Black Diamond Spot User Guide (manual)

I’m swearing off Wirecutter. Again.

It’s not that their recommendations are awful, they’re just kind of inexpert. They don’t actually use the products they recommend, they just test them.

Like the Black Diamond Spot headlamp. I needed something for an upcoming trip and it wasn’t mission critical, so I used the Wirecutter recommendations. The Spot actually works ok, and seems well made, but it’s ridiculously complex. The Spot is what happens when you give bored Chinese engineers some chip space.

Serious climbing headlamps have maybe two settings — basic and high. This has at least 6 settings based on combinations of switch press, hold and side tap. My brain looked at the directions and shut down.

And those directions — they go on for pages and pages in many languages, but the core is a small series of pictures. Sure to be lost, essential to reference, and not available online.

So here’s my scan of the part of the Black Diamond Spot User Guide that matters

You’re welcome.

Here are all the friggin modes (I put them in a note on my phone). Die Wirecutter, Die.

TOP BUTTON modes

Not Powered On (why it needs a lock mode)
- press and release 1x: turn last active light on
- press and release 2x: toggle between spot and wide angle light
- press and release 3x: strobe
- press and hold 2s: red light on
- press and hold 3s: always turns on spot light
- press and hold 4s: toggle lock mode (small blue light blinks for a few seconds in lock mode)

Powered On
- press and hold: goes to bright then dims as hold
- 3x: strobe

TAP RIGHT SIDE
(light tap when powered on)
- activate BOTH spot and wide angle

Notes on converting a MacBook Core 2 Duo dual USB to Lion

Our vintage 2006 MacBook Core 2 Duo can, in theory, run Lion [1]. I just upgraded it from Snow Leopard, which it ran reasonably well albeit with lots of fan activity.

I didn't upgrade happily. There's a reason I've waited this long. I wanted to stay with Snow Leopard, but Apple's MobileMe migration was going to cause problem for Emily's Address Book/iPhone Contact sync. Yes, that was the primary reason. Sad.

I upgraded all the apps we use, said farewell to AppleWorks and many games the kids no longer use, removed all PreferencePanes and extensions, unplugged all cables, did a safeboot cleanup and two completely independent backups (one a clone). Then I upgraded.

It seemed to go well enough once Spotlight rebuilt its indices and I refreshed everyone's account. it does take a very long time to log out; Lion is saving a lot of state information and the MacBook doesn't like that.

It went well enough, that is, until my old account. Then things got slow. Even though I'd updated VMWare Fusion to the final "Lion Compatible" 3.x version, I suspected it was the problem. I tried running my VM -- that was a disaster. After power down and a safe boot I uninstalled VMWare 3 per directions.

That helped a great deal. In fact, the laptop is quieter than it used to be. I suspect Fusion has been causing problems for a while [3].

So will I try Fusion 4?

No, not on this old machine. I really don't use my VM's very often, and neither Parallels nor Fusion are sold through the App Store. To do their magic without Apple's help they must be hacking the underlying OS; and OS X is increasingly hard to safely hack.

For now the MacBook seems to have survived Lion - albeit at the cost of a little used VM I'm probably better off without and a dozen or so older games -- and AppleWorks.

So far, better than it could have been. I am, however, regretting obeying Lion's command to update my Airport firmware [2]. 

[1] That's almost six years ago! I'd forgotten how old it really was. Maybe I shouldn't be too upset it can't run Mountain Lion. [2] Lion really wanted me to undo my Time Capsule firmware regression, so I did. Now I'm seeing more problems with losing connectivity, i saw a -1 error again, and I'm again having to rebuild Spotlight indices of the backups. I have a strong feeling I'll be reverting again. I seem to be the only one with this problem though. [3] My best Fusion experience was version 2 with a Windows 2000 VM -- on that old MacBook probably with Leopard (10.5). It's never worked as well since. 

Update 6/17/2012: Logging out and user switching is much slower. It takes about 20-30 seconds to log out and 15-20 to switch. I think it's because of all the context saving Lion does; this old machine can't handle it. There are ways to disable saving of application states, but I'm going to wait a while on this one. Otherwise things aren't too bad. The machine is quieter than it has been for years, the fan no longer roars. I suspect that's due to uninstalling Fusion 3.x, but it could be a Lion improvement.

