Not only because I always have to have some Linux on my computer, but also because I often need a Linux system available for training and testing purposes, I installed Parallels Desktop for Mac on my Mac Mini yesterday. Parallels provides a virtual environment for installing other operating systems like Windows or Linux[1]. Its virtual harddisk files, its installation wizard as well as the start, stop and restart buttons on the guest OS window very much remind of VMware, but with a license fee of 79 Euro, there's quite a price difference, isn't it? It took me 3 minutes to install Parallels -- you have to love the OS X installation process -- and then I tossed in the Ubuntu 6.06 server CD to install my first guest OS. After choosing Debian Linux" in the installation wizard, Parallels suggested appropriate environment settings and I only reduced the virtual harddisk size to 3 GB[2]. Ubuntu installed flawlessly, but after restarting the virtual machine, the boot process stopped at "loading the kernel". A quick search on the "Parallels user forum unearthed that you have to install the Ubuntu 686 kernel to fix that problem. So, after booting into the Ubuntu rescue shell and issuing sudo apt-get install linux-686" (as described in this "forum entry), Ubuntu started into the login prompt as desired. I'm quite impressed how easy it is to install and maintain virtual machines on Mac OS X using Parallels. I have no doubt that I'll gladly shell over the 79 Euro after the 2-week trial period is over. fn1. Solaris, BSD and even OS/2 are supported, too. fn2. I really need an additional harddrive.

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In Mike Arrington's opinion, the new POP fetching mechanism was Google Mail's missing piece to perfection Even though I like GMail very much, I'm not quite that excited. Neither is Om from Web Worker Daily If I want to collect emails in a central Google mailbox, I can simply forward emails from other accounts to GMail. But with the central mailbox, there comes the problem of multiple email addresses: Regardless if mails came in via forwarding or via polling another account, users usually want to answer them with the email address the mails were originally directed to. GMail actually does allow sending responses with another verified sender address, but the mandatory "Sender" header Om describes ("on behalf of [@gmail.com](http://gmail.com)") confuses some email clients like MS Outlook and gets displayed to the recipient instead of the sender address chosen. So, your usage of GMail as your central mail hub is not really as transparent to the public as you'd probably like. Having access to my email everywhere I have web access (and with the Nokia E61, that's pretty much everywhere I have a cell phone connection) is really nifty. And I like Google Mail's spam filter and tagging features. But on the other hand, the service still lacks import and export functions that allow users to transfer all their archived mail to Google as well as to back up their important communication pieces. Oh, and POP doesn't get replaced more and more by IMAP for no reason -- what about offering this much more powerful mail access protocol? Integration with Google Calender could be improved, too. So, the service still has some steps to go on its road to perfection. Well, with Christmas coming and all, what's on your wish list for a perfect email solution?

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I'm totally flabbergasted: Bill Gates not only has common sense, he even shows it in public! TechCrunch reports from Gates' meeting with bloggers where he expressed his dissatisfaction with DRM technology: There are "huge problems" with DRM, he says, and "we need more flexible models, such as the ability to buy an artist out for life" (not sure what he means). He also criticized DRM schemes that try to install intelligence in each copy so that it is device specific. His short term advice: "People should just buy a cd and rip it. You are legal then." Amazing. Just amazing.

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The german company Walther produces juice beverages and publishes Walthers Saftblog ("Walther's Juice Blog"), one of the most successful business blogs in Germany. Well, it seems more appropriate to say "published", since they decided today to shut their blog down after receiving a c&d letter from the German Olympic Sports Union ("Deutscher Olympischer Sportbund", DOSB). In the 17-pages document, Walther is accused of, among others, exploitation of reputation, copyright infringement, deception and trademark infringement for publishing two harmless blog entries about the Olympic Games (entry 1&more=1&c=1&tb=1&pb=1 explaining the difference between the Olympiad and the Olympic Games, entry 2&more=1&c=1&tb=1&pb=1 about Germany's olympic successes). German attorney and law blogger Udo Vetter can't find any offences, though. (At the most a small one, namely using the olympic rings logo without attribution.) Of course, the german blogosphere reacts in the same way it did for example in the Heidi Klum incident it turns up the heat. Basic Thinking: A-hole alert Indiskretion Ehrensache: Meta Tag Olympia ("Outside of your corruption-infested umbrella organization, there's a social order named democracy") Law blog: Olympic cease and desist ("This is so weird, there could be doping in the game") Once again, the blogosphere deals out wrath to one side and love to the other: For the DOSB, this could become a PR nightmare, with many bloggers writing articles on their websites as well as emails and letters to the DOSB. The Marketing Blog even plans a survey among the organization's sponsors. On the other hand, company director Kirstin Walther expressed her amazement of all that support by strangers in an addendum to her blog entry&more=1&c=1&tb=1&pb=1#more592 where she announced the shutdown of their blog. Let's hope they give that step a second thought. We all want justice to win, not the lawyers.

