Mike Cohen

Avoid Seagate FreeAgent Go drives

by

I needed yet another external drive so I can test the Leopard beta and not wipe out either my internal drive or the backup drive I brought with me to SF, so I decided to pick one up at CompUSA.

After looking at several models, I picked the 120 GB Seagate FreeAgent Go. When I got it back to my room, I discovered it included a USB Y-cable, with two connectors on the computer side. There’s a reason it came with that cable: it draws too much power for a single USB port, so you need to connect it to *both* ports with one of the connectors providing power only. If I connect it to a single port, it won’t work.

I ended up returning it and getting a Western Digital Passport 120 instead. This one works nicely from a single USB port.

Virtualization in Leopard?

by

On the flight to San Francisco, I was sitting next to someone who worked for a software company that specializes in virtualization (not Parallels or VMware). He told me that Apple hired several people to work on virtualization. I suspect Boot Camp in Leopard will involve virtualization.

Alaska Airlines does it again

by

Once again my checked luggage was delayed. I’m at the hotel now and my bag isn’t here. Unlike Vancouver, the airline paged me and told me that my bag went out on the flight after mine, since the flight from Vancouver to Seattle was delayed, which didn’t give them enough time to transfer my luggage. It should be delivered here between 8 & 10PM tonight.

VMware vs. Parallels revisited

by

Right now I’m at YVR waiting to board my flight in a few minutes. While I was waiting I installed VMware Fusion beta 4. I had previously installed Parallels 3.0 so I got a chance to compare the latest versions of both applications. So far Unity looks very cool – unlike Coherence, Windows applications aren’t all in the same layer. If you click a Windows application window, only that window will be brought forward, not the entire Windows layer. I’ll try to write a more detailed comparison later.

Off to WWDC

by

I’m leaving tomorrow morning for WWDC in San Francisco. I enjoyed the last week in Vancouver and I’m looking forward to coming back here again next month. Vancouver is my favorite city. It’s very easy to get around downtown without a car and Vancouver has more great restaurants than any other city I’ve been to, including New York and San Francisco.

Parallels 3.0 rocks

by

Parallels released Desktop 3.0 today, which I pre-ordered as soon as it was announced. Coherence got even better – you can now open Mac applications from Windows or tell Windows to open web pages in the Mac browser. It also seems to use less CPU and doesn’t slow my machine down as much as the older version did. Running Linux in Parallels no longer sucks, since they now have Linux tools that provide mouse synchronization. Now there isn’t much reason to switch to Vmware.