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Now that the magic of Apple has fallen to the normal level, I also found out that my 24-inch aluminum iMac has accumulated some bad jojo over the last 3 years. Ahh, the good old ritual of reinstall Windows every a couple years. Come to think about it, Microsoft is really the progenitor of so many current high-tech successors. Sooner or later, they find in their gene map bits of bad code granddaddy put in. First it is Yahoo, then Apple, and pretty soon Google too.

Now back to the current task at hand. The problem is that my Snow Leopard keeps dropping internet connections and gets really sluggish compared to the Windows 7 laptop sitting next to it. Since it is a slow progression, it can only be attributed to aging but not any particular incident. Searching online yielded no quick fixes but the clean install options popped up a few times. So I thought it is show-time for a real test of Time Machine.

First attempt: boldly wiping out hard disk and have a clean install of Snow Leopard. It detected the attached Time Machine hard drive and asked whether I wanted to import from it. Sure, give it go. Everything restored beautifully – all the applications including 3rd-party ones, all my iPhoto files (100+GB of them!) and everything else. However, so does the internet slowness. Well, I should have thought about that – the time machine is so faithful it essentially gives me the exact same machine back.

Second attempt: same steps of clean install but declined the time machine option. Now I’m opting a manual restore by carefully choosing what I restore. Nothing from the system folders please. New users, fresh software re-install. So far so good. It did give me some permission problems as Mac thinks the new Me is somehow different from the Me created those Time Machine backups. Certain folder works when I override with admin password, some folder is less lenient. Thank goodness the gigantic iPhoto and iTune folders are fine – I really don’t want to copy 100,000 files by hand.

So far so good. We will see in a few days whether the internet connection problem comes back or not. Stay tuned, if you are interested.

Please read my recent column on ClickZ:

http://www.clickz.com/3640574

“These two important differences lead to the very reason why a technology like real-time bidding can potentially create tremendous value for buyers and sellers simultaneously…

I’ve been happily using Sun VirtualBox until version 3.1.8. It started to give me trouble when I upgraded Ubuntu 9.10 to 10.04 LTS guest OS. I suspected that the VBox version I’m running is out of date. However, when I ran “check for update” it happily reported that I’m “running the latest version”.

After several iterations of struggle, I came back to revisit the notion of “the latest version” by going directly to the VBox website. Sure enough, the latest version is 3.2.2. Shutdown, download, install. Out it popped the window indicating I’m about to install Oracle VM!

After some panic, I realized that it is not a trojan horse but rather the side-effect of Oracle’s recent take-over of Sun Microsystem. Because it was hastily rebranded from Sun VirtualBox to Oracle VM, even the software itself didn’t recognize it has a new owner and newer version available.

One annoying thing about Outlook is that it will show emails with graphical signature line as having an attachment. Since having attachment sometimes is an important filtering criterion for me to search for important attached documents, this becomes a pain. I ended up hating all the people who have fancy graphical signature lines.

What I hate instead is that Outlook is not paying attention to many small usability issues. When I tested this with Yahoo mail and Gmail, both of them correctly identified inline images as not attachments.

iPhoto 09 has been plagued by performance issues. One of the most annoying ones is the memory leak problem in slideshow mode. I used System Monitor and have seen memory footprint steadily grew from 200MB to 1.2GB while playing an endless loop of video files.

Last weekend Apple released a patch that finally fixed this problem. This feels great and we can now enjoy family video clips for as long as they want now.

Windows 7 has been very robust for the last several weeks that I feel confident enough to push the performance boundary a little. I want to see how well Linux virtual machines (VM) runs on top of Win 7.
There are three popular choices to run VM on Windows 7: Virtual PC, VirtualBox and VMware Server.
Virtual PC is a free Windows update for Windows 7. It is intended to supply a Windows XP VM for legacy programs. I was able to boot and install Linux (Ubuntu 8.04) on it but couldn’t boot into the finished install at all.
VirtualBox (VBox) is an open source VM acquired by Sun. It is cross platform (OS X, Linux or Windows). VMWare Server(VMS) is the entry-level VM (freeware) from the virtualization powerhouse VMWare.
Both VBox and VMS install and run Linux VM successfully. Of the two, I feel VBox is more suitable for a desktop/laptop host environment because of its small memory footprint, nice “seamless mode” when guest and host apps run side by side and full snapshot capabilities. VMS is probably more suited for a server environment for its web-based remote management GUI. In my test VMS also has slightly better device drivers such as video that works more smoothly out of the box.
Some of the features VBox has are included in the VMWare Workstation version (or the VMWare Fusion for Mac OS X). It is not free though.