I finally got around to setting up Synergy, sharing the keyboard and mouse between Leopard and Vista. I ran into problems trying to use Leopard as a synergy client, just wouldn’t work. So I took the path of less resistance and ran the Synergy server on Leopard and the client on Vista. That works fine with one caveat, I can’t seem to run the synergy server on Leopard as a daemon, it just dies. Now I just leave it up and running in the foreground in one of the many terminal windows I have open.
Aside from the oddities of getting it to work with Leopard I’ve been really impressed with Synergy. It is amazingly smooth when going from one system to another. I highly recommend it if you need a simple keyboard and mouse sharing solution.
UPDATE 22 Feb 2008: See Comment 14 by jimeh about SynergyKM. On Leopard I’ve switched to SynergyKM, which I’ve been really happy with so far.
Microsoft’s IIS.net site has a new section: PHP on IIS. This is kind of strange on several levels. First off is the idea of Microsoft supporting non-Microsoft server side languages in IIS. Yeah, you’ve been able to do this for a long time (I remember running a perl ISAPI module in IIS in the 90s), but quite frankly it wasn’t that great. Just getting it to run usually involved way too much voodoo. It looks like we are starting to get something that resembles official support for PHP on IIS.
Another strange think is that this was announced in conjunction with their Go Live release of FastCGI for IIS 5.1 and IIS 6.0. Those using IIS 7 will have to wait until Vista SP1 or running Server 2008 Beta 3 or better. I suppose IIS 7 doesn’t have a large share of the IIS web server market so perhaps it isn’t much of an issue.
It looks like FastCGI will be the official way to run PHP on IIS going forward.
The IIS.net site has some documentation on how to get various PHP apps running on IIS, including WordPress on IIS.
The big news at the end of last week is that WinFS will not ship with Windows Vista. If you follow that link you should be warned that it is mostly spin. Don’t believe me? You’ll see gems like:
It’s great technology and we are super-excited to be productizing this way.
Productizing? Is that even a word? The folks at Merriam-Webster Online don’t seem to think so. I checked a few other dictionaries and turned up nothing. So Quentin Clark, what exactly is productizing that makes you “super-excited”?
Back to WinFS, it seems that it will be absorbed into the next version of SQL Server and ADO.NET. Given the last update to SQL Server (2005) took five or six years, is there any hope of seeing WinFS in SQL Server before 2010? Of course if you want to bring up file system announcements from Microsoft you could argue that the basis of WinFS was announced almost 15 years ago with Cairo. I expect that the general concept of WinFS will buried from a PR stand point as quickly as possible by Microsoft.
At some point I hope to see a giant collective “we’ll believe it when it ships” response when Microsoft announces yet another new technology that will change everything. Oh yeah, and it will ship in the next version of Windows.
Apple announced a public beta of Boot Camp, which helps you install Windows XP on your Intel based Apple hardware. This includes drivers for graphics, networking, audio, wireless and bluetooth.
I’ve got to get this out of my system first: This Is So Freaking Cool! Okay, I feel better now.
With Boot Camp you can dual boot between Windows XP and Mac OS X. Details are still coming out, but I’m going to guess that this contains updates to EFI to support BIOS dependent operating systems. If that is the case then you should be able to multi-boot between other operating systems also (like FreeBSD or Ubuntu). Perhaps even Windows Vista when it is released. If you combined this with something like Mac Drive 6, which allows Windows to read/write to HFS/HFS+ (the Mac OS X file system), you’ll have a pretty reasonable setup.
Boot Camp will be included in the next version of Mac OS X (10.5) Leopard. I don’t believe that a release date has been talked about yet for Leopard, but we are supposed to hear more this summer (August). This also brings into question the rumors about virtualisation software being included in Leopard. How far with Apple really go with allowing/supporting other operating systems on their hardware? As much as I’d like to see this rumor be true, part of me things that it isn’t likely that Apple as a company would be thrilled with the idea. They have to draw the line some where on encouraging people to use non-OS X software.
At this point I see Boot Camp as good news for Apple and consumers. For die hard Apple fans this won’t change anything, but it makes for one more reason for Windows users to make their next computer a Mac instead of a traditional PC.
I can understand having a server version that is different from a client/desktop/notebook system, but these are all client versions. Ug, sometimes too much choice just results in more pain.
Hey, speaking of a server version, what is the next Windows server OS going to be? Will there be a Windows Vista Server to replace Windows 2003 server?
