Trying out VirtualBox 2

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VirtualBox 2 is out. VirtualBox is Sun Microsystems’ entry into the Virtual Machine market, and competes against Parallels and VMWare. Unlike the others, it is free and comes in an open source flavour.

Since I have been using Parallels for some time, and VirtualBox is free, I thought I’d give it a spin on my MacBook, using Mac OS X as the host operating system. Parallels is excellent for running Windows Vista (and presumably XP), but its Linux support has been a little lacklustre and the past 2 releases have not supported Ubuntu 8.04 despite being released after Ubuntu has been released.

For version 2, quite a bit of work has gone on to make VirtualBox fit into OS X better, and it shows – though it still feels like a port, it looks very much look a native Mac application and it’s very easy to get going. Since I only have 1 Windows Vista license and I’m already running it in Parallels, I decided to try it with Ubuntu 8.04.

And it seems to work well. Plus, VirtualBox’s ‘Guest Additions’, software for the guest OS which enhances support, work for Ubuntu 8.04 – unlike Parallels Tools which only work for older Ubuntu releases. They also go further; not only do you get dynamic screen sizing (the display area adjusts depending on the virtual machine’s window size), seamless mouse pointer integration and time synchronisation – there’s also clipboard synchronisation and an attempt at desktop integration, which resembles Coherence mode in Parallels, but it works under Linux as well as Windows. However, it’s a bit buggy and I had some rendering issues while trying to use it.

Other down points? There’s no importing from other disk formats – so if you already have virtual machine set up in Parallels you can’t use it straight-away in VirtualBox (although if you can find a tool that converts the disk to the VMDK format you may have some luck). And PowerPC Mac owners are out of luck as VirtualBox is Intel-only, although running an Intel VM on a PowerPC machine would be very slow anyway.

That all being said, VirtualBox is a strong contender, and you can’t argue with free. For many, this will do everything that they demand from its commercial rivals, without costing a penny.

Knock-off Nigel

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When you watch a British DVD, usually before the film starts, you’ll have to watch this:

But now on TV, we have this:

The message it’s trying to spread is that people who download films or buy counterfeit DVDs are sad, corner-cutting lowlifers – no ‘cool’ person would want to be like Nigel. While I like the less confrontational stance, I somehow doubt the effectiveness of the new ads.

Of course, the best one is the parody by the IT crowd:

More on the upgrade

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As promised, here is more about the upgrade I did to my parents’ computer last weekend.

The computer will be 4 years old in October and I wanted to sort out its current shortcomings while also making it capable of running for at least another 2-3 years. The agreed budget was £100, about 6 times less than the original cost of the computer.

In the end, we went for the following internal components:

  • 2 GB of Corsair Value Select PC3200 RAM
  • 256MB XFX nVidia GeForce 6200A AGP 4x/8x graphics card
  • A no-brand USB and FireWire PCI card

The memory was the most important part of the upgrade. Originally, the machine only had 512 MB of RAM, and as such was struggling. As a matter of principle I only buy Corsair or Crucial RAM as I know it’s good quality, and on this instance I went for Corsair as it was slightly cheaper and could be shipped as part of the same order from Scan. It was still the most costly aspect of the upgrade at £39.32 (ex VAT), taking the majority of the £100 budget.

Next was the graphics card. Right now the machine has onboard VIA graphics, which can do some basic 3D but not much more (it will just about handle the original World of Warcraft with all of the effects turned off, but it’s not pretty), and it leeches system RAM rather than having its own. Furthermore, the manufacturer has not produced any new drivers for Windows Vista. So, as part of my plan to keep the machine running for a few years, allowing for a potential Vista upgrade is important. I doubt nVidia are due to disappear any time soon, so hopefully this new card will be a safe bet. It also adds DVI and S-Video output, allowing connection to a TV or a more modern TFT screen.

Finally, I added a USB and FireWire PCI card. The machine had 2 USB ports at the front and 2 at the back, but both of those at the back were full and my parents were already having to use a hub. The machine is due to be moved to a room where there is no wired socket for Ethernet, so we’ve opted to go for a USB wireless dongle (the Netgear WG111 previously mentioned), so that would be another USB port used up. As an extra PCI card was only around £5, it made sense to add 4 more ports. It also adds 2 FireWire 400 (IEEE 1394a) ports, which the computer previously lacked; whether my parents will ever use them is perhaps questionable but at least they are there, and it may add resale value to the machine.

