Tuesday, December 25, 2007
I slept in while Patrick took his mom to the airport; she'll be in New Orleans until January 8. We opened presents (only a few this year), Patrick took a nap, and I continued setting up the iMac. I didn't encounter any problems with my new iMac until after I had installed Parallels. I should have known, having had problems with Parallels in the past at work. Upon launching Parallels Desktop 3.0 for Mac the very first time, it quit unexpectedly. I relaunched, and it started as expected. But later it hosed my Boot Camp partition because hal.dll was missing. I had seen this problem at work before, and I once I had seen this message again, I restarted into OS X and uninstalled Parallels on the spot. I've now lost perhaps 8 to 24 hours of work due to Parallels. I figured I would just restart into Boot Camp and uninstall Parallels Tools and then be done with them. I had some trouble getting started into Boot Camp again, but I finally figured it out. But when I attempted to uninstall Parallels Tools, a message appeared indicating that Parallels Tools would only install when running as a virtual machine. I restarted into OS X, reinstalled Parallels from cdrom, and it again unexpectedly quit upon launch. I reuninstalled Parallels, threw away the Boot Camp partition, then reinstalled Windows XP from scratch. Ugh! No more Parallels for me! I'm anxious to try out VMWare Fusion now. Patrick has indeed started to get sick as he suspected. And I think I'm out of the worst of my illness. It's hard to say whether it was one really long cold or two overlapping ones. My nasal passages are clear now, but I still have lots of congestion in the lungs. Coughing is dying down, but still occasional. Late lunch: leftovers. Patrick made bread pudding and took a bath. Attempted to download an evaluation version of VMWare Fusion for Mac, but when I clicked the link, I received the following error message: "Proxy Error. The proxy server received an invalid response from an upstream server. The proxy server could not handle the request GET /go/tryfusion. Reason: Error reading from remote server. Apache/1.3.29 Ben-SSL/1.53 Server at www.vmware.com Port 80." Dinner at home with Patrick: canned soup, a bagel. Attempted to build Wine (software) from scratch and failed. The instructions provided at wiki.winehq.org did not work for me even though I followed the instructions and installed X11 and Xcode beforehand. I suspect the instructions provided are either inaccurate or not current. Installed Skim 1.0.1 (v19), a PDF viewer for OS X. It seems to work alright. Installed Thunderbird 2.0.0.9, decided that I'll start using it for home e-mail.