two monitors, two operating systems!

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.

Redundant folders on Gmail/Googlemail – any ideas?

First a couple of screengrabs to show what I am ranting about below

Suddenly all my Google Apps email accounts have started showing additional (and largely redundant) labels (folders on my IMAP), and I have no idea why. I am guessing its because they call Gmail Googlemail in the UK, but then they could just have changed the existing root folder name from Gmail to Googlemail rather than creating an extra root folder called Googlemail under which I see a set of labels (which obviously become folders on IMAP) that are basically redundant – like Sent Mail, Drafts, Spam etc. These labels are redundant because the default labels/folders for sent mails is still set to be [Gmail]/Sent Mail and default for draft emails set to be [Gmail]/Drafts and so on. So these [Google Mail]/Sent Mail, [Google Mail]/Drafts and so on are redundant and annoying really, especially on my Apple Mail. I have of course tried to delete these labels, they can be deleted but they appear again few minutes after, I guess automatically created by the system! The only solution now is to make them ‘hidden’ on IMAP but only the labels/folders are hidden but the root folder [Google Mail] still shows up in Apple Mail’s list of IMAP folders…

myBlogEdit

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!

extending screen real estate on mac os

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.

Blogging from ipod touch

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 !!!