Thursday, October 16, 2003

I suck at blogging...

It seems like the only time that I ever think about adding to my blog is at a time when I have nothing to say (gasp... aharbick has nothing to say).

So I'll tell you about something funny that I saw. I was on a recruiting trip to VA Tech (pretty disappointing... 2 good, not great, hires). I entered my building through one of the side entrances and proceeded through the stairwell up a couple flights of stairs. When I got to the top there was a sign "Student Disability Services ->" Now I know there are many types of disabilities, but I could help but thing "ummm.... shouldn't this be in the elevator"

Yeah, I'm no good at this.

Tuesday, October 7, 2003

VirtualPC

As I said yesterday, my XP install under VirtualPC has a virus. Well today, I have an announcement. If you want a PC buy a PC! VirtualPC just doesn't cut it!

Running it on a 1GHz machine with 1GB of RAM (512MB dedicated to virtual PC) and nothing else is so slow that it takes HOURS just to scan the "system" for the viruses. Then once it's wasted hours McAffee runs out of memory and crashes preserving no state and hence leaving you at the starting line again (granted this is only minorly VirtualPC's fault). Ugh.

Monday, October 6, 2003

Mac OS X

First, a humorous story... I had my powerbook in the office when I was in Seattle last week (turns out, I love to develop on it ;). On Friday, I got an e-mail and a remedy ticket auto-submitted on my behalf for having a virus on my machine. Rafael, the deskside support guy, came to check out my machine (my work laptop), and couldn't find anything so he started asking questions like... "Do you login to a different PC"... "Umm no, but I do have a Mac, and I did run Virtual PC." The day before, I had given a friend a demo of the machine; showed off X11 (with KDE, Gnome etc.), all of the iApps, popped up Virtual PC. "Check this out! I can run MacOSX, Un*x, and Windows XP all at the same time!" It turns out that Windows is so secure that it can get a virus under an emulator! I don't know which is more true; MacOSX is cool or Windows is lame.

Second, a Mac, er Powerbook complaint. Why on earth can't it have any sort of lights for CPU/Disk usage feedback? I don't know how many times I've clicked on something and after waiting an uncomfortable amount of time wondered whether it was actually doing anything. Maybe I've still got bad PC addictions, and Mac is actually the correct way to do UI/feedback. However, it feels like maybe Apple was being a little too snobby about their "clean industrial design" that they couldn't be bothered to have a light for disk feedback. How about this.... Why not use the light in the "lid open button" which blinks when sleeping? I bet it's probably even possible to hack this somehow.