Software

Audio mixing with VMWare on Linux host

Ever since I switched to VMware from VirtualBox I have had a problem with audio.  If I launch VMware after launching an application that has played some audio, the audio will not work from guest OS.  Also, if I launch VMware first, no Linux application will be able to play audio.

It looks like the problem is that VMware is using OSS for audio, while the sound mixer that Ubuntu uses is ALSA.  This forum has instructions to get this to work.  Essentially the solution is to use the alsa-oss library to have VMware audio go through alsa.

24 hours of Google Reader Shared Items

In this post, I decribed that I wasn't able to have Google Reader export a feed of the last 24 hours of shared items. The feed that is generated by Google reader uses the publish date from the original article as the pubDate of the item in the feed.  It would be great if Google embedded the "shared" date in the feed for each item.

In the mean time, I have created a Yahoo Pipe that will do this.  Unfortunately, this requires that the previous period's feed needs to be saved somewhere where this script can access.  I have set a cron job to fetch the feed once a day.  Then the yahoo pipe  uses that cached feed and compares it with the latest feed.

NuevaSync

When using a Mac as a main computer, I was able to create an overly complicated setup that would allow me to sync my iPhone wirelessly with Google Calendar/Contacts.  But this doesn't work on my linux computer.  When I was looking foa a solution I found a link to NuevaSync.

NuevaSync is a Exchange "proxy" for Google Calendar/Contacts.  This allows the iPhone to be configured to sync to thie Google apps.  This solution acually makes MobileMe unnecessary. This article has a good walkthough for configuring NuevaSync with an iPhone.

This has been working fine for me on my iPhone.

One problem that is being worked on is better support for multiple calendars.  Also another annoyance, with the iPhone and not with NuevaSync is that you can not connect to multiple Exchange servers.  I would like to connect to my work's Exchange server for mail, but connect to NuevaSync for Calendars and Contacts.

Virtual Machines

VirtualBox is a free virtual machine that I have been using for a while It worked perfectly to run Windows XP on my Ubuntu computer. VirtualBox is available for Mac, WIndows and Linux. Connecting my iPhone didn't work. It looks like there is a bug where a connected iPhone is not recognized with VirtualBox.

This isn't a problem in VMware Workstation. I tried the 30 day free trial and it worked with the iPhone. I was able to easily transfer the data from my VirtualBox VM to VMware Workstation.  I backed up the VirtualBox to the Windows Home Server.  Then in the VMware Workstation VM, before I installed an OS, I put in the client restore CD.  This allowed me to restore the image to the new vm.

Moving to Windows

About the time that we got our new Dell M1530, the internal video card on our MacBook Pro died.  My wife is now trying to use the M1330 as her personal computer.  I erased the Ubuntu partition and installed WIndows Vista on it.  Also, since our Mac OS X machine was disabled, I have installed Windows XP in a virtual machine on my Ubuntu m1530 to do everything that I can't do in Ubuntu.

There are several things that I have noticed about Windows:

1. The backup functionality in Windows Home Server works perfectly with Windows machines.  (I actually have used this to rebuild a machine and it worked perfectly)
2.  There is no calendar program.  I don't get how Microsoft can ship an OS that doesn't have a calendar program.  Mac OS X ships with iCal.  You would think that Microsoft would want a computer to be functional for a family with just the base OS install.  They ship a mail program, photo and video editing programs, but no calendar.  This means that I can not sync my calendar with MobileMe.
3. I am getting tons of errors from MobileMe Sync on both XP and Vista.  The errors state things like "a sync in progress" or my "MobileMe account is expired".
4. The Windows version of Quicken is so much more functional that the Mac version.  Once I confugured Quicken for our accounts, it automatically configured itself to use the online bill pay from the bank.  With Quicken for the Mac, you have to use a third party bill pay service.