Back when my XP laptop died and I finally bought a MacBook Pro, Parallels was one of my first purchases so I could run multiple VMs to do Perl software testing. At the time, that was Parallels version 3. Everything was snappy and life was good.
Then came the upgrade to Parallels 4. From day 1, I’ve had nothing but problems. It was most definitely much slower just to boot XP. Even a fresh install of the software and even an new XP VM fixed nothing. It was still slow. Even more entertaining was that when running XP in VGA mode, Safe Mode, or at the boot options screen, Parallels took up 100% of 1 or both host CPUs. After KB articles, months of patches and support, Parallels tells me that eating up all that CPU is normal. Parallels 3 didn’t have that problem. No, I won’t disable all the options that worked in version 3, and yes, 4GB ram was just fine in version 3.
Well, I’m getting off this train now. Clearly, Parallels 4 has issues, and I’m not the only one having it. VirtualBox is free, installed and running a fresh new install of XP and Studio 2008 and what do you know, it even runs XP in Safe Mode without eating 100% of the host CPU. Go figure.
Last year, I bought the wife a new Dell Studio 17″ laptop to replace her dead laptop and her old crusty desktop. New laptops don’t come with parallel ports any more. This makes my 13 year old faithful HP LaserJet 6P very lonely. After 13 years, I’ve only had to replace the toner cartridge once. It’s been workhorse.
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When using javascript in links onclick event to open windows or perform other navigation related tasks, always set href just like you would if javascript didn’t exist. If javascript is broken, links still work.
<a href="http://example.com/" onclick="doStuff(this.href);">Open</a>
Now that iTunes has gone DRM free, I’ve been adding more albums to my collection. I’m only about two thirds of the way done ripping my CDs to the network share. Even at relatively low quality, I have well over 30GB or music. This means an iPod Touch is out of the question for me. 32GB just isn’t enough.
On the other hand, we have the iPod Classic, which has tons of room, but well, it’s worthless compared to an iPod touch. Dear Apple, add me to the list of thousands that would gladly buy an iPod Touch if you would just bump it up to 64GB already. 128GB would also rock.
Posted in Apple
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Tagged iPod
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Websites need to function without javascript enabled. AJAX and Web 2.0 are fine tools, but don’t abandon the basics. The ability to interact with a website without javascript means you can easily unit test your website just like you would your other classes and executables. Yes, I’m looking at your ASP.NET 2.0 PostBack Forms.
$ curl -F "username=claco" -F "password=badpass" http://localhost/login/ | grep "login failed"
If you’re using connection strings on the web, set Application Name to the domain name. If you’re using connection strings with an executable, set Application Name to the executable name. If you have to use SQL Profiler to diagnose performance issues, it will be easier to filter out a specific application or web site.
<connectionStrings>
<add name="LocalSqlServer" connectionString="... Application Name=mywebsite.com;" />
<add name="LocalSqlServer" connectionString="... Application Name=myapp.exe" />
</connectionStrings>
Last night I downloaded Windows 7 Beta and installed it under Parallels 4 on my 17″ MacBook Pro. It is without a doubt, better and faster than my Vista install and performs the same as, if not better than my XP install. Totall install took less than 15 minutes.
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Here’s a fun way to waste 2 hours of your life. I was writing a custom config section, and trying to figure out why this wasn’t throwing a duplicate key error:
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Long story longer. A group of various friends hang out at a local coffee shop working on their mostly-Apple laptops. Someone referred to use as the ‘laptop mafia’. In a cool twist of fate, laptopmafia.com was available.
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A few batches of udates to CsvDataReader this week. I added support for schema.ini files including all of the TabDelimited, CsvDelimited, FixedLength and Delimited(*) formats. I also added support and tests for using Streams.
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