Appholes

Microsoft was supposed to be the evil one, but now Apple is busting down doors in Palo Alto while Bill Gates rids the world of mosquitoes.

http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/wed-april-28-2010/appholes

VirtualBox 3.2.0 Beta 1 released, err Oracle VM Virtualbox

What a name! Oracle VM VirtualBox?

Major version update!!!

VirtualBox Version 3.2.0 is a major update. The following major new features were added:

• Following the acquisition of Sun Microsystems by Oracle Corporation, the product is now called Oracle VM VirtualBox and all references were changed without impacting compatibility.
• Experimental support for Mac OS X guests
• Memory ballooning to dynamically in- or decrease the amount of RAM used by a VM (64-bit hosts only) (see the manual for more information)
• CPU hot-plugging for Linux (hot-add and hot-remove) and certain Windows guests (hot-add only) (see the manual for more information)
• New Hypervisor features: with both VT-x/AMD-V on 64-bit hosts, using large pages can improve performance (see the manual for more information); also, on VT-x, unrestricted guest execution is now supported (if nested paging is enabled with VT-x, real mode and protected mode without paging code runs faster, which mainly speeds up guest OS booting)
• Support for deleting snapshots while the VM is running
• Support for multi-monitor guest setups in the GUI (see the manual for more information)
• USB tablet/keyboard emulation for improved user experience if no Guest Additions are available
• LsiLogic SAS controller emulation
• RDP video acceleration
• NAT engine configuration via API and VBoxManage
• Guest Additions: added support for executing guest applications from the host system
• OVF: enhanced OVF support with custom namespace to preserve settings that are not part of the base OVF standard

Google Apps for Enterprise? – Boo!

I was really excited to move to Google Apps from our old email provider.  The pilot went great, the email storage, 25GB from 125MB was a huge boon for all our users.  This was my project, global email migration for the company.  I researched it, I championed it, fought for it, and finally got it approved.  Awesome!

Then Google decides it doesn’t like Chinese politics.  Great, only 80%+ of my company works in China.  Now, email doesn’t work reliably, webmail is completely blocked, etc.

Google’s advice: use VPN and connect to someplace outside of China.  All the problems are “local DNS issues”, and not Google’s.  Thanks! 

Google’s newest announcement: Moving from Gears to HTML5, so no more offline Docs!!! https://docs.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=176376

Their take: “we’re temporarily removing support for offline access in Google Docs through Gears. We know offline access is important for some of you, and we’re working hard to bring a new and improved offline access option to Google Docs.” 

They know its important, but they’re still dropping it, no dates for resuming service…wow!

Thanks Google!  And, thank God the userbase almost revolted at the hint of replacing Microsoft Office so we didn’t roll out Google Docs! 

The biggest question about Google Apps from users: “I want to be able to access my stuff, email, docs, etc. if I am not connected to the Internet,” i.e. airplane, hotel, client site, etc.

Android 2.1 on Moto Droid

I got my 2.1 update this weekend. Other than the pinch-zoom thing, don’t see too much difference.  Pinch-zoom was already enabled from previous updates on a few apps, but it’s cool to have it in the browser now.