The day before yesterday I couldn't resist the temptation any longer and ordered a black 13" MacBook from apple's student shop. It is in Suzhou (China) right now, giving me plenty of time to think about possible accessories that might come in handy. In this article I compile a list of accessories and evaluate on some notebook sleeves.

Maybe you know this situation: You really don't want to, but you have to use windows to look at a webpage with Internet Explorer, need an up-to-date version of Java, or whatever. It has happened to me the other day, and I started to look around for an easy solution.

The first thing I tried, of course, was Microsoft's Virtual PC, that lets you run a whole Windows XP Pro (or the operation system of your choice). Over all, it was pretty okay, but far from anything that I would call responsive or even fast. I was a little surprised by this fact, as I thought a dual PowerMac G5 with 2 gigs of ram would be enough for another operating system. I was wrong.

I wasn't happy with this, so I continued to look around. I found iEmulator which is built upon the open source processor emulator qemu (AFAIK) and claimed to be a "high-performance PC emulator for Macs" (quoted from their webpage) . Hooray, I thought! Open Source Power! Yeah! I then found out, that iEmulator is not free. How weird. Oh well, if the trial period goes well and I like iEmulator, I'll pay the $23. But wait! There is no trial version of iEmulator. I was dumb enough to spend the $23 nevertheless.

Soon after buying iEmulator I found out why they don't offer a free trial version. Because it's slow. iEmulator is slow. It is slow beyond imagination. It is a pain in the ass. It is not usable. Even on my hardware which is not exactly considered slow. Windows XP would run faster on a symbian smartphone.

The point I'm trying to get across here is: Don't buy iEmulator. It is not worth it, it sucks, and it's a ripoff.  iEmulator is so very very slow.

So my problem remained unsolved. Until my simple mind was blessed with a brilliant idea: Use the thinkpad. I still have this old IBM Thinkpad with a broken battery and a display that does not display anything. But it has a licensed (!) Windows XP Professional on it, and apart from the display, it works. I activated XP's remote desktop support, downloaded the (from Microsoft), hooked up the laptop to my WLAN, and voilà, it works. And it's actually usable. I chose it over (Tight)VNC, because it is a whole lot faster and it also transport all sounds from windows to my Mac. How nice.

It's not very fast, but still faster than VMWare and it doesn't produce any load on my workstation. I could probably get a nice speedup by hooking them up via a patch cable, but I don't want another  humming computer in my room.

For those who didn't notice my subtile rants: iEmulator is slow. Don't waste your money on it. 

I've never really used NFS before. So I decided to give it a go on my new debian server. After installing openvpn both on the server and the client I of course needed to put the nfs stuff onto my server. Installed nfs-common and nfs-user-server, tweaked /etc/defaults/portmap to bind the portmapper to one ip, adjustet /etc/hosts.allow and /etc/exports and watched the syslog while trying to connect:

Aug 15 02:13:50 ffm-root58 mountd[30063]: NFS mount of / attempted from 10.2.0.6
Aug 15 02:13:50 ffm-root58 mountd[30063]: / has been mounted by 10.2.0.6
Aug 15 02:13:50 ffm-root58 nfsd[30061]: NFS request from eisenuschi originated on insecure port, psychoanalysis suggested

Semi-True. A psychoanalysis might be a good thing, but / hasn't really been mounted by 10.2.0.6:

Eisenuschi:~ root# mount 10.2.0.1 test
mount_nfs: bad MNT RPC: RPC: Timed out

Not mounted. Alright.  Adding "insecure" to the /etc/exports entry fixed this. Server mounted, Jannis happy. I then asked google about tips on how to map uids between server and client, when darwin assured me, that it's nfs-implementation is more broken than working (click to enlarge):

 

Where's my remote debugger? Samba, here I come! 

Not even a month after it's inital release, OSX Tiger gets updated by apple. Finally. Let's see which of these malfunctions are fixed by the update:

• coreaudiod: crashes every once in a while
• Mail: goes crazy with some IMAP servers causing heavy load (on the server!)
• iChatAgent: crashes, aim connection is not exactly stable
• Some Quartz-Compositions crashed the whole systems
• iSync: crashes while syncinc with my 7610
• Backup: crashes on each backup-attempt

The update is 37,7MB large, so chances are good these issues are fixed... I hope.

Edit:

I'm sooo, excited... ugh...

Edit 2:

Edit 3:

Apple, this is the point where I start disliking you. Release early and often? Yeah! Release before things are working? No!

If you also lost some icons in your dock during the Tiger-upgrade, I can assure you, that one will be back :) After I installed Tiger a good week ago, the iTunes symbol in my dock suddenly had this ugly default-icon, with pencil and ruler. No good. So I installed iTunes 4.8 (31), which isn't availible via software upgrade but only via apple.com, and the icon is back. Yehaa.

Isn't this good to know and totally interesting to you? I knew it!