Update 6/17/2012: I went through each user account and turned off 'save and restore windows' in system preferences. Then I logged out and unchecked the restore windows on login option shown there. No logout and login is back to Snow Leopard times. Now I have to figure out what to do about #$@$ Google Software Update. it keeps popping up in managed accounts that don't have privileges to run it.

Shrinking a pre-allocated Mac VMWare Fusion virtual machine image

My "pre-allocated" VMWare image was taking up 120 GB on my drive for about 40GB of data. I found many references on how to shrink these images (.vmdsk), but they were largely obsolete and misleading. It takes a while, and the steps are weird, but it's fully supported by VMWare 3.

At a high level, here are the steps. Alas, I'm short of time so no details.

1. Close down the guest OS.
2. Using VMWare settings for 'hard drive' you can change the image from pre-allocated to the default. This takes hours but it works.
3. Open the guest OS and run XP defrag.
4. In the guest OS update VMWare tools.
5. In the guest OS Run VMWare tools "shrink". Takes hours.
6. In the guest OS Defrag again as a nice-to-do.
7. Shut down and restart to make it all nice and clean.

My image now consumes about 45 GB of drive space. It's not pre-allocated, so it will get host OS fragmented as it grows but I can live with that.

Retrospect Professional 8 backup of VMware VM corrupt on restore

I've been using Retrospect Professional 8 to backup a Windows 7 machine. That machine has VMware VM running.

There have been no backup errors.

Recently I had to do a restore of the VM. All seemed fine. The size was right. When I ran it, however, the VM was corrupt.

The VM is made up of many large files. I think Retrospect backed some up at different times, depending on metadata changes, file locked, etc. Normally that would be fine, but they all had to be the same version for the VM to work.

Fortunately I had a completely separate manual all-at-once backup done when VMWare was turned off. It was a few days old, but we didn't lose anything significant. Sometimes paranoia is a good strategy.

A cautionary tale! Virtual machine backup is tricky.

Access denied: VMWare Shared Folders on Windows 7

Between Dell machines shipping with motherboard disconnected SATA cables, a Clampi Trojan on my Windows 2003 server, a mysteriously vanished backup [1], Windows 2003 blue screening on a new Dell workstation, a failed Acronis disk image and the horror of 64 bit Windows 7 it's been another fun week in tech.

Today was a bit better. I installed VMWare Player on a 64bit Windows machine and created a 32 bit Windows 2003 VM - giving it all four cores and 3GB of memory. After VMWare tools installed and I enabled hardware graphics acceleration it felt faster than on the prior 3 yo workstation lost to the wretched corporate refresh cycle.

Mostly easy, until I dealt with the second drive in the box. Even after I used shared folders to map to drive E:, and the ancient DOS subst command to assign a drive letter to the shared folder, I still couldn't write to the new shared folder. I could read, but I couldn't delete anything. If I tried, I got an "access denied" message.

Worse, it seemed I could write to the drive, but the data wasn't there. VMWare showed files as having been copied, but in Win 7 they weren't there. On restart the VM didn't see them either.

The fix was to right click the drive letter in Windows 7, choose properties then security, and allow "EVERYONE" full control of the E: Drive. Then Windows 2003 in the VM could read and write.

I suspect there's a less severe fix. After I left work it occurred to me that I should study the read/write permissions on the C: drive. I suspect the vmware_user (__vmware_user__) group has special privileges on that drive, I just need to study them and replicate them for the E: and F: drives.

I'll update this post with what I find.

PS. It's unnerving that my Google searches really didn't turn up anything useful on this topic!

[1] Retrospect Pro backup on external drive. It vanished! Dir *.* and Attrib *.* showed nothing with 325 GB used. Retrospect could find the files though -- it restored from the backup drive.

--
My Google Reader Shared items (feed)

Experiment with VMWare -- for free

I have sinned, but I have seen the light.

Now that I've joined the Church of the disposable image, I need to catch up on some basics. I've been using Fusion and Parallels w/ Windows 2000 on OS X, but the Windows VM world is new to me. So I'll have a few posts on that topic.

