You think this post is too ambitiously titled? Think again, because this is 21st century and we have all the tools available to do that. Hey, we’re in information age and we don’t have to wait for evening news to get some insight on things developing in Mumbai. If this was happening in my town, I’d be blogging & twitting my ass of about it! Well, guess what, people are doing that in India! And in many of this cases regular people like you or me are journalist (twitter definitely stands out).

Love this Quote! By Matthew Ingram:

Twitter reports are a valuable first “draft of history”!

Mumbai (almost) real-time:

• Twitter
• YouTube
• Global Voices
• IBN Live Videostream (via milijonar @ Twitter)
• Digg
• Flickr
• Ground Report
• CNN Hot Topics > Mumbai News (constantly updated)

And the list could could go on, closer and closer to infinity.. Got any good sources that you think should be on this list? Write them in comments!

However, there could be a small catch.. Inflow on Mumbai info is huge — how can we, on the other side of earth, know which reports are true and which false? But if you think about it, regular media¹ constantly supplies us with false information!

I love this age! Don’t you?

— Regards, Milan

## Added ##

Just found this great resource regarding Mumbai events & citizen journalism on TechCrunch. Via “Matthew Ingram’s > Yes, Twitter is a source of journalism” article.

1. If you can still call TV, Radio and Web news pages regular media nowadays?

Hey evribadi! An hour ago I got surprised by an gift from Agile Solutions - the authors of 1Password software. I already wrote something about this fantastic app a while ago. Basically, it’s the best password manager & form filler app out there and back then I wrote this:

Who among you Mac users, still hasn’t heard of 1Password - a password manager & auto-fill app for MacOS X? Well, if you haven’t heard of it, or you’re still considering to use it - stop being ignorant and start using it! Check out this screencast to see it in action. Believe me, this is one of the best apps I encountered in my computing history (and I’m not exaggerating at all) and it is well worth of ~40 $ license price.

Back to the point. It’s Thanksgiving day tomorrow in the USA and authors of 1Password decided to give us (existing license owners) a possibility to give three 1Password gifts (free licences) to three of our friends.

Since none of my closest friends use Mac (did I mention it’s an Mac only app?) and I still have two 1Password gifts to give away, I’ve decided to give ONE away here on this blog.

So, if you’re interested leave me a comment (first one gets it!) and I will contact you regarding details. But hurry, because I can’t promise I will have it available for long.

— Kind regards, Milan

A week ago (+/- few days) Parallels announced the availability of 4th revision of their virtualization software Parallels Desktop. In press release company promised 50% speed improvement compared to version 3, along with 15-30% lower resource usage.

It was good to hear that they have been working on performance issues for this release, but my question to Parallels wouldn’t be “how does Parallels Desktop 4 perform compared to version 3″, but “how does it perform compared to VMware’s Fusion 2“?. Since I use Windows at work I also need it installed inside VM on my home Mac — if I want to have any professional work done at home. Dead simple.
I use iMac 5.1 with 2.16 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor, 2 GB of memory and ATI Radeon X1600 128MB graphics at home, so VM performance and impact on hosting OS is of great consideration to me. Considering all that I decided to tryout both Parallels Desktop 4 and VMware Fusion 2, compare their possibilities and test them both with benchmarking program.

Preparations
Both Parallels and VMware offer downloadable trial versions of their virtualization software — Parallels desktop is available here and VMware Fusion is available here¹.

I decided to try both VM’s with Vista (first I planned to install Windows XP). There are no specific reasons for that, except that I wanted to give them both some hard time and Vista — which is one giant resource hog — seemed more suitable. I used Ultimate version and installed it on both VM’s without a product key².

After I did some searching for a good & free benchmarking program for Windows, I discovered that there is a ton of it out there, but all the good ones are shareware. So I decided to use couple of them, which is o.k. because the final result should give me more precise picture. I decided for following benchmarks: PCMark05 demo version, Geekbench 32-bit version (64-bit is shareware), CrystalMark 2004 and CrystalDiskMark. Plus, Windows Experience meter should give me some comparison too.

Installing Vista
After collecting all software I started with installation of Vista on both VM’s. Here are some system parameters of both VM’s:

Vista on Parallels Desktop 4

• CPU: 1 core dedicated to VM
• Memory: 1024 MB
• Disk size: 32 GB

Vista on VMware Fusion 2

• CPU: 1 core dedicated to VM
• Memory: 1024 MB
• Disk size: 32 GB (I missed this setting during the install, otherwise I’d set it to 32 GB - equal to Parallels VM)

I decided to clock both installations and start-up’s and get some hint on how will both VM’s perform even before I start with the benchmarking. For that I used Apimac Timer. Prior to and during both installations and every benchmark I restarted my Mac and had same programs running. Time machine was OFF during the whole process. These are the results:

Vista on Parallels Desktop 4

• Installed in: 49 minutes sharp
• Start-up of fresh installed system: 1 minute 7 seconds

Vista on VMware Fusion 2

• Installed in: 44 minutes, 40 seconds
• Start-up of fresh installed system: 1 minute 3 seconds

Start-up times are close, but it takes more then 4 minutes longer to install Vista on Parallels, so that is a clear 0:1 for VMware Fusion.