These 3 items, plus the Netgear dongle, packing and VAT, came to £100.19, so only a bit over budget 🙂 . The difference is very noticeable – startup times are improved and general performance is much better. The machine is now almost ready for Windows Vista – the only device lacking a Vista-compatible driver is the internal modem, which isn’t in use anyway and could be removed if necessary (it’s made by SmartLink who sold their assets to Connexant in 2006, and then disappeared off the face of the earth. Their latest drivers don’t even work correctly with Windows XP SP2).

Stop… upgrade time!

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My parents’ computer is in need of a mid-life upgrade. It was bought in October 2004 and, at the time, gave acceptable performance. But now it’s flagging a bit, in comparison to the latest and greatest. To save you reading the old entry, here’s the specs:

  • AMD Athlon XP 3000+
  • 512 MB RAM
  • 80 GB HD
  • DVD rewriter
  • 64MB onboard graphics
  • Plus all of the usual stuff

Three-and-a-half years on, and it looks like the main weak points are the memory and graphics. The processor is reasonably good, and I’m not inclined to replace it as the prospect quite frankly scares me, and they still have ample space on the hard drive.

512 MB RAM is low by today’s standards, and so I’m proposing an upgrade to 2 GB – the maximum the machine will hold. Upgrading the RAM on Hari’s machine, which is of a similar specification and age, made a big difference and so this would be my first choice.

The graphics are the other aspect I want to upgrade. Right now it’s a VIA onboard job, which as well as being underpowered also lacks Windows Vista drivers, so if my parents do ever upgrade (unlikely, but I wouldn’t rule it out) they would potentially run into problems. The machine does have an unused AGP port, and so a cheap graphics card would be an instant upgrade. It would also return those 64 MB of RAM that it used to the computer, although 64 MB is a drop in the ocean when you have 2 GB.

We still have Hari’s old graphics card lying around (in a static-proof sleeve), which is based on the nVidia GeForce 5200 FX chipset. This was okay for normal use on her computer but seriously impacted her WoW gaming. Now, my parents are hardly likely to be fragging noobs or levelling shadow priests any time soon, but a better card can be bought for very little money. In fact, £25 would buy you something based around the full nVidia GeForce 6200 chipset (as opposed to the budget FX range). So it’s a question of saving £25 and recycling the old card, or getting something better for a little more money.

The computer also needs equipping for Wifi, probably by virtue of a USB dongle, but at less than £10 a piece that’s not a major issue. The total budget for all of this is £100, with the RAM costing about £50 (looking at Crucial and Corsair prices). There’s ample room for a reasonable graphics card, but I’m wondering whether to bother or not.

What do you think?

Films that I own on DVD and haven’t yet watched

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Here’s a list of films that I’ve bought on DVD, but, so far, I haven’t actually watched:

  • Shrek 3
  • Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
  • Hellboy
  • Nacho Libre
  • Family Guy presents Blue Harvest

Of those, I haven’t even seen 3 of them at the cinema/on TV.

This is mostly a mental note to make sure that next time there’s nothing good on TV, I get around to actually watching these films – after all, I’ve paid money for them.

Been away, going away…

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I’ve been away from this blog for some time – 2 weeks almost – which is mostly due to being busy at work and having very little free time at home. I’ve been playing World of Warcraft a bit more than usual lately, but now have a second level 70 character as a result.