Since I've committed to Fusion on the Mac I'm experimenting with VMWare. Their primary end user product is VMWare Workstation, which is inexpensive for academics. This appears to be similar to Fusion on OS X. There's a generous 1 month free trial.

The surprise, however, is that you don't actually need to pay any money at all to do quite a bit with VMs. Both VMWare Converter and VMWare Player are free. VMWare Converter (Windows) will convert an existing machine, such as an XP machine, to the VM format and VMWare Player will execute these images. [Update: OK, not quite! See below.]

This isn't something VMWare markets. VMWare's web site doesn't list VMWare Converter as a possible source for VMWare Player images and even the VMWare Player wikipedia article doesn't mention this.

VMPlayer (Windows) will run their "appliances". -- and more besides ...

... Open Microsoft virtual machines, Symantec Backup Exec System Recovery (formerly called Live State Recovery) images, Norton Ghost 10 images, Norton Save & Restore images, StorageCraft ShadowProtect images, and Acronis True Image images. In this process, the initial virtual machine or image is left untouched in its native format and any modifications are saved in a much smaller VMware-formatted file that is linked to the initial image...

So you can turn your existing Windows environment into a VM and play with it - for free. I think you can also run a VMWare 6.5.2 VM on Fusion but I'm not sure of that.

There are a few VMWare Player limitations, it doesn't enter full screen on startup unless you tweak a setting and it's essentially undocumented. I've also run into device driver issues, I can't see how to install the VMWare tools for example. It's really a bit of a toy but it's free. There's an upgrade mechanism to VMWare Workstation

If you want to download the Win 7 RC .iso file and turn it into a VM without installing it I think you'll need VMWare Workstation -- though if you have VMWare Fusion maybe you could prep it on the Mac then move it to VMWare Player.

VMware Converter comes with lots of documentation. Cough. Actually, it appears to be about as undocumented as VMWare Player. Must be a corporate policy.

I think there are two ways to run Converter - standalone and client server. I did the standalone conversion. I installed it on a machine and directed it to send the resulting image to a network share.

I clicked "convert machine" and followed the defaults. The one place to pay attention is where you're asked to select the target VMWare product. The default is some corporate product, you need to change to "VMWare Workstation 6.5.x".

A reasonably big VM takes rather a while to convert - overnight is typical.

More later...

Update: Ok, now I see the catch. Unless you install VMWare Tools you can sort of use the VMWare Convert image, but you can't go full screen, toggle out of it, some drivers don't work, etc. You can get VMWare Tools from VMWare Workstation, but there's probably a reason VMWare doesn't bundle them with Player. I say "probably" because I think VMWare is rather vague about the whole think. In any case I'll be using Workstation for my further experiments. (You might be able to install VMWare tools via Fusion. I think this is actually legal, since the point of VMWare Player is that it lets you use completed images and if you have a license to Fusion you can can complete them there.)

Update 1/21/2010: I experimented for a while, but I found VMWare on XP much less consumer-friendly than VMWare on OS X. In retrospect that's not too surprising. VMWare/Win is a corporate product, VMWare Fusion (OS X) is a consumer/geek product.

VMware academic discounts: Fusion and Windows Workstation

Post-Waterloo I'm a VM geek.

So, as a part-time faculty person at the U of MN I was pleased to see that VMware has large academic discounts.

VMWare Workstation is $114 academic ($190 list), Fusion (Mac - I use this) is $40 academic ($80 list).

Why I'm downloading Windows 7 RC tonight ...

It works on VMWare -- and it's free ...

VMware: Team Fusion: Windows 7 on Mac with VMware Fusion: A Practical Guide Revisited

... More important, I am excited that the Windows 7 Release Candidate is the easiest way for you to try out Windows on your Mac for FREE (at least until the beta expires). That’s right, you can download Windows 7 Release Candidate through July 1^st and it’s free to use until it expires on June 1, 2010...

The VMWare post has more details, but basically the RC works fine with some trivial and standard configuration options.