Here is a little gem for all of you folks waiting for MS Exchange 12:
The primary hardware difference between Exchange 2003 and Exchange 12 is the move from a 32-bit platform (Exchange 2003) to a 64-bit platform (Exchange 12). Exchange 12 will only be supported in production environments when it is running on an x64 edition of Windows Server 2003.
At this point it means that Exchange 12 will only run on AMD Opteron and Intel Xeon with EM64 Technology based servers. Probably not a huge issue since Exchange 12 will undoubtedly require a huge amount of resources to run reasonably. I’m more concerned about the requirement of the x64 edition of Windows Server 2003. This is just one more item to throw into the MS licensing stew.
Migrating to Exchange is on my do to list. Coming across this news has made me wonder if waiting to start with Exchange 12 would be better than starting with Exchange 2003. Time for more research.
Most of have come to terms with the idea that some software come with rather evil components that try to take over Windows systems, or attack others, etc. Usually the software packages that do this are on shaky ground to start with, are fairly easy to avoid. I guess Sony was looking to change all that.
Before you go out and buy another CD read through “Sony, Rootkits and Digital Rights Management Gone Too Far“. It seems that the CD “Get Right with the Man” by Van Zant will install a poorly written rootkit on your Windows system. This is bad news, it is becoming increasingly difficult to know who to trust in these matters. Before it was a pretty good rule of thumb that if you only installed software from reputable vendors then you’d be okay. The list of vendors considered reputable seems to be decreasing rapidly.
It really is amazing how easy it is to put together a system with a terabyte (or more) of storage. For less than $500 you can purchase four Maxtor 300 Gigabyte IDE drives ($118 each from New Egg), putting you well over one terabyte in capacity. If you are looking for something a bit bigger Apple has made that pretty easy with their Xserve RAID unit, up to 7 terabytes for $13,000. I believe hard drive capacity will continue to go up and price per terabyte will drop.
At work I’ve got few systems now with a terabyte or more of storage. While most modern operating systems support filesystems in the terabyte range, their advanced features don’t seem to work well. FreeBSD had no problem running with a terabyte plus filesystem (fs), but snapshots on that fs were pretty much useless because they took forever. Still having to run fsck when problems happen would undoubtedly be equally as painful. Fortunately there has been talk of adding journaling to FreeBSD, hopefully that work will at least take care of the fsck problem. General work on large file systems under FreeBSD is being done as part of project Big Disk.
You might think that a company with more money than many countries (Microsoft) would be able to produce an OS (Windows 2003 Server) that wouldn’t have those sorts of issues, but you’d be wrong. Windows 2003 does fine using a one terabyte plus fs, until want to use things like Shadow Copy and then things start to fall apart rather quickly. From what I’ve been able to determine things work fine for awhile and then shadow copy stops working at some point after the system has been up for awhile. That wouldn’t be so bad if that was the only thing that went wrong, but it isn’t. In Windows 2003 the built in backup software makes use of shadow copy, which makes sense, if shadow copy didn’t roll over and die on large file systems. When ntbackup tries to create a shadow copy and that fails, ntbackup stops and the whole back up fails. Obviously that makes it rather difficult to get a clean backup, at least using ntbackup. But it gets even worse, when ntbackup fails because shadow copy fails it erases all of the old successful snapshots that shadow copy made earlier.
After hunting around for awhile I came across Article 833167 at support.microsoft.com claiming that there is a hotfix that is supposed to fix the problem, but it isn’t publicly available. I have to contact Microsoft support and request the hotfix, after which they’ll determine if they are going to charge me for said support. At some point I’ll have to bite the bullet and ask for the hotfix, but I get the feeling they don’t have a lot of confidence in it yet. How long until SP2 for Windows 2003 comes out? What ever it is I doubt that I can wait that long.
Given how easy and cheap it is to equip a system with a terabyte (or more) of hard drive space it is disappointing that some things don’t work better on that sort of scale.
So Russell has a rather long list of reasons why he might switch back to Windows from Mac OS X. Given that I use Windows, FreeBSD and Mac OS X on a daily basis I don’t really consider my self a zealot, but I’ll discuss his points anyway. So you’ll know where I’m coming from the Apple systems that I use include a G4 PowerBook (for the last 18 months or so) and an Xserve + Xserve RAID server. Although I have complaints about how I’d do things differently, that is true for Windows as well. Overall I’ve found the systems to be stable and have worked well, although I don’t have nearly the array of mobile devices to test that Russ does. About the only time I reboot is when an update requires me to.
