Oct 102013
 

After several days stuck in various problems, it seems I’m making progress now.

First good news came from financial side … I found this site which is good for on-demand Mac “rental”, and obviously it saved me at least $200 (if I was to go with a refurbished Mac Mini). Now I just leave $30 in my account, and occasionally log on to build my Apps. It was said that you have to log in at least every 60 days, or your money will be gone, this makes sense to me and does not bother me at all. Continue reading »

May 302013
 

Give up MacBook Pro to someone else, and moved back to PC laptop.

I was thinking of running Ubuntu on the new laptop so to fully utilize the 16G memory and 4-core i7 processor. However, after two days’ painful trial, I finally gave up and moved back to Windows, and you can image – I moved back to Windows 7 instead of 8.

The problem with Ubuntu and Windows 8 are similar, they were not designed by following people’s common sense, or direct sense, whatever you want to name it. I, personally, believe the usability is OSX > Windows 7 (Windows XP as well) > Ubuntu (Windows Vista is almost the same) > Windows 8.

Heard of Windows 8 is to be upgraded to have something like start button and program folders, etc. though it is still rumor so far. Shall we just name these changes as “graceful downgrade” in case they are really true? ๐Ÿ˜€

BTW, I turned on Hyper-Thread on i7 processor so logically, I’m running a 8-core machine with 16G memory – this is my dreaming machine several years ago ๐Ÿ˜‰

Mar 162012
 

What else can I say? It’s ridiclousely slow.

I’m on Excel now, every single copy and paste took me close to a minute, without any reason. I tried to reboot the machine, re-compsoe the sheet, and lots of other tricks that I can imagine, but nothing works. Even Office in the VM on the same box works much faster.

Jan 092012
 

I made Cisco VPN works on my MacBook, accidentally …

I was talking to someone while randomly clicked on company’s web VPN site, and while discussing something I blindly clicked here and there and found that Advanced VPN does not work on my Mac, it soon took my attention and in several minutes, I figured it should be privilege issue (at least I guess). After manually download the installation shell script and run it with sudo, everything’s working now.

However, I used to start Cisco VPN on the Windows XP virtual machine running inside VirtualBox, it seems with the VPN moved to Mac itself (which is the host machine for VirtualBox), it became slower, significantly slower than before. I haven’t got time to dig out what was happening, but anyway, it is acceptable.

Nov 072011
 

Got an MacBook Pro 13″, but it’s an old model as the newest models are still pending on “regulator’s approval” in China, per Apple’s web site. I believe it’s the problem from the new Thunderbolt.

Mine has 8G memory so I can run 3 VMs (under VirtualBox, each has 1G memory) plus all applications from Microsoft Office (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook), Safari, and several small utilities at the same time without any performance problem. For most time I only need to run 1 VM so it should be OK.

VirtualBox rolls, while Parallele Desktop and VMWare Fusion both suck. Alright I know I’m not familiar with either so VirtualBox gained my respect, but thinking of VirtualBox is free, this simply kills those two.

Installing Xcode was a nightmare – App Store in China didn’t work, at least for huge packages like Xcode (I installed some small stuffs without problem), finally I downloaded Xcode from Apple’s developer web site. There were not many to be installed as I can see, other than QQ and MPLayer. I’m trying to get Pidgin running now, but seems I have to run it under X11, and if this is the case I will move to Adium though I do want to have customized smileys. Maybe Adium got it already, need to check out.

Overall speaking, MBP is a nice laptop, it’s quiet, cool (against HOT MBP ppc I had 8 years ago). The only problem is that I have to remove my watch while working on it as chain of the watch will scratch the shell.

I ordered a keyboard screen and a bag for it, will get this week.

Dec 042009
 

It was said corp IT is now able to switch HP laptop with a MacBook, there is a guy in our group got his MacBook, and another guy’s request is being handled and will get in “couple of days”.

I’m thinking now – maybe I should get my HP laptop replaced as well. I’m checking software installed on my laptop now, so that I have some rough idea of what ability I’m going to lose by switching to Mac.

I believe I’m still going to have MS Office, and I will still have Firefox and Thunderbird, I will have Yahoo Messenger, and I think Adium can do all Pidgin does. I don’t think I need putty and WinSCP. I assume I can still get software for Blackberry and Nokia E90, but if they are not available it won’t be a big deal. I will have Perl, python, Java, subversion, etc. by default, which is good.

I may lose GNAT Ada, and have to find a better Common LISP environment. I need to find a good media player, while i think VLC should be good enough. Obviously I will lose all those Windows development environment, but if I can get Fusion I could run a Windows image (not sure about corp IT policy though). A new printer (all-in-on) is on the way and I believe it works with Mac (my current one does not work quite well).

Pretty much everything is fine :). I will submit the ticket after coming back from the Christmas vacation.