Parallels vs VMWare Fusion
Ever since I got my Mac, I’ve been looking into virtualization solutions. I have gotten more and more used to running VMs over the past few years and once you get used to it, it’s hard to go back. The option of restarting my computer into a new OS seems so ancient and weird to me now that I sometimes forget I was doing it quite regularly only about two years ago.
There are two main contenders for this job: Parallels and VMWare fusion with a runner-up in the form of Virtual Box (which has the great advantage of being free and open-source). I won’t go into some complex review here with charts and stuff, I just want to share a bit of my experience to help others make a similar decision.
Don’t ignore Virtual Box just because it’s not as heavily marketed as the other solutions. It was made by Sun and it’s a pretty strong contender. I actually hear it has some features that the other two don’t have. What I didn’t like about it was that it doesn’t integrate with the native OS as nicely as the other two and that immediately eliminated it for me, since that’s one of the things I was looking for. If you’re interested in running stand-alone isolated VMs, this may be all you need. Definitely give it a try first, since it’s free there’s nothing to lose.
Now back to the two big guys. I’ll tell you from the start that I picked Parallels over VMWare and here’s why (by the way, don’t take my word for it, feel free to install trials of both and play with them; Parallels had no problems converting the image created by VMWare and I’m guessing the reverse may be true as well). I feel that Parallels integrates just a bit more smoothly and is easier to use, but it may really just come down to personal preference. Here’s what the two breaking points were for me though:
- When I was running VMWare, I had several problems with my computer. I tweaked the settings a bit here and there, but either the host was sluggish or the guest was sluggish or both. Mind you, I have a MB Pro and 8GB of RAM! It’s not exactly an under-powered machine so this was annoying to say the least. It may have something to do with Lion, but VMWare said they’re supporting it so that’s not much of a valid excuse. I had no such problems with Parallels.
- I guess I could’ve ran some benchmarks and some crazy tests to work out performance, but I decided to do something much simpler instead: I tried running Skyrim 
It ran on both, but it was unusable on VMWare: extremely laggy and within a few minutes it crashed. On Parallels it runs great, I was actually able to play through a few hours of it (there is a mouse problem, but I think it may have to do more with the game than the VM since I saw many complains about that online).
Before I wrap this up, I just want to make a very important note. You cannot ignore versions and OS’s when looking at these or any other reviews.
- Version numbers:
I played around with the latest versions of both apps that are available for trial (at the time, this was Parallels 7 and VMWare Fusion 4). This is important because the two are very close “rivals” and they are constantly improving so if you do find a benchmark that’s interesting for you, make sure you look at the version numbers, otherwise it may be totally irelevant. That’s also why you will find some that show Parallels as a winner and some that show VMWare fusion.
- Host OS:
I’m running Mac OS Lion. This is fairly recent so it may be that future optimisations for this OS will change things or perhaps that they exhibit different behaviours on older versions of Mac OS.
- Guest OS:
I did all the above with Windows 7 x64. I haven’t yet made any other VMs to be able to evaluate how things would go with something else. It’s very possible that optimizations made for Windows do not translate to Linux or that 32bit and 64bit will behave differently. You know what you need so keep all this in mind.
Oh yeah, I forgot to mention price. Parallels is more expensive than VMWare fusion (£64 vs ~£32 last I checked) but look out for numerous offers out there that may get you a significant discount (I got Parallels for about £20, but you have to look around a bit).
More Jobs: The biography, the reaction, the legacy
I’m a bit late with this post, because it took me a long time to get it right. But finally here, we go, this is what I have to say after having read Steve Jobs’s biography and like any person with a blog, I need to write about it.
First off, the book itself.
This is one great biography, I really really enjoyed it. It’s telling me a story, it’s almost always giving me different sides of every event and most importantly, it’s not just giving us Steve’s thoughts, but those of many many people around him as well. I can’t even picture how much work must’ve gone into putting all of this together, to me it’s amazing. By comparison, I recently read Al Pacino’s Biography
The reaction
I see a lot of people online that are reacting very negatively after reading this biography and it’s really bugging me, but I will try to keep my anti-rant rant as short as possible. I had actually written several lengthy paragraphs going over why being “angry” at Jobs’s character is wrong on multiple levels, but I decided to cut them out. I think it was a manifestation of “someone is wrong on the Internet syndrom” and I am trying to treat myself from that.
Instead, I’ll tell you a few stories from my own life. In college I was very lucky to work with a few people that were similar to Jobs. No, they wouldn’t shout obscenities at students and wouldn’t drive without a license plate. What I mean when I say that they were like Jobs is that they pushed their students to do more than they felt comfortable doing. I’m thinking of one or two professors and two teaching assistants (I’m not naming them because I don’t think they want the publicity, good as it may be). Today and always, I thank them and I can only hope to work with such people in the future.
