Disqus - Latest Comments for Warren Baird

Re: Virtual Adventures

Warren Baird — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 17:46:44 -0000

I've been using VMWare Fusion on my macbook pro for probably 6 months now, and I'm pretty happy with it... I've run both XP and Linux images and they work quite well.

They are even pretty responsive if I'm not running anything too memory hoggish on the native side...

Too bad Oracle VM isn't available for the Mac yet...

Re: Play Name the Platform

Warren Baird — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 16:55:34 -0000

Out of curiosity - why not stick with either mix or connect? Both are great names for the concept.

I think it's quite defensible and not confusing to call the platform 'Mix', and to describe 'Connect' as an internal deployment of Mix. Or vice-versa. :-)

Re: OS X, Ubuntu and Other Fun Stuff

Warren Baird — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 13:09:06 -0000

actually - vpnc can connect to Cisco VPN. Out of the box it won't work with Oracle's VPN, since the support for certificates is turned off, but I understand that if you build from source and turn on certificate support it works fine with Oracle's VPN. I plan on trying it sometime soon - I'll let you know if it works.

Re: OS X, Ubuntu and Other Fun Stuff

Warren Baird — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 15:32:55 -0000

I think my experience has somewhat mirrored Rich's --- I've used linux since the bad-old-days of kernel 0.9.x on a 386, and I must admit that when I moved to a macbook pro for my personal machine - I didn't miss *at all* the mucking around with config files, and recompiling kernel modules I had to do on linux.

That being said, it is true that Ubuntu is getting closer and closer to the point where you don't need to mess about too much. but it still has a long way to go.

Just one small example - external monitors. I can plug my mbp into an external monitor, and after a moment my desktop automatically grows to include the new monitor, and I can continue working. it almost always guesses the right resolution, and it's easy to tell it the orientation, and it remembers the orientation and resolution if I connect to a similar monitor later.

With Linux (Ubuntu 7.10 at least), the only approach I've found that works is to edit the Xorg.conf file to have configurations and layouts for all my monitors - and then I have to kill my X session and start a new X session manually with the correct layout. Not my idea of 'usable'.

Re: OS X, Ubuntu and Other Fun Stuff

Warren Baird — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 18:51:13 -0000

well - if you find a solution to the multiple monitor thing - definitely let me know. I've heard that the Xorg people are making strides in that direction - but I don't think they've solved the problem yet...

Re: OS X, Ubuntu and Other Fun Stuff

Warren Baird — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 10:33:25 -0000

The problem with PC's is that the "same hardware" isn't. My laptop is a dell d410, and when I was offered it through work, I checked the linux hardware compatibility pages, and it was listed as having a fully supported wireless chipset (Don't remember if it was intel or atheros).

When I got mine however, it had a broadcom chipset, so I had months of futzing with it before I could get wireless working reliably. Fortunately Broadcom support has improved a lot since then.

The problem is that unless you roll your own hardware, you generally have no idea what mobo, chipset, video, etc you are going to get if you go with a big name box...

IMO that's one of the advantages of Apple - they don't just shove whatever's cheapest that week in the box, you get very consistent hardware from machine to machine...

Re: Measuring the Cost of a Computer

Warren Baird — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 13:48:07 -0000

Yeah, I agree with the comments about hardware not necessarily being a commodity.

When I bought my macbook pro - I would have been fairly open to buying a non-apple laptop and running linux on it. However, my criteria included:
<ul>
<li> 15" display, with graphics card powerful enough to drive a 30" 2560x1600 monitor
<li> no more than about 6 lbs weight
<ul>
That was enough to narrow it down to the mbp (which has about 3 hours battery life), or an alienware laptop that reportedly got about 45 minutes of battery life.

Now, maybe my requirements aren't that common, and this was 8 months ago, so the landscape may have changed, but I went through a very similar process when I bought a 12" ibook about 4 years ago.

Certainly every laptop I've bought, the decision has been primarily made on hardware considerations rather than OS.

Re: Want to Help Socialize OpenWorld?

Warren Baird — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 12:08:19 -0000

> Now, if only I could get a hotel room in the city and skip the 30 minute drive
> up from the airport hotel where I’m currently installed. Ideas?

check back at the OOW housing page *often*. a co-worker clued me in to a better hotel yesterday, and I managed to get moved from near the airport to hotel just a couple of km from Moscone... But it was the *only* open room at the hotel...

I was contemplating writing a screen-scraper that'd check for better rooms every five minutes and notify me if it found anything - but (as is so often the case) the old-fashioned approach won first.