A very nice surprise for me. I've been tracking Windows 7 from a distance, but primarily as my way to avoid Vista (Windows 7 is Vista 2.0 of course, but I'm good with that). In the meantime I've had Parallels 1.x and Windows 2000 (!) running on my MacBook for about 2 years (man, does Win2K ever boot fast on that machine.) This setup worked for the handful of times I've needed it, and the two take up very little CPU or disk space. Windows 2000, of course, is essentially immune to modern viruses.

That's a good setup and it cost me nothing but Parallels 1.x since I have several unused Win2K licenses. It probably won't work on 10.6 though, and I'm about due for a new iMac.

So I'll put my unused VMWare license on the new machine, install Windows 7 RC, and be good for a year or so. Then I can decide if I want to buy Win 7 or regress to Win2K ...

(I wonder if I need to get more than one copy of Win 7 RC, in case I put it on two Macs ...)

5/26/09: Updated to remove a stupid mistake where I confused 2009 with 2010. The RC1 download is good for one year. That's just fine.

Why you want XP, not Vista, for use with an OS X VM

Great series of tests by MacTech, excerpted by Apple Insider:

AppleInsider | Shootout: Parallels outperforms VMware Fusion in many tests

... 3D and HD Graphics Tests

XP: Smoothly played both 720p and 1080p videos in both environments.
Vista: Couldn't play 720p at all in Parallels. VMware Fusion stuttered on every machine except the Mac Pro. Given 720p results, MacTech didn't bother trying 1080p...

Yikes! Rules out Vista for me. You really want XP inside these VMs.

Parallels was significantly (20% range) faster than Fusion, but for me speed is less critical than reliability and stability. They didn't seem to test that.

VMWare Converter - turn your XP box into a VM platform

I love the competition between Parallels and VMWare. I very much hope they both thrive ...

MacInTouch: timely news and tips about Apple Macintosh, iTunes, iPhone and more...

... Along with last week's release of Fusion 2.0.2, VMware has released VMware Converter 4.0, a free standalone program that can create a VMware virtual machine from a physical Linux or Windows machine and can convert VMware virtual machines between platforms. This release brings support for converting new third-party image formats, including Parallels Desktop virtual machines, newer versions of Symantec, Acronis, and StorageCraft. Registration is required for free download...

My old XP box may be failing -- possibly due to a CPU fan issue (which would be fixable if I cared enough [1]). Time for me to move all the data off to the iMac server and then make a VM from what remains. Then, if the machine really does fail, migration to a new iMac or even the "legacy" plastic MacBook (by far Apple's best value) would be only a few hours work.

[1] It takes up a lot of space and power and it can't run most of the apps (OS X) I prefer. I'm not ready to throw it out, but I wouldn't mind replacing it with an OS X machine.

iPhone Google Mobile App changes - more than voice

The headlines are all about server-based voice search: Now you can speak to Google Mobile App on your iPhone.

So far the voice search seems more novel than interesting. Voice software doesn't like my voice (hey, it sounds clear to me!), and Google is no exception. It would be much more useful if:

1. Voice search preferences were distinct from text search preferences. Then I could limit voice search to contacts
2. Contact voice search ran against my Gmail Contacts, not my iPhone Contacts. The latter set is much larger.
   

There's a several second lag between when you change settings in Google Mobile Apps (GMA) and when the changes propagate to google servers. This is confusing if you don't know about it.

On the bright side, search results are now optimized for the iPhone, including images and news, and you can set search with keyboard showing as your start screen. Terrific launch time too! (Tap the top of screen to dismiss the keyboard -- that's not obvious and if you don't know about it it looks like you're locked out of the app!)

You can now add a Google Apps set that's distinct from your Gmail identity - one domain only (see settings).

So now I can view my Gmail calendar and my family domain Calendar, but when you view from this URL you can't edit calendar settings. It's read only. So I still need to use the top-secret Google Apps only editable calendar URL.

There are a LOT of changes to Google Mobile Apps. Since they're a neat fusion of iPhone resident app and web app it's a bit hard to tell what's changed where, but overall it's a great set of improvements. I particularly like the ability to work with both a Google Apps domain and a Gmail identity.