User experience
During the installation process, Parallels Desktop was unable to share mouse³ with OS X (you have to press Ctrl-Command to get your mouse available to OS X). On the other side VMware Fusion was sharing mouse during the installation process, which makes it 0:2 for VMware Fusion.

In order to get drivers for sound and graphics, one must install Parallels Desktop Tools or VMware Tools respectively after the OS is installed. Also, without installing it you have no option to run VM in Coherence (Parallels) or Unity (VMware) mode, which is a nice way to integrate your VM’d Windows with MacOS X.

One thing I noticed is that both Parallels Desktop Tools and VMware Tools were unable to transfer my regional settings from OS X to Vista (is it really that hard) so I had to do it manually. Well, Parallels Desktop Tools were at least successful at transferring time-zone and syncing clock. I had to do that manually on VMware. So this one goes to Parallels! Current score: 1:2.

Parallels always share Vista’s taskbar with OS X Dock (icons of running Vista programs always show-up in the Dock), while VMware shares it only in Unity mode. I don’t know about you, but for me this is a point for Parallels so 2:2 it is⁴.

Both VM’s were able to share Vista’s Desktop and text clipboard nicely with OS X. I found no other advantages of one over another, regarding user experience, during the test.

Benchmarking
Here is the benchmarking results table:

Please note last three benchmarks on upper table. These are benchmarks on OS X, made once without running VM, once with running each VM & Vista (doing nothing) and once with running a video compression software on Vista. I did this just to see how do both VM’s affect MacOS X performance. I won’t go into details with other benchmarking results, you can draw your own conclusion out of them if you need to. VMware Fusion 2 won this last stage with fourteen points against only six points of Parallels Desktop 4.

Conclusion
So, overall score was 6:16 in favor of VMware Fusion 2 and the result itself indicates a strong winner! I must admit that for me such a big difference was unexpected. I did install Vista on Parallels first and after using it for short time I had a feeling they did improve significantly (I did use version 3 some time ago). But after testing both of them, Fusion still feels faster and results confirm that. The fact is that VMware Fusion 2 was out some time before Parallels Desktop 4 and guys at Parallels probably did have the time to look-up on competition and make a better product, or at least more competitive one — a task at which they’ve failed.

I hope someone will find this test usefull, my 65 Euros will certainly go to VMware.

— Kind regards, Milan

## Added on 23rd of November @ 18:30 ##
Just found two similar Parallels 4 vs. Fusion 2 comparison test, both more focused on funcionality - here and here.

1. You will have to register at both sites to get a trial key
2. 14 days was more than enough do to all the tests
3. Parallels started sharing mouse after Parallels Desktop Tools were once installed on the system
4. However it is truth that I didn’t check if I could enable same thing in VMware’s preferences

Those of you who read my old blog, before I deleted it about a year ago, may remember that it featured a bookmarking system, where you could follow on my favorite daily bookmarks (interesting tech and various news, movie trailers, etc.). The feed was called RSS Zaznamki (I blogged in Slovenian language at that time). Well, the feed is back — only this time it’s called RSS QuickMarks. I will use the feed to publish bookmarks of various interesting stuff, upon which I will stumble while surfing the web.

I think this is a great way to share interesting links with others. I would be very much interested to see what daily reading some other bloggers recommend, using system like this. You can use Fahlastad’s fQuick SideNotes plug-in to implement this kind of system on your blog.

My latest seven QuickMarks can be followed from the central widget on the bottom of my blog pages (look screenshot below), or you can simply add the feed to your RSS reader. I hope you will like it!

If you have any suggestions (interesting links to be published), you can send it to me using contact form.

— Regards, Milan

Koornk is a social networking webapp — a microblogging platform, much like Twitter. It was first developed as a local (Slovene) microblogging project, but soon it grew into a worldwide microboging platform with many international users, who btw. at the time of writing this post already sent over 77k clucks (new statuses) to Koornk. Let me point out that Koornk isn’t necessarily a Twitter competitor or replacement. It does support status synchronization with Twitter, so your Koornk clucks can parallelly appear on Twitter.

You can read more on how and why it was developed here: The story behind Koornk. And why is it named Koornk?

The name “koornk” comes from Slovenian language and is a geeky way to write the word meaning henhouse – where the chickens just can’t shut their peepholes.

Anyway, here is the thing.. As I already wrote yesterday, I was doing some visual and content corrections on my blog. Later I contacted Matija, head Koornk developer, asking him if there are any Koornk banners available that users could use on their pages or blog. After discussing this issue with him I decided to help them by putting together some banners which we can all use. I’m really not a designer, but I hope you will like them anyway. For now this sizes are available in PNG format (some other sizes will follow soon):

Size 250 x 250 (download, 188 KB)

Size 180×150 (download, 120 KB)

Size 120 x 90 (download, 64 KB)

Size 88×31 (download, 28 KB)

Size 80×20 (download, 4 KB)

To download simply right-click on the download link above the banner you need and choose “Save As..”. If you have any specific size request, leave it in the comments and I’ll see what I can come up with.