I personally have found to my OS X systems to be much closer in stability to FreeBSD (very good) than Windows (so so). I can count the number of times my OS X systems have gone wacky on one hand over the last year and half. I won’t dispute that Russ is having problems, but I can attest that that isn’t the case for everyone.
I’ve had mixed feelings about this. For instance Java tends to run much faster on my PowerBook than on my older Windows systems. For recent (3+ Ghz) Windows systems it is probably a close tie. This is kind of a toss up though, somethings certainly run faster on even older Windows systems, and other things run faster on my PowerBook.
I don’t use my PowerBook for too many graphically intensive tasks (like games) so I don’t have much of a comparison there.
For the most part I really like Mail, especially the ability to have a unified inbox across my IMAP accounts, I wish Thunderbird supported that for more than just POP3. I like Firefox and Camino because of the community of plugins that are available. But there is always one thing that I miss in Safari, built in spell check! I know there are plugins for Firefox, but it just isn’t the same. I tend to mostly use Safari and Camino with some Firefox thrown in. When Firefox 1.5 becomes official I’m going to consider moving to only Firefox.
Okay, I can not stand Windows thumbnails! It drives me nuts. It really gets me when it decides to automatically switch my view to thumbnail mode just because it found one jpeg in a directory full off hundreds of other files. Arg! I use iPhoto sometimes.
In general I like the Windows explorer is better, but not for everything. There are some specific features in Finder that make me go duh, why doesn’t everybody do it this way?
I’m not a big chatter, but I will go with Skype on this one. I’ve used Fire and iChat and been okay with them too.
Only spent a few minutes with Garageband, looks like it is extremely cool for folks into making music, but I’m not one of those.
The built in screen shot feature uses PDF in OS X so I’m not sure what Russ is using that generates Quicktime tiffs.
I’ve never used Keynote or Pages.
This is a rather self serving argument, but it does have some validity.
This depends on what “most stuff” is. I’m pretty sure that Subethaedit comes out on Mac first :-)
Vim
Never used .Mac
Wide screen is awesome. Yes web pages are generally long and not wide, so what, do you want your notebook to have a 14″ tall screen?
True, I carry my adapter around a fair bit just in case.
I’m sorry, you are complaining about the install process on OS X vs. Windows? You’ve got to be kidding me. I’d be thrilled to have it so easy on Windows when installing and uninstalling.
Why complain about the .DS_Store files if you enjoy Windows adding dot files when viewing directories in thumbnail mode.
I’ve got a DVD burner on my PowerBook, I’ve used iMovie a couple times.
So don’t buy the Apple mice. The old Microsoft mouse that I’ve had on my desk works fine from the first day I plugged it (USB), didn’t even have to install any additional drivers.
Being a FreeBSD user/admin for awhile (over 7 years) I’m thrilled with the Unix guts on OS X. Sure I’d like to systat (from FreeBSD) on my OS X systems, but without Unix guts OS X wouldn’t be OS X (to me). man ps.
I don’t use Expose very often, instead Desktop Manager allows me to have virtual desktops, which pretty much does the trick for me.
I would like Command+tab to cycle through multiple windows of the same app also. For the most part I like the dock.
Like I mentioned above I don’t have the huge set of mobile devices that Russ has. Everything I’ve plugged into my PowerBook works, often better than it does on Windows.
I haven’t used iSync. Perhaps if I get around to buying a mobile phone with Bluetooth that will change.
Flip a coin on this one, I could argue for either side I think.
I haven’t used Spotlight as much as I thought I would. When I have though it has worked okay.
This arguement sounds too much like a sales pitch :-)
Nope
I’ve found the virtually everything looks better on an OS X system than Windows, including fonts and especially colors.
I’ve never had to install drivers for the various mice that I’ve plugged in, so I’m not sure why Russ has.
Rendezvous/Bonjour is awesome! Many of the new network printer cards support, which makes adding a printer to my PowerBook a snap. I wish there was wider support for Bonjour, especially in Windows.
I’ve forgotten what the default function is for F11, what’s the problem?
I’m fairly excited about the move to Intel for OS X systems. But then again, if Windows Vista were revealed to be built upon Unix guts I’d be excited about that too. I spend a huge amount of my time on my PowerBook in iTerm and the Windows shell doesn’t even come close, not by a long shot. I could switch back to a Windows notebook though, it wouldn’t kill me. But if I had an x86 PowerBook I could triple boot between OS X, Windows and FreeBSD with a FAT32 shared data partition, the best of all worlds!