So even if the voice stuff doesn't do much for me, the rest is very good. Now if Apple would release it's beringed fingers and give Google access to the calendar API...

Update 2/20/09: The voice search turned out to be just a toy, but the rest worked well.

The Personal and the Apps Calendar

Does our family really need an OS X spreadsheet?

We don't have a spreadsheet for our OS X machines. Sure, I could install Microsoft Office, but I'm not all that fond of Excel - and it's overkill for most of our family. Besides, it includes Word which I despise, and PowerPoint which I prefer to forget.

Running office is why I have VMWare Fusion -- I'd rather keep it off our Macs.

That leaves Google Spreadsheets, which we use extensively. That works for most things, but, for some odd reason unconnected to echoes of 1929, Emily wanted a way to review our investments. We're not quite ready to expose them to Google (which was recently found guilty of an astoundingly bone-headed security screw-up).

The data lived in a spreadsheet in our old XP box [1], so at first I thought it was time to get a Mac spreadsheet. There are a few options in addition to Excel ...

Pure Mac: Spreadsheets - Software for Macintosh

AppleWorks
Excel
icExcel
Mariner Calc
Mesa
NeoOffice
Numbers
OpenOffice
Papyrus
Ragtime
Tables

I don't have the time to mess with anything but very reliable products, so based on my personal experience that ruled out most of the open source options. We already have AppleWorks (works on 10.5), but the fonts look ugly with 10.5 and it is pretty darned old.

That left Mariner Calc, Numbers, and maybe Tables. Of these I'd probably opt for either Numbers (get Pages and Keynote for free) or Mariner Calc (simplest, fastest, most tested, great vendor). If they save as .xls I could still use Excel from the XP box for editing of the iMac served file.

Still, it's a lot of bother to buy and install a desktop app given that we use Google Spreadsheets so much and that we so rarely need one.

That's when I remembered FileMaker Pro - version 8 (!). Yes, old version. Still works on 10.5, though if you don't have web sharing disabled the first startup is very long. I have it on my XP machine and our Macs, so it's cross-platform. It's easy to create a mini-app with running totals, filters, search, links to our FileMaker password file, security, simplified menus, etc.

I don't have to do it all at once, the beauty of FileMaker is I can import the spreadsheet, make a few tweaks, and evolve from there. Bento can probably do something simpler in a similar way.

Between FileMaker Pro (Bento?) and Google Spreadsheet we might be able to go a very long time without a true OS X spreadsheet. In the unlikely event that my daughters early enthusiasm for math persists, we might end up with Mathematica or MathCad rather than Excel ...

[1] I used Quicken 2.0 -- and almost every Windows version since - as well as 4 years on Mac Classic versions. Somewhere between 1997 and 2005 Intuit's quality hit rock bottom. I still use Quicken and the quality may be improved now, but really I don't have time for it anymore. Intuit killed my enthusiasm some years ago.

It was never all that friendly for anyone but a regular user anyway. We make do with the simplest possible approach -- we have too much complexity everywhere else.

Permissions bug in OS X 10.5 - unable to update applications

I hate OS X permissions problems.

There were enough of them before Apple introduced ACLs in 10.4 alongside UNIX permissions. The dual parallel systems hasn't made things any easier.

Evil apps, like just about anything that Adobe makes or anything that uses a VISE installer, are prone to wreck permissions. Rumor has it that using "apply to enclosed items" changes to the Application and Utilities folders can have unexpected consequences.

To add injury to insult, running "Repair Permissions" from the OS X disk utility app never seems to fix anything. (I think that's a Potemkin application).

So, I had a permissions problem. Again.
Since upgrading to 10.5, when I try to update applications by dropping new versions into my (all user) Applications folder I get this message -- despite entering my admin credentials on request: "The operation cannot be completed because you do not have sufficient privileges for some of the items."

The target application will be partly removed at this point. I have to delete it (no problems) and then drop the new one on.

A minor annoyance, but aggravating.

I figured I'd have to fix it sooner or later, but today my daughter complained that her evil Flash using kid sites were crashing. Time to update Adobe's little OS X virus, aka Flash. Except I was getting Access denied errors from the evil VISE (of course) installer. I'd already tried repairing permissions, so I knew I had to do more.

