I have been using Parallels Desktop on my Mac for a few years now when I need to run WinXP. Recently I read about Sun’s VirtualBox and thought of giving it a try. Couple of nights ago I installed the app (its way smaller in size than the Parallels), and then Installed OpenSolaris OS on it. It runs like a charm. No problem in installation and it actualy uses a lot less resources than Parallels does. I have yet to install WinXP on VB to see if it works just as good as in Parallels but with less resource use obviously. In fact I did try to install XP but everytime I got some error in loading installation CD. I have yet to figure out the solution. Seems like lots of other people are getting the same problem though! The error I’m getting is this:
Fatal: no bootable medium found! System Halted
Anyway, I am happy to be able to run solaris though. It works excellent in ‘seamless’ mode on my second monitor! Click on the image for the larger version.
Not that I’ve been updating my blogs too often these days (I do have genuine enough reasons for that) but still, ever since I upgraded to Snow Leopard, my preferred blog editor, ecto, has stopped working, it opens and within a few seconds it crashes. I tried clean reinstalling but to no avail. When I have posted a few entries recently, those have been using ScribeFire add-on on firefox, which, by the way is excellent. However, I prefer using non-browser blogging clients, those that blend well with the OS and provide easy way to resize and upload images. I saw this half-price offer on myBlogEdit on macZOT! so I thought I should give it a try before I decide to splash out 10 bucks on it, which already looks a good deal as I play around with this blogging client! And to complete the text, here is a picture I took a couple of weeks ago…
Castle Howard just outside York on a dull day!
As I was struggling to make my paper write-ups more efficient, especially in cutting the time wasted in tabbing through numerous open windows and applications (common culprits being, MS Word, Bookends or Endnote, Papers, Skim, SPSS, Pathfinder – not to mention Mail and Skype!), I decided what I needed was an additional monitor which gave me more desktop real estate and allowed me to view at least 2 or three applications windows side-by-side. I also remembered this Randy Pausch lecture on time management and his take on multiple monitors. So, I ordered a Samsung LCD from ebuyer, okay its only 19″ but I have a small desk at home and the monitor was on sale too! As soon as I got it and plugged it in, I though it would just extend my laptop monitor towards the side, which it did (and luckily for me, I placed my new monitor on the right side – the default side a mac seems to extend its display!).
However, what I was hoping was the top menu bar to extend all the way to my new monitor so I could get extended menu bar real estate too. Well, how wrong I was. And after Googling for hours and searching all the mac forums that I frequent, I couldn’t find any tips or tricks to extend that menu bar – nothing! I know I can mirror it (by mirroring the main laptop display), but that’s a waste of external monitor as far as I’m concerned. I don’t know why no one has come up with a program that let you extend the menu bar!?! 
Anyway, what I did come across was a cool little application called DejaMenu, which gives all the menu items from the application you are running as a context menu on the press of a hot-key combination. At least this is much better than having to move mouse all the way to the main screen to get to the menus. I’m using DejaMenu now and I can’t thank the creator enough for this wonderful application. Thank you!
And please someone make an application that lets us extend the main menu bar.
This is going to be a very short entry. For I’m typing this up on my iPod touch tapping my fingers on the touch screen. Although the screen is very responsive and the predictive input seem to improve as I type along, it’s still a pain to tap fingers for long. Anyway, I found this cool wordpress app for free so thought I should give it a try, and I’m impressed at how easy it was to set up and start blogging. Now I’ll see if I can connect my Bluetooth keyboard with this thing and type fast! But this is cool in itself !!! 
I just though I should write a short post about few of my recent favourite software on mac (macwares). It is not a “review” of any sort, just my “views”. I tend to try pretty much all the ‘shareware’ that I think might be useful, and many of the good ones get filtered through to my ‘to buy’ list that way, especially the ones that I tend to keep running from the day I download them. One of them happens to be Papers.
I used this organiser for academic papers (in electronic format – mainly pdfs) a while back and used it till its trial period ran out. I then was away in Africa and didn’t really have time to organise my collection of academic articles. Now that I’m back writing up my own thesis, I really needed something to organise my collection, which is pretty much all over my computer, and that too quick and in an systematic fashion. I turned back to Papers. Not only does it allow me to organise my pdfs the way I want them, but it also allows me to search for the metadata on the web (I use Google Scholar mainly because I don’t need any special login and find most of the information I need – to use other sources such as Web of Science, you need to set up authentication somehow!) and match them to the papers, all automatically. Now that is really cool. Further, I also got educational discount on my license for Papers so didn’t have to pay the full price (after using it every day for the past week, I think I wouldn’t mind paying the full price). I think going through my pdfs every day and searching for the metadata on the web and matching them with the paper so that they could be organised systematically (by Year, Author and so on), I’m now almost a third through my papers collection. Of course there will be some without metadata on the web, especially the documents that are not publicly available or those that Google Scholar doesn’t have in its database. I think I just need to spend a couple of hours at my office so that I can use Web of Science faster and without having to set up manual authentication to match the rest of the document with their metadata. For anyone with a huge collection of academic papers, books or any other documents and using a mac, I highly recommend this software. Worth every penny!
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