So what’s happened over the past 2 weeks? Well, based on my recent Twitters, here’s what I’ve been up to:

  • Been testing out Firefox 3 RC1 and Thunderbird 3 Alpha 1. Firefox 3 is looking really good now, especially on Macs where the improved performance and native theme make it even more of a joy to use. Thunderbird is obviously an early alpha build but it too is much faster, as it inherits many of the optimisations that were undertaken for Firefox. Unfortunately, it’s not yet very stable, but it is at least usable.
  • Now that I have more than a smidgen of free space on my MacBook, I installed Ubuntu Hardy Heron in Parallels. Unfortunately, despite updating to the latest Parallels release, the Parallels Tools for Linux package doesn’t work with this release of Ubuntu so there’s no adaptive window sizes, cursor integration and clock synchronising. It’s a shame as apparently VMWare Fusion does support the latest Ubuntu release. I haven’t played around with Ubuntu much but it looks good, and including Firefox 3 is a bold but welcome move.
  • Speaking of Twitter, I would recommend the TwitterFox extension if you use Twitter and Firefox, as it’s quite a handy little extension which lets you read and interact with your Twitter friends. It doesn’t have masses of features, but it’s intuitive and it works with Firefox 3 already.
  • Google Reader’s ‘Trends’ feature has an unexpected use as a way of digging out feeds which haven’t updated in a long time. I found one that had gone dead in October 2005 that I was still subscribing to. I also found a few sites which had changed their feed URLs without redirects so I wasn’t receiving updates any more.

This, unfortunately, isn’t the return to regularly scheduled blogging, as on Saturday I’m going away for five nights in camping barn in the Lake District with some friends. It’s really in the back-end of nowhere – it doesn’t even have a connection to the electricity grid so all power comes from a hydro-electric generator, and it’s highly unlikely that there will be any mobile phone reception there either. So until I return on Thursday, you may not hear a peep from me, either on here or on Twitter.

Firefox, Performance, and You

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I’ve been blogging quite a bit about the beta versions of Firefox 3, which can be downloaded here, and how much better it is than Firefox 2. If anything, I’m as excited about this version as I was when version 1 came out, as it feels like the browser I have been using for 5 years has now grown up and many of the issues it has had in the past have been ironed out.

In this entry, I am going to go through the various changes that have been made in Firefox which improve the performance of the browser – the startup times, the time it takes to render web pages, and the general responsiveness of the program. Improving performance has been a major focus of the Firefox developers for this release, and the changes are notable.

Memory usage

Do a search for ‘firefox bloated‘ and you’ll get over 500 000 results, many of which complaining that Firefox is big and slow. Many put this down to the amount of memory it uses, which, in Firefox 2, appears to be more than its main competitors – Opera, Internet Explorer and Safari. (Note that, unless you’re using Windows Vista, it is difficult to measure memory usage of individual programs on Windows successfully)

For Firefox 3, reduces Firefox’s ‘memory footprint’ (the amount of memory it needs to run) was one of the main priorities. Improvements have been made both in reducing ‘memory leaks‘ – memory taken by Firefox that isn’t released back to the operating system when it is no longer needed – and memory fragmentation, which means that the memory it does have allocated is used more efficiently. The culmination of this is that, on Windows, Firefox 3 uses less memory while running than any other current web browser. It also released more memory back to the operating system after a period of inactivity, meaning that it’s no longer needed to close and restart the browser because it’s eaten half of your RAM.

How does this improve performance? If you have 16 GB of RAM, then, not much really. But if like most computers your machine has just enough RAM to perform, then it means more of Firefox can fit into RAM and less of it has to use ‘virtual memory’ – essentially a big file on your hard disk which acts as an overflow when all of your RAM is used up, but that is much slower than RAM. It will also allow more space for other programs in RAM, so you’ll be able to run more programs at the same time as your web browser.

Code optimisation

Several parts of Firefox have been re-written to fix bugs and simplify code, and in some cases, improve performance. There have been performance improvements in:

  • Page rendering – a marked performance increase that also means that Firefox 3 will pass the Acid2 test
  • Image drawing – a bug fix sorted out problems with image caching and a new JPEG decoding routine also means that images will render faster

Mac-specific improvements

Firefox 3 finally moves away from the really old QuickDraw API to the newer Cocoa API. As well as giving nicer widgets (scrollbars, buttons etc) on web pages, this also means the whole program should feel more snappy. This, combined with the new theme, means that Firefox 3 is the most Mac-friendly version to date.

Profile guided optimisation

Firefox is now, essentially, compiled twice – the first compile runs as usual, and then the compiler runs a series of tests which optimises the code by looking at what parts of the browser will be most used in a working environment. This has lead to performance improvements of at least 10%.