Others had run into the same problem: Apple - Support - Discussions - The operation cannot be completed - you .... VK (level 4!) advised (modified slightly here):

... sounds like you have incorrect permissions and ACLs on your Applications folder.

Run the following terminal commands from an admin account ... copy and paste the commands into a terminal window.

sudo chown -R root:admin /Applications
(This will reset the ownership on /Applications to system defaults.)

You'll have to enter your admin password when its requested. You won't see anything when you enter it. These tasks can take a few minutes to complete, so just wait -- there's no progress dialog. Depending how long execution takes you may need to reenter your password. Wait for the prompt to return before entering commands.

next

sudo chmod -R g+w,+X /Applications
(this should set unix permissions correctly)

next

sudo chmod -RN /Applications
(this will delete all ACLs from everything in /Applications)

next

sudo chmod +a "everyone deny delete" /Applications /Applications/Utilities
(this will put the necessary ACLs back where they belong)

I tried installing the latest version of Onyx to see if it had a bundled fix, but it didn't. So, with some reluctance, I followed the above.

I then did a safe boot restart, then a regular restart, and then I ran repair permissions from Disk Utility. DU didn't like the settings VK recommended -- it changed many of them. I'm not sure who's right here, because an evil app can mess up the permissions database (Ex. an Adobe product) and repair permissions might be getting bad advice.

After that I run Adobe's Flash Installer (drag it from the DMG file to run it). It still gave me access errors, but I was pretty sure I'd removed all Flash stuff by hand. I suspect Adobe's Flash uninstaller is old.

I tried the Flash 9 for Intell installer again (drag it from DMG file to run) and this time I didn't get any privilege warnings.

So now I'll see how my next app update goes. Next step is probably a clean install.

Non-geeks don't have a chance with this stuff - or bad design?

1. Having both ACLs and BSD permissions at the same time is just asking for trouble.
2. It's wrong that badly behaved installers should be able to wreck permissions. (Apple should at least put up a warning ... something like ... "this ill-bred Adobe product is going to wreck your system, we recommend Aperture instead ..."
3. Repair permissions ought to work better than it does. It shouldn't be getting its settings from a corruptible source.

Update 11/20/08: Some better fixes have been discovered.

Update 9/16/10: The official fix.

Bose QuietComfort 2 Mobile Communications kit vs. Monster iSoniTalk for iPhone

About a year ago I expected that my future iPhone would be joined by the Bose QC 2 mobile communications kit. The kit adds a microphone to Bose QC 2 headphones, so it's possible to use the phones during calls.

Gordon's Tech: Bose QuietComfort 2 Mobile Communications kit connects to an iPhone

... the $40 Bose QuietComfort 2 Mobile Communications Kit. Sure, it's much more expensive than whittling, but it includes a microphone so you can handle incoming calls. On the other hand it only works with post-2005 QC2s ...

I later read that the pre-2005 QC 2 incompatibility was due to an easy-to-remove plastic protrusion. On the other hand, the Apple Store reviews tell us there's no answer/pause button on the Bose microphone.

The Bose kit is fairly elegant looking however. It replaces the standard cord, so there's no cord clutter.

Later I saw a Griffin kit that worked with any set of headphones, had an answer button, and cost half the price. That sounded right -- but it's gone now.

In its place is the Monster iSoniTalk. It was designed for iPhone 1.0 (fits the recess), but works fine with iPhone 2.0.

I agree with the 1/08 review -- it's really pretty good. Costs $20, seems to work well, decent microphone and clip and it has an inline answer button on the mike (like Apple's set). It does create cord clutter; I'd prefer a serial connection with no double cord rather than the iSoniTalk's parallel cord (see pictures in linked review). The splitter by the phone connection is pretty big and ugly looking too.

So get the QC 2 kit if you have the Bose headphones, want minimal cord clutter and a svelte connection, and don't mind answering calls using the iPhone (not a big deal for me). Otherwise, the iSoniTalk is fine. I'm looking forward to trying it with my next conference call.

Update 8/21/08: Turns out these are weird to use. When I wear the QC2 heaphones, my own voice is distant and muffled. The headphones don't play back my own voice.