You would go into their office with what you would think was your greatest idea ever and they would convince you that it wasn’t good enough and make you leave that office with something that was ten times more difficult and a hundred times more awesome. You would be upset for a day, concerned for a few weeks as to how you were ever going to pull it off… but you’d get on with it and that’s just the thing! They wouldn’t just throw you the idea, they would stick with it and find ways to push you and motivate you until you actually got that new idea done, while it often kept getting transformed into something even better as it progressed.
Or, you would go and do a presentation in front of them and they would not only criticise your slides and text, but tiny details like the way you moved your hands, looked at the audience and projected your voice. I helped with some of that work, as a teaching assistant during my graduate year and there came a point where we knew that we were criticizing stellar presentations, but we still pushed people to make something better by next time. And you know what? THEY DID that, every single time.
Freshmen year, I was working on my first major project in university. It was 2am, I had 90% done, there was just a bit more needed to have it all finished, but I was feeling tired, hungry and sleepy, I just wanted to go home. My TA stopped by the lab and convinced me to go the extra mile and finish the thing. I cringed, I opened a new box of almonds (I must’ve eaten something like a pound of almonds that night) and I got back to it. It was 4am when I finally headed home, but the next day I was the only one with a 100% working project.
Sure, the experience would be frustrating at times. Some people wouldn’t go on with it, they would quit (and that’s why Jobs wanted “A players”… it’s a challenging environment and not everyone does well in it). Sometimes I also felt they were exaggerating. Sometimes I got angry, I would get into arguments with them, I’d try to push back on the constant pressure. But in the end, I ended up doing more than I would have ever been able to do without them pushing me. When we were working with those students for their senior projects, the results they produced under this pressure were absolutely astonishing. We knew they were A-players to begin with, but what they made blew my mind. As I watched the final presentations I could see numerous potential startups on screen. It was incredible and it would never have happened without those people leading them.
If you’ve never worked with someone like that, you can’t understand how incredible it is. You look back months or years later and you see yourself having done things that you thought – you KNEW – were impossible. You may be tired, exhausted, crying, but you have an overwhelming positive feeling of “godly” power. You went beyond any limit you thought was possible and you delivered what you never thought you could. Trust me when I say that if you work with a person that can take you on such a trip and you want to go the distance, you are willing to put up with a lot of negative stuff from them just to be able to go on. I’m not saying that the negative is necessary (the people I was mentioning above are among the most polite and kind that I have met), but things in life are never perfect and sometimes that’s what you get in the box. Or are you genuinely expecting someone who builds a multi-million dollar company from the ground-up before he’s 30 to be humble and not at all arrogant?
So what’s my take on the reaction that people have following the biography? To be honest I’m a bit sad that it’s so negative. The negative stuff had been known for a long time, it’s the good bits that I feel are just coming out now. Unlike most of “the Internet”, I like Jobs a whole lot more after reading it because I got to glimpse a bit into how he ticked and how he did what he did. I also find it a bit disconcerting that people would so easily give Steve up just because they now realize his “reality distortion field” extended all the way to their homes, making them think he is some kind of genius-angel. He wasn’t. But that’s irrelevant. What matter is what he WAS and what he DID, not what people imagined that he may have been. And if you’re writing your criticism about a person you’ve had no contact with from a Macbook or an iPad, well… that reminds me of the great courtoom scene in “A few good men”. Just say thank you and go on your way.
Legacy
I’ve read some people online expressing fear that a lot of entrepreneurs will try to imitate Jobs’s style in order to copy his success. I find this fear to be completely unwarranted. If you think that being a jerk to your employees will turn your company into Apple, this is quite probably not your only issue to begin with. Really, it’s a dumb fear. People won’t just start doing that and if that’s all they get out of the book, they probably wouldn’t exactly have taken over the world to begin with.
What’s more realistic though is buying into Steve’s thoughts regarding manners of innovation. This is where the debate gets interesting. Should you try to copy Steve by giving people what they don’t yet know they want (or in other words, try and guess what people will want next)? Or follow the more traditional path of market research? Should you buy into the closed-system paradigm that Apple has made so succesful, or the open one that’s being pushed by other companies (also doing quite well with numerous other examples)?
I think here again, simply copying Jobs or Apple is a stupid idea. My take on it is that it’s great to see Steve’s example. He made those things work. He made closed-systems work, he made the “screw market research” approach work. He clearly shows us that it is POSSIBLE to go about innovation in that way, even though most people and most companies don’t do it. That by itself doesn’t mean that you should or should not try to do the same. I think it’s great that you have this example (and he’s not alone, there are numerous other famous innovators that have taken a similar approach) and that you can see it was done successfully. If you think you have what it takes, you should now have more confidence in trying to do it. But before you go and bet everything on this idea, I think you need to make sure you understand the kind of talent that goes with taking this approach and then make a decision based on that.
