Mike Cohen

links for 2007-06-19

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Tip: Resizing a disk image in Parallels Desktop 3.0

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One limitation of Parallels Desktop 3.0 is that you can no longer resize a disk image (although Parallels says that will be fixed in an update to be released soon). If you need to resize a hard drive now, I found a good work-around for Windows XP: Acronis True Image Home.

The free trial copy will work nicely. First thing you have to do is add a new hard drive to your virtual machine of the desired size. After you install True Image go to Manage Hard Drives and Clone your existing hard drive to the new one. You can simply use the automatic operation. It will then ask you to reboot and it will boot right into their cloning utility, which took about 5 minutes to clone a 7GB hard drive with about 4GB of data on my MacBook Pro. After it finishes, it will shut down the machine. At this point, go to the VM configuration, remove your old hard drive, and change the connection for the new drive to IDE 0:0. When you start up, the Acronis tool will run once again to finish setting up the new drive and will finally reboot into Windows. You can then remove True Image.

What a long strange trip it's been

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I’m finally home after being away for more than two weeks.

American Airlines went 3 for 3, delaying my luggage on all 3 legs of my trip. It happened yet again when I arrived home. I flew from SFO to DFW yesterday. Due to weather conditions, all flights in and out of DFW were delayed for an hour or longer, so I didn’t miss my connecting flight. We finally landed a little after midnight. I didn’t leave the airport until after 1AM dealing with baggage service, along with a lot of other people. They finally delivered my bag at 7:30 this morning (they had told me it would be sometime between 8AM and noon). According to the tag, my bag travelled via LAX.

My bag was also delayed flying from here to Vancouver and from Vancouver to San Francisco. In both cases, they delivered it to my hotel later that night.

Apple's WWDC Bash was awesome!

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At first I was a bit disappointed that Apple decided to have their traditional Thursday night WWDC Bash in Yerba Buena Center across from Moscone instead of the Apple Campus as they usually do, but it turned out to be their most awesome bash of any WWDC I’ve attended. Apple usually gets a fairly popular indie band for their bash, although last year they only had a DJ. This year they got Ozomatli, probably the biggest band they’ve ever had.

They were simply awesome. I always liked Ozomatli ever since I heard “Saturday Night” in the iPod commercial, but now I’m an even bigger fan. Every one had a great time and they got the geeky crowd dancing like crazy. They played for over an hour and ended the set by marching into the middle of the crowd still playing their drums and horns, turning into a gigantic conga line.

Ozomatli

I’ve posted more photos here.

Leopard

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Like most WWDC attendees, I immediately tried Leopard. After two days, several reinstallations and lots of crashes, I went back to Tiger.

Leopard worked OK when I did a clean install on my external drive, but I couldn’t use it for any real work that way since I couldn’t access any of my email, address book, iCal, or Yojimbo data. I decided to give it another chance by doing an upgrade install on my MBP (after doing a full backup, of course), which was only barely usable. For some reason blued (the Bluetooth daemon) would keep crashing and relaunching continuously which made Bluetooth unavailable. Also many applications including Parallels Desktop would crash immediately after launching. Doing an archive install didn’t work any better. Among other problems, the clock was very confused about time zones. The menu bar clock showed the time in PDT, but the date & time control panel showed it in EDT.

I spent much of the day yesterday reinstalling Leopard several times. Last night I gave up and restored Tiger from the Backup. My MBP is now back to normal. I’ll try installing it on my iMac when I get home.

As a lot of people have said, the translucent menu bar is a mistake. If you use a dark colored background, the menu can be very hard to read.

A great utility: WiFind

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After reading a review on MacZealots, I decided to try WiFind and ended up buying it.

WiFind is simple and very useful. It replaces the Airport status menu with a more informative menu telling whether each network is open or protected and the signal strength. It came in very handy at WWDC and is well worth the $8 price.

WiFind