Parallels to VMware - my experience

As part of my move from 10.4.11 to 10.5.3 I switched from Parallels (Windows 2000 VM running Office 2003 and MindManager to VMWare Fusion (updated 5/30 for 10.5.3). Here's how it went.

1. Uninstall Parallels prior to the OS update. Don't delete the VM files (Win2K.pvs and W2k.hdd on my disk).
2. Update OS.
3. Download latest version of VMWare Fusion (not the beta though). You need to be a registered user to do this.
4. Install VMWare Fusion.
   
5. Download beta version of VMware Importer tool and install (requires Fusion be installed).
6. Find the Parallels files - Win2K.pvs and W2k.hdd. Drop the PVS file on the importer. The importer then converts the 3.1 GB Parallels file to a 3.4 GB (10% larger) single file stored in a Virtual Machine folder in current_user/Documents. (After I'd finished the entire install, however, the VM file was 4.4 GB, a 33% increase.)
   
7. I double clicked on Win2K (my VM name) and Windows 2000 SP4 launched. Fusion shows an inline reminder to install the VM tools, but after a LONG startup and restart (for Win2K this is a new machine) Fusion installed them automatically. I saw a Windows dialog requesting help with an unrecognized device -- ignore those and let the Fusion tools install and Win2K restart.
8. Shutdown Win2K after this initial install (good practice after initial config), in future just suspend it.
   

After the conversion and setup Win2K SP4 goes from shutdown to running in 30 seconds on my MacBook. Much faster than XP, much less Vista! Of course one would usually suspend the OS when done, not do a shutdown.

Upgrading to OS X 10.5.1: LaunchDaemons

I try. Really, I try.

I knew 10.5.0 had severe quality problems. I waited until 10.5.3 was out, though the install DVD was still 10.5.1. I even cleaned up prior to installation [1].

Then I did an 'archive and install' ... Oops. I thought the installer would ask me what type of install I was doing. It didn't. Guess I should have read the manual. I ended up unwittingly doing a regular update install. (Yech.)

The install sucked down another 5GB by the way.

So I had an ominous premonition when I was done. Justified.

After installation I tried to log in to my Administrator account, with user name 'Admin'.

My password didn't work.

An empty password didn't work.

I was locked out! My other accounts worked, just not the admin account.

Google sent me directly to the fix ...

Mac OS X 10.5: Unable to log in after an upgrade install

... You may not be able to log in with a user account that has a password of 8 or more characters and was originally created in Mac OS X 10.2.8 or earlier, after performing an upgrade installation of Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard (the default installation type)...

... launchctl load /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.DirectoryServices.plist...

So at least this was a well known bug.

I caught it because when I bought my MacBook, I used the firewire migration service to migrate the settings from my iBook to the MacBook. I never had 10.2.8 on the MacBook (it wouldn't have installed anyway), but the iBook started with 10.1. So the glitch was transferred to the MacBook.

A little booby trap, just waiting to detonate when I installed 10.5.1.

Fixing the bug required entering some reasonably convoluted unix commands. The last step in the series resets the admin password. [2]

Yes, as has been known for some time, anyone with access to your machine can reset your admin password, though they won't have access to the admin keychain. (Since I reset the password to the old password, I still have access to the admin keychain).

Now I've installed 10.5.3.

More on that later.

If you haven't updated to 10.5, I'd suggest waiting until Apple starts shipping DVDs with 10.5.3. "Leopard" was a really buggy OS update, a kind of mini-Vista.

[1] Cleanup

1. Uninstall Parallels 2.5.
2. Check for Input Managers and remove them (l found smart crash reporter.)
3. Remove contextual menu items
4. Remove Preference Panes
5. Repeat for both admin and my primary account.
6. Do a safe boot (hold shift on start) to run maintenance checks.
7. Delete all apps I suspect won't work with 10.5.1 or that I don't often use.
   
8. Reboot into admin

[2] I suspect that if one has encrypted one's home directory, then one would be, technically speaking, screwed.

Update 6/17/11: Years later my iMac started handing at startup. It passed hardware tests, I couldn't find an easy fix, so I archived and installed. Right. That's why I'm back.