Some things in the book are definitely take-away messages in my opinion and here’s what they are:
- Focus on great products, not profit. The former will lead to the latter, but not the other way around.
- As a leader, at any leve, you have to push people to better themselves. You don’t have to be a jerk, do it in your own way, but you have to push people.
- It’s not always bad to be a perfectionist, if it shows in your work.
- You’re not Jobs. Make sure you keep that in mind whenever you try to use him as an example. He was talented and maybe you are as well! But he was also lucky and he was at the right place at the right time. Those are things you cannot just copy. That said, if you feel you have your environment working for you, there’s nothing wrong in getting some inspiration from his life and work.
With our powers combined… sample code!
I never got around to making a proper sample project for my Android USB connection posts (1 and 2).
But, in the wonderful ways that the Internet works, someone has taken my efforts one step further and wrote up some nicer sample code to go with the ideas I dug out. Here’s the tutorial from Nelson Ramirez. I’m glad he found what I did helpful and I want to take a moment to thank him not only for putting up that code, but also for mentioning me in his posts. It’s unfortunate how many people will not do that and take the credit for themselves, so I just wanted to say that I appreciate it.
Backblaze and Spotlight
Last week, on more than one ocasion, I could feel my laptop getting really hot for no apparent reason which pointed me to take a closer look at what’s using up my resources. Indeed CPU & memory were being intensely taken over by mds and md-worker (mkay, they weren’t really “taken over”, more like one core was and half a gig of RAM, but still quite significant). What are those, you ask? Well, they are processes related to Spotlight, that wonderful little tool on the Mac OS that just seems to know where everything is on your system. In order to do that though, it has to spend some time going through your new files so that it can find them quickly when you’re looking for them.
I was on the right track, but I couldn’t really picture any reason why Spotlight would be working out so intensely all of a sudden, as I hadn’t copied any large amounts of files or anything of the sort in the previous days. Even if I had, why would it take so long to index them (it was pretty quick with everything in the very beginning). It took a bit of searching around, but I eventually tracked down a bug that makes Backblaze (a cloud backup service) and Spotlight not play well together.
Here’s a description of the problem and very easy fix (on the Backblaze website! How cool is that? Good job tech team!); it boils down to Backblaze playing with a (large) log file very often which apparently makes Spotlight want to reindex it and results in a continuous load on that process. All you have to do is tell Spotlight to ignore that log file. Done, everything is back to normal.
(Note: It seems that Backblaze does try to tell Spotlight to ignore that folder when it installs, but sometimes it doesn’t work right. Maybe it’s a Lion-related bug? I don’t really know, but nonetheless, it’s good that they actually put up a description of the problem and fix on their website, I really liked that).
KLM A la carte… About time!
I’ve been saying for a long time that I do not understand why food on flights has to be so horrible. It’s not the cost-cutting part, I get that. What I don’t get is why airlines don’t try to follow one of two routes which I believe would be a better action:
1. Marketing approach!
Have some caterer provide the food and cut your costs by allowing them to advertise on the flight. Let them tell me who made what I’m eating and where I can find them once I land and I guarantee that they will make sure that the food in front of me doesn’t suck so much. Such a deal should also result in having the airline pay less for the food, since the caterer is getting free advertisement – if I like it, I know where to go eat when I land.
I’m not an expert in this area so maybe there are other problems here which I’m not seeing (greed sounds like something I may be missing).So that brings me to option 2.
2. Make me pay for it, but at least give me options!
Airlines are getting really really good at price segmentation. You’ve got low-cost airlines, regular economy tickets, economy tickets + extra legroom, economy tickets + even more extra legroom and then the business/first class choices. Depending on how much you’re willing to budget for your comfort, you have enough options to satisfy almost everyone. Except for meals.
Meals come in two flavours. If you’re in the expensive bracket (business etc.), I’m guessing your meal may actually taste like food (I wouldn’t know because I was never there, but if you pay that much for a ticket and still get crappy food, I’d be quite furious if I were you). If you’re in the economy section, irrelevant of other upgrades, you get flavoured plastic. Why? Why does this have to be black and white?
How about you give me the option to get even MORE of my money for something that tastes at least somewhat like organic matter? Yes, it will be overpriced, yes I will complain loudly about it, but at least give me the option. Just because I don’t travel business doesn’t mean I can’t get a few bucks out to not eat recycled paper. Yes, it’s annoying that I have to do that and that your regular food serving can’t be at least half-decent, but if I am willing to do it, why not let me?
To my great surprise, someone has finally caught on to this! KLM is now introducing an “A la carte menu” in the economy class. As the title says… it’s about time!
…Of course, soon I will probably blog complaining about how they’re making me pay extra for decent food. Oh well, you can’t change human nature.
