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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Switching Minis

I love my new Dual core Mini :) It's small, elegant and fast. But what really impresses the heck out of people is when I use Parallels (RC2) to show off running Windows XP and then using YouControl:Desktops to "flip" the entire desktop to a new one with different icons and wallpaper and it's fast! There is a free switcher called "Virtue" and it's actually been included in Parallels. It's fine but I prefer YouControl even though you have to pay a small amount for it. I find YouControl to be a more polished product and less buggy but that is to be expected since I paid for it. But free is good and both rock on Intel or PPC Macs without any real problems that I've seen. In the screens below you see the configuration menu and the icon menus. You get an icon view of each desktop and you can expand it out as I did here. Very clever!!!





I have to say that I retired my Delmac today with the final configurations of the new Mini. It's nice to have real video that I can adjust and I stayed with the 24 bit Transit audio card even with the Mini. It just sounds better than the built in sound.. big surprise! I also went to a DVI input for the monitor and that made a nice difference in the sharpness on the screen. The Dell keyboard sucks so I will have to replace it with something else.

My new (daughter's now) MacBook Pro had an interesting failure. The two inner pins on the mag connector failed to pop out and the result was that the battery would never charge all the way or at all. It took a while to figure this out but the Apple store at the Irvine Spectrum replaced the brick without any reall issues so life is good again.