Parallel Universe

Well, what Apple should have done was completed by Parallels today. The production release of their OSX virtual computer software is out now. The WSJ had a great piece on it with much of the same opinion I have, why in the hell would you want to dual boot a Mac when you can run BOTH concurrently with Parallels :) It works well enough to run WebEX in the virtual Windows session. I have to say that it is very impressive how well Parallels works. I use it every single day running Office, Outlook and even Visio without issues. IE gets a bit flacky now and then but it's IE :) And this is running on an "slow" Mini of 1.6Ghz but still a dual core. I think I may hack it to put in a different chip for giggles. I'm also wondering how to put a mini cooling tower on it to handle the heat from something like a 2.1Ghz dual core or the like. The 1.6 runs really cool even in the small formfactor of the Mini so who knows.

I found a cool application called Cryptix which offers a way to encrypt files on the fly among other things using a nice GUI and almost any kind of cipher. You have several encryption selections on the top including audio files. In the demo, SAVE is disabled which while annoying, is not a real burden in testing. All in all, a very useful tool. To list some of the features:

• Password Generator
• RSA 512 bits Key Generator
• DH 512 bits Key Generator
• Encoding / Decoding Cryptix files via yencode
• Encryption /Decryption via "Aes128 bits, Ano, Blowfish 447 bits, MD5 C, Twofish"
• Encoding / Decoding via "Base 64, Binary, Hexadecimal"
• Hash via "MD5 H, Sha1, Sha 256/512"
• Common Unix Tools "Manual, Logs Analyser, Locate Files, Unix Infos, Whereis"
• Save all your hash, encoding & encryption in one file at ease...
• little frontend for openssl who ll be in the future transformed in a full gui
• Complete manual
• Mnemonic password generator
• some improvements...
• Rot 13 Scramble
• Steganography for images(pdf,png,jpg,etc...)

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