Personal Virtualisation on Mac OS? OK, I was wrong. It’s actually pretty good.

by tarambling, posted in .NET Development, C# Development, Mac OS, mac OS / OSX, Virtualisation, Windows

You know, I’ve always said that one of the things I admire most about a person is when they are happy to say “I don’t know”. I think that says they’re confident enough about what they do know, to be able to admit the boundaries of their knowledge.

In a similar vein I have a lot of respect for people who are happy to admit they’re wrong. And so I will step up to the plate now, and admit that after the feedback I received over the last week from a number of colleagues and acquaintances about my previous post …

Personal Virtualisation on Mac OS as a Developer? Probably not.

… and the work I’ve done since … I was wrong.

Continue reading “Personal Virtualisation on Mac OS? OK, I was wrong. It’s actually pretty good.” →
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Personal Virtualisation on Mac OS as a Developer? Probably Not.

by tarambling, posted in .NET Development, Apple, C# Development, Cloud, Mac OS, Productivity, Software, Virtualisation

Much of my recent professional life has been dominated by the Microsoft development stack – Visual Studio, C#, SQL Server and related technologies, and in recent years, the popular JavaScript frameworks and libraries, Angular and React.

Developers who work with a similar technology stack, would often use a Windows machine as their primary development workstation, as I did. But, my preferred personal computing platform, has always been Mac OS and Mac hardware. So my employer’s or client’s workstations have almost always been powerful Intel-based Windows Workstations, but my personal machines have almost always been Macs.

When doing work at home on my Macs over the years, I’ve tried using various flavours of virtualisation on Mac OS, to run instances of Windows, on Mac hardware. I did this to run:

  • Windows-based Dev Tools, such as Visual Studio, and Visual Studio Code, or
  • Windows-based Services, such as SQL Server, or Internet Information Services, both of which stretched the capabilities of a virtualised Windows environment extremely, or
  • Other software or services for which there wasn’t a non-Windows option.

Initially, I used VMWare Fusion extensively, and more recently, particularly since Apple Silicon, Parallels. Both Fusion and Parallels are excellent products, but in recent times I’ve begun to re-consider the value of virtualisation of Windows on Mac for development activities.

Continue reading “Personal Virtualisation on Mac OS as a Developer? Probably Not.” →

A Trip Down Computing Memory – And How Far We’ve Come

by tarambling, posted in Hardware, History, mac OS / OSX, Productivity, Software, Technology, Windows

I was talking with a friend the other day, about the “prehistoric” days of computing, about things we did in our youth tinkering with PCs, which ignited our interest in computers. And apart from this proving a fascinating “walk down memory lane”, these reminiscences got me thinking about some of the features of modern Operating Systems we take for granted today.

My earliest experience was on an Apple IIe, with a Z80 card installed, which allowed me to run what seemed to me at the time, an incredibly powerful Operating System, CP/M. And the highlight of using CP/M was what I thought was a very sophisticated Word Processor, Wordstar.

For those not familiar with this now ancient program, here’s a fantastic video from Youtube, which provides a quick overview of the use of Wordstar. And although I can’t be certain, given the “naming” of the drive used, I suspect it is actually being launched (very slowly) from a “floppy disk” – and for those who don’t know what they are – yes they’re the things that look like the Save Button in modern programs, that no one uses any more!

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Apple iCloud Drive – Where did My Files Go?

by tarambling, posted in Apple, Cloud, Drive, iCloud, iCloud Drive

Well that was interesting? I’ve always been an avid user of Cloud based storage providers. And I’ve tried most of them:

  • Dropbox – my long-time favourite
  • OneDrive – generous space with Microsoft subscriptions, but at one time didn’t play particularly nicely with Mac OS.
  • Google Drive – reasonable free quota, and if you host services with Google, their storage quotas are pretty good. And their client’s have improved over the years.
  • Mega – I tried Mega a while back – as an Australian, I was keen to try the “Antipodean Alternative”. It was fast, it was generous in the space available, but the clients, and mode of operation wasn’t quite “retail” enough for my needs.

I had been using Dropbox as my primary storage provider but, had begun to question the value of their relatively expensive subscription. So what were my alternatives?

My various Microsoft subscriptions allowed me 1 TB of OneDrive space, and although that didn’t accommodate all of my requirements, it certainly allowed me to use that for critical files. I also host some services with Google, and a relatively modest upgrade in my subscription increases the Google Drive storage quota considerably … so that’s an option.

And unashamedly my family is a very “Apple-family”, and so despite the exorbitant price, we have subscribed to “Apple-One”, which I’d almost forgotten provides a quite generous 2 TB of iCloud Drive storage shared across our family members. I’d not really looked at how much the family was using and was surprised that along with all of the many device backups, iCloud based applications etc, we still had well over 1.8 TB free.

So, my plan was to use Google Drive as my primary Cloud provider – where the entirety of my cloud repository resides, and use OneDrive and iCloud Drive to store critical files, and keep the “critical files” synced across all three. And that’s all worked pretty well to date, except there’s been a really odd idiosyncrasy about getting iCloud Drive to work as I want.

Firstly, some background on iCloud Drive. There are some key factors I came to understand both before and as I began moving a significant number of files into it. Some of them are:

  • The location of your local iCloud Drive must be in the User Home Directory – so unless you take the radical step of moving your Home Directory to an external drive, you are very much constrained by the size of your boot drive – unless someone else has other ideas – this is the information I’ve determined?
  • There’s a particular configuration of iCloud Drive, whose meaning is perhaps a little unclear, but it’s critical you understand what it means for you – Optimize Mac Storage – It will be set to On by default, which makes sense for most, but the behaviour of this setting – or in my case – misbehaviour – is of interest.
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Australian Retail Organisations using Facial Recognition

by tarambling, posted in Uncategorized

A recent report by the Australian Consumer Organisation Choice has identified that a number of Retail companies have begun using Facial Recognition software in their stores with both minimal consent notices, and unclear purpose. A link to the article is here:

https://www.choice.com.au/ Facial Recognition Article

This article has generated a lot of discussion, but two broad themes of responses have dominated over the last few days:

  1. Heightened alarm that facial recognition is being used by commercial organisations, and that so little is known about their short and long term planned use and as importantly, storage of data harvested.
  2. On the other hand, some have responded in a relatively “benign” way, with comments such as, “Well, if I haven’t been shop-lifting, what have I got to worry about?”.

I consider myself very firmly in the first camp!

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