn.

Simple yet very powerful application, see screen

If you wish to disable the Apple remote control infrared receiver, then you need to enable the option “Disable remote control infrared receiver” option as found in “System Preferences -> Security“. See example screen capture below;

If you find this entry useful then please leave a comment.

Electronic Arts (EA) need a swift kick. The reason why is that if you purchase a game from them, create an online EA account to track your progress of said game then associate/register the CD-KEY from the game when prompted. It registers the CD-KEY for the game against this online EA account.

They provide no means to remove this registration of the CD-KEY, so if you sell the game some months later, the person who buys it will not be able to use the CD-KEY with an different online EA account. They will be forced to either buy a new CD-KEY for the product at the cost of US $10 or obtain the user name/password of the online EA account the person registered it against previously.

I think this is very poor form. They provide tools to manage this at account.ea.com, however the tools do not allow you to remove the registeration.

Having been caught in this situation just lastnight, I asked the person who sold it to log a support ticket with EA, and I also mentioned the support ticket they logged in my own support ticket. The response from EA is below;

“Unfortunately the registration code can only be used to create one account. Since if you have previously created an account using the Registration code, you cannot use it again to create a new account. Also, the account registered once cannot be unregistered, removed or re-registered. You will need to login to the game using the same account name and password with which you have registered the game.”

As you can see, Electronic Arts (EA) will not provide you an option to remove this registeration of the CD-KEY from your own online EA account, even though you legally own it and wish to remove it.

I’ll be thinking twice about making any sort of game purchases to which Electronic Arts (EA) is associated with. This in my honest opinion is just WRONG.

PS. Valuable Lesson: Anyone buying an EA game, please don’t register the copy when prompted. Especially if you think you’ll be very likely to sell it onto someone else down the track when your sick of it.

VMware pushed out a new version/build of VMware Fusion overnight. Users should go download the latest release from VMware.com