Because we’re now approaching the ‘release candidate’ stage, ahead of a final release probably some time in June, most of the performance changes have now been made, so if you want to see if it is an improvement for you, now is as good a time as any to try; any further changes will be to fix any major bugs and stability issues. All in all, the massive strides made in performance make Firefox a much bigger competitor in the web browser arena and may win back some of its earlier detractors.

Fixing a broken iPod

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I was going to make one of two posts today:

  1. How I fixed my broken iPod
  2. What iPod to buy in place of my broken iPod

Thankfully, this post is the first one.

I have an iPod Mini, bought in August 2004, which has hit a spot of bother. Well, okay, I dropped it, and afterwards it kept crashing or giving me the dreaded ‘unhappy iPod’ screen (which is like the Blue Screen of Death for iPods) when playing music, especially when skipping tracks. So here’s how I fixed it:

  1. Because my iPod was formatted in Windows (a conscious choice, see rant below), I plugged it into Hari’s computer and ran ScanDisk, and opted to do a full surface scan to fix any bad sectors.
  2. Next, I opened iTunes on the Windows PC and did a restore on the iPod, wiping the existing firmware and files and replacing it with the most recent firmware.
  3. Then, I reloaded my music.

And now it works fine. Quite what went wrong originally, I am unsure. However, by running ScanDisk it may have marked any damaged parts of the disk as bad. If I had more money, I would have bought a copy of SpinRite which is apparently very good at getting hard disks back into working order (or at least letting you know that your disk is fubar‘d).

I may still consider buying a new iPod eventually but I’m torn between which model to buy, so that blog post may still come. At least now it’s not so much of a priority as my current iPod now seems to work fine.

And now for my rant about iPod formatting. If you format your iPod on Windows, it will be formatted with the FAT32 file system, readable by Windows and OS X (and pretty much every other modern operating system). Format it on OS X, however, and it’ll be formatted with the HFS+ file system which only OS X can read. Since Apple now ships Boot Camp with Macs and has been promoting the ability to run Windows if needed, why not let Mac users change the file system used when formatting? If needed it can be some option hidden away in an obscure corner of iTunes where your average Joe User who has no idea what FAT32 or HFS+ are can safely ignore it. But it would be nice to have the option, rather than having to use a Windows computer.

Leaping to the Coast

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I’m making sure I post something here today, since I can only do it once every 4 years. No marriage proposals yet, though.

I’m off to spend a weekend at the seaside in the vicinity of Scarborough, which will be nice provided that the weather is better than the wind and rain we have in Bradford right now.

Mildly interesting things that I have learned about recently

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  1. There is a phobia of bridges, known as Gephyrophobia – and there’s a New York Times article about it, via Kottke.
  2. The platforms at St Pancras International Thameslink railway station are labelled ‘A’ and ‘B’, to avoid confusion with the main national and international platforms. This was also used at the recently-closed King’s Cross Thameslink station (which St. Pancras replaced) and at Waterloo East station.
  3. Though all Mac Pros now come with two quad-core Intel processors as standard, you can opt to have just the one processor, saving around £320 (to a total of £1442.99). You can also spend over £17 000 if you want every build option, unlimited server license and all the professional software packages bundled with it.
  4. In the past year, thieves have stolen at least two bridges in Russia for scrap metal.
  5. ‘Akbar’ is Arabic for ‘great’ or ‘greatest’. I’d be tempted to post a picture of Admiral Ackbar from Star Wars and say it is a trap, but I’ll refrain.
  6. Frederick Lorz, an American athlete, cheated in the marathon in the 1904 Summer Olympics by travelling by car for 11 miles. He was first across the finishing line but another athlete, Thomas J Hicks was declared the winner, despite him too cheating as he had run the race under the influence of drugs and alcohol.
  7. In China, ‘Dan’ is a girl’s name.
  8. VLC can use many Winamp skins – see this guide.
  9. ‘Blighty’, a slang word for ‘Great Britain’, derives from the Hindustani Urdu word ‘vilāyatī’, which variously means ‘foreign’ or ‘homeland’. It originates from the days of the British Empire when Britain controlled India.
  10. Inner Mongolia is a region in northern China, ‘Outer Mongolia’ roughly corresponds with the independent nation of Mongolia.