Dangerously Opinionated

Here’s a challenge for you. Ready?

In Java and C++ on OS X, output to the console the following string:

I have €100 to my name.

You’ll be surprised how hard this is.
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I was messing around with Beta 3 Beta 4 of the Parallels VM environment for Intel OS X.

Dayamn.

I got Windows XP SP2 plus Cygwin plus Visual Studio 2005 on there without a hitch. And it’s fast. CD, network and sound all works perfectly. I’m a fan. Can’t wait until the final release.

It kicks the shit out of the QEmu-based turds:

• OpenOSX WinTel for Mac OS X. I actually paid money for this. I’m not sure it was even worth the time I spent downloading it. A crappy interface, and the product basically doesn’t work. Got as far as installing Windows XP SP2, (after like three attempts), went to install updates and “some of the updates could not be installed”. Winner.
• Q. Despite staking out a letter of the alphabet, and a small amount of graphic design sensibility, these guys couldn’t even boot the Windows XP SP2 disc.

This is the Open Source way. Provide a product that works on your own machine, and not anywhere else. Quality is a secondary concern to the technical masturbation. Well, enjoy it. I hope you spend my $25 on making the product better.

Note that I didn’t provide a link to those jerks. Not going to give them the satisfaction. And I do apologize if this is harsh, I really do — but when the stuff just fundamentally doesn’t work, I don’t have a lot of compassion.

I found some cool links today. All stemming from the same link.

• David Weiss is involved with the Mac Lab at Microsoft. He provided a tour of the lab that’s cool. An evil army of 150 Mac Minis are part of the population.
• I read some of his other posts, and found TN2124 at Apple — debug tips which seem pretty handy.
• Which included a cool URL hack to open a man page (on OS X anyway). Check out the ktrace manpage. Or if you’re not on OS X, don’t.

I installed Boot Camp on my MacBook Pro, got myself a legit copy of Windows XP Professional, and now I can finally have a single machine on the road for everything I need to do. Got Visual Studio 2005 on here and everything.

The biggest problem I had was installing the Apple-provided drivers. I left the network cable plugged into the machine, and when I installed the drivers, the network fired up and downloaded a bunch of system updates which then clobbered the Apple drivers. So every time I booted after that point, it would get to Mup.sys and then reboot. Sigh. In any case, it all seems to be working now.