MacLochlainns Weblog

Running VMWare Fusion installations doesn’t require interaction. You can walk away from your Mac knowing it won’t go to sleep if you download Caffeine from the Apple download site. It lets you defer the Mac sleep cycle. I’ve found it very useful during the setup of my virtual machines, along with a 320 GB 2.5″ USB drive.

While I’ve worked on many systems over the years, principally Windows for the desktop, and Linux and Unix for the servers, I’ve begun to return to Apple because of Mac OS X. It different than the Apple 6 and Apple 7 that consumed me during my years at American President Lines in Oakland, California. The biggest difference is that my MacBookPro can run Mac OS X, Windows XP x64, Ubuntu, Red Hat 4 in virtual machines courtesy of VMWare Fusion. This affords me a great set of testing environments on a single machine. That does exclude Microsoft Vista. I’ve found Vista’s memory demands coupled with the Oracle 11g really requires 3 GB, and therefore a separate physical machine. I typically only run one virtual machine at a time because they’re allocated 2 GB of memory, and my MacBookPro only (my how life changes) supports 4 GB or memory.

My son just talked me into using Quicksilver, an application launcher – it’s great. I think he’ll make a great technology evangelist someday. You can find more Mac, Ruby, and Django (a Python framework) tricks and techniques on his blog. He’s also just started a gig doing hybrid application development for the iPod and iPhone. I think you’ll be seeing news on that front too.