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Finally, The New York Times columnist David Pogue debunks all the badmouthing of Windows Vista being just a cheap rip-off of Mac OS X: [youtube=[www.youtube.com/watch](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MDNuq94Zg_8]) (via Mac Essentials)

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"Auf dem Gleis" -- that's the title of an article about the Catalyst web framework for Perl in the german IT magazine "iX" . That title is a little side blow meaning that you don't necessarily need Ruby on Rails to efficiently get a web application with only a few lines of code. The article from Jens M. Nödler and Sebastian Willert gives the reader a quick insight into how Catalyst works. It begins with installation instructions, shows how to code database access and user interaction by means of a small example application and ends with adding the Prototype JavaScript framework to the mix to integrate AJAX functionality. So, if you're a german speaking Perl developer that's not yet using Catalyst for his web applications, have a look at iX issue January 2007.

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Choosing a content management system is getting more and more difficult, because the amount of alternatives keeps growing almost by the day. First, there are the open source solutions like Joomla, Typo3, Drupal or WebGUI. Or should it be a more "professional" (aka proprietary) software like CoreMedia or Contens? Which features offered by a certain CMS are the ones you need? And what crucial features does it lack? Already in 1998, when I had to choose a CMS for the company I was working at at that time, defining the necessary functions and comparing CMS solutions was so time-consuming that I made that task a diploma thesis for a student working at the IT department. Up to today, the expense of comparing CMS software has risen by orders of magnitude. But The CMS Matrix comes to the rescue. This website lists several hundred CMS solutions from "Ariadne Content Manager" to "Zumu Software" and facilitates the comparison of up to 10 of them at a time. The task of defining your needs is still yours, but finding the one CMS that suits them best has gotten a lot easier.

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I'm an uncurable optimist, believing in good and expecting to make a difference. People can debate endlessly if it's better to be a pessimist and not be disappointed or to be an optimist and have a happy perspective on things. For me, I'd say that optimism is the better approach -- it can even be fueled by pessimism, as I learned today. At work, many of us write short daily reports of our accomplishments and decisions. Two of my coworkers obviously dealt with the same problem, but in different ways: First, R. sent his daily: Regarding the memory leak in GNU awk: Since I as an "old naysayer" don't suppose that it can be fixed anyway, I configured some resource capping. S. later wrote in his report: I'm gonna show that "old naysayer" R. I fixed the memory leak in gawk and sent it to the GNU developers. I'd have done that anyway, but now more than ever. :P Getting things done also is an attitude.

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Other than Spiegel Online International (why doesn't the german version report it as well?), I don't care if a great part of the german population will get american or british humour. I know I do. And I also know that most of the dubbing staff doesn't. Because I don't want to have to translate a sentence back into English word by word to recover its punch line, the great news of Comedy Central making a german channel,1518,449206,00.html quickly became a disappointment. Well, at least there's the Daily Show Global Edition on CNN. And, of course, YouTube.

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If you're anything like me, your user accounts collection keeps growing week by week. All those Web 2.0 applications require a personal account with user name and password. Some let you choose the login name yourself, others generate it automatically from other information you input, e.g. your real name. Passwords make the whole thing even more complicated. But I finally found a solution that puts security in balance with ease of use. There are many websites that offer advice on choosing a good password. Some of the basic rules are: Don't take a simple word because that can be guessed by working through a dictionary. Don't use just lower case, and also put some numbers or even interpunction characters in. Don't use the same password at different places -- if one website gets compromised, so could be all your accounts. The problem is that most hard to find passwords are also hard to remember. There's a way around that problem by deriving the password from an easy to remember sentence. For example, from the initial characters in "Another two pints of Guinness, please", you get "A2poGp". But the number of easy to remember sentences is limited, too. Because I wanted to get rid of the nagging feeling I got from using the same password over and over, I decided on getting a password management software that securely stores my account collection and lets me easily retrieve them. Tom Raftery swears by Keychain as password manager But, additional to my Mac Mini, I have an IBM laptop with Linux on it, so I was searching for a cross-platform solution. <img width='250' height='277' style=float: right; border: 0px; padding-left: 5px; padding-right: 5px;" src="/uploads/keepass.png" alt="" />I found "KeePass KeePass is available for Windows, MacOS X and Linux and it stores all your login data in a securely encrypted file that you can put on an USB stick. The USB stick with the KeePass file on belongs to those items I carry around in my backpack all the time. So, if I'm at work, I can plug the thumb drive into my Linux laptop. At home, I plug it into my Mac's USB port. Since KeePass uses the same file format and encryption algorithm on all platforms, I have access to my login data everywhere, just by entering my master password at the KeePass startup screen. (That's the one password I actually have to remember although it's a really tough one.) KeePass is easy to use and has many sensible functions: Organize all records in a group hierarchy (Web, Web/Email, Web/News, Bank, Bank/CreditCards, ...) Icons for groups and records Suggest a new password (length and character set definable) Display how secure the chosen password is Enter additional information like a comment or an account expiration date And, keeping the best for last: KeePass is free software. So, what's your lame excuse for still using your girlfriend's name as your single password? ;-)

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