The horrid Apple fix worked again. This time though I created a fresh administrator account before I upgraded to 10.5.8. I'll delete the old, contaminated account. Should have done that years ago.

How to uninstall Parallels Desktop for OS X

Uninstall is not an OS X strength.

It's not quite as bad as OS/2, where nothing could be uninstalled, but it's not good. (Note to self: this was a bad sign about how finished OS/2 was. Don't forget this.) Perfectly behaved apps can be simply deleted, but those are less common that one would imagine. Even Apple apps aren't all that well behaved.

Applications like Parallels Desktop and VMWare Fusion are particularly worrisome. You know these things are messing with the deep OS.

The good news is that there is an uninstaller -- it's in the DMG file. The bad news is that it's surprisingly hard to find out about this. Google failed completely, and it took several searches through the Parallels kb to find this article (VMWare Fusion was marginally better at providing the same info):

KB #5027 - What is the recommended policy of updating to Mac OS X Leopard with Parallels Desktop installed?

... Please uninstall Parallels Desktop from Mac OS Tiger using the program's Uninstaller script located in the distribution package (.dmg or CD) before running Leopard update. Keep in mind that you should use Uninstaller of the same program version you have installed or newer, using Uninstaller from the outdated package may cause unexpected issues with removing the program. The uninstall procedure doesn't affect your existing Virtual Machines.

BTW, this is the first place I read that you should uninstall Parallels before upgrading to 10.5. I'm battered enough to routinely clean out complex things before an OS update, but I suspect that most Parallels users, geeky as they are, missed this.

Yes, I am now moving to 10.5. It's not just that 10.5.3 finally came out, it's also that I really want the parental time-limited access controls.

With 10.5.3 I'm switching to VMWare Fusion -- mostly because the people I read like it better. I've already noticed, however, that Fusion is much pickier about Windows OSs than Parallels. It won't work with older versions of Windows 2000, for example. A point for Parallels I've not seen mentioned elsewhere, but since I've already bought Fusion I'm going to give it a try.

Sun xVM VirtualBox: free VM for OS X windows work

Via TUAW. It's a free OpenSource app now maintained by Sun. It won't have the support of VMWare Fusion (current leader) or Parallels (contender), but it includes an RDP server for remote access to VMs and it's supposed to support "any x86 based OS" on Windows (least interesting), Solaris (of course), Linux or OS X.

I think this would make most sense for someone with a copy of Windows 2000 who wants to run Microsoft Office 2003 and one or two other compliant apps. (Disabling net access for the VM seems adviseable, though Win2K is probably not a major OS target any more. Who knows, it might now be safer on the net than XP, especially if, like me, you run XP without antiviral software). [1]

That would be me, except I already have a license to VMWare Fusion. If I didn't, I'd try this.

[1] Because the antiviral software causes more problems for me than the viruses. I use Firefox with NoScript, stick to good neighborhoods, and use XP as little as possible.

Windows Live Writer - gallery of plug-ins

The world's greatest blogging tool has a new and improved Plug-In gallery. (The Firefox Blog widget is prominently featured.)

As fond as I am of WLW, it does pain me to praise it. It's a Microsoft Live product, and there's no OS X version on the horizon. It's a bit much to load VMWare Fusion and XP only to run WLW, but I'm tempted.

There's nothing comparable for OS X. Ecto showed promise once but every time I've tried it I've been disappointed. In particular it made a mess of Blogger posts; WLW handles Blogger quirks and bugs as well as anything can.

Update 5/20/08: The WLW Firefox add-in is not compatible with FF 3! Wow. Wish I'd thought about that before I upgraded. I'd have held off on my XP machines.

Microsoft WorldWide Telescope's Mac support

Microsoft Research's WWT has Mac support ...

WorldWide Telescope

For Mac:

Microsoft® XP SP2 (minimum), Windows® Vista® (recommended) with BootCamp...

Not.

Ah well, it's hard to complain too much. It is Microsoft Research after all.

I'll try out WWT on my XP box. If/when I get around to installing XP SP2 and VMWare Fusion I might try it on my MacBook too.