— See you on Kornk, Milan

P.S.: You can follow my Koornk status here.

P.S.2.: If you like Koornk you can nominate them for 2nd Annual Open Web Awards by using the form below. Just fill in your e-mail, press “Submit” and confirm the nomination e-mail you will receive to your Inbox.

Today I was playing around with my blog, updating theme, WP engine and plug-ins, and also implementing some changes in CSS styles. As it is already stated in the footer of this blog I use HemingwayEx theme by Nalin, which I’ve slightly¹ modified. This theme is really nice and clean, and Nalin did a really good job with it. I did two (visually) notable changes in CSS: I changed link and link hover styles and I changed alignment of post and page text to justified. Wordpress is updated to 2.6.3, I added WP-Footnotes plug-in and I enabled WP related posts plug-in (still not not sure I will keep it). Suggestions and comments to this changes would be appreciated. But back to the point..

After I was done, I tried to validate my page with W3C Validator and validation failed with over 30 errors. Quick review of the errors however pointed out two mayor problems: Flickr badge and Akismet widget.

1. Flickr badge
As you probably already noticed I use Flickr badge to show random 10 photos from my publick Flickr photoset on this blog. Flickr has a tool that allows you to create this kind of badge and insert it into your page. Actually the badge Flickr produces is almost useless so you will have to do some cleaning² of unnecessary code and styles first, but that is not my point. After the cleanup I was left with this code:

<div class="flickr_badge_image">
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://www.flickr.com/badge_code_v2.gne?count=10&display=random&size=s&layout=h&source=user&user=22500348%40N03"></script>
</div>

This code however still won’t validate. I found answer on this blog. For this code to be valid XHTML 1.0, we need to change ampersands (&) to XHTML entities as explained here. After that we get this code

<div class="flickr_badge_image">
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://www.flickr.com/badge_code_v2.gne?count=10&amp;display=random&amp;size=s&amp;layout=h&amp;source=user&amp;user=22500348%40N03"></script>
</div>
that validates flawlessly.

2. Akismet widget
Second problem I faced was connected with Akismet widget and was a little bit harder to trace and eliminate. I use 2.2.1 version of plug-in and I don’t guarantee that this instructions³ will also work on any other version.
2.1. FTP to your server and edit akismet.php file in your WP plugins folder.
2.2. Go to the line 835 where you will find code like this:

<div id="akismetwrap"><div id="akismetstats"><a id="aka" href="http://akismet.com" title=""><?php printf( __( '%1$s %2$sspam comments%3$s %4$sblocked by%5$s<br />%6$sAkismet%7$s' ), '<div id="akismet1"><span id="akismetcount">' . $count . '</span>', '<span id="akismetsc">', '</span></div>', '<div id="akismet2"><span id="akismetbb">', '</span>', '<span id="akismeta">', '</span></div>' ); ?></a></div></div>

2.3. and change it into this:

<div id="akismetwrap"><div id="akismetstats"><span id="akismet1"><span id="akismetcount"><?php echo $count; ?></span> <span id="akismetsc"><?php _e('spam comments') ?></span></span> <span id="akismet2"><span id="akismetbb"><?php _e('blocked by') ?></span><span id="akismeta">Akismet</span></span></div></div>

This will somehow cripple the widget by making it static to show only the number of spam comments cleaned, but it still is a solution.

And that’s all folks! Now my blog validates again. I really hope this helps someone, because I lost quite some time before I found those solutions.

— Regards, Milan

1. Emphasis on slightly
2. Use Google if you don’t know how to do it yourself.
3. I found solution here, but the line is different.

Wolves Eat Dogs is a crime novel written by Martin Cruz Smith and featuring Arkady Renko - a detective from Russian capital. It’s the fifth — and for the time being also my favorite — novel in Renko series. I’ve already read Gorky Park and Stalin’s Ghost, and although I was positively impressed with both of them, Wolves Eat Dogs is the one I almost literally fu***n ate. Delicious!

Arkady Renko is a smart, resourceful and persistent, but — after the death of his beloved wife Irina, also lonely and somehow depressed Moscow detective. In Wolves Eat Dogs he’s called in to investigate a death of a rich Russian businessman in, what appears to be, a simple suicide case. But Renko wouldn’t be Renko if he’d buy the suicide story and sets to investigate the plot behind it. The more this case seems unsolvable, the more Renko tries to dig deeper and despite the heavy opposition he’s facing from his boss and other powerful characters in the story, he has no intention of stopping before he solves the case. This time the plot leads him to the Chernobyl Zone of Alienation where even the most radioactive zones don’t stop him from passing through, just to uncover the truth.

The story is tense, dramatic and includes many turn overs which will make you hold your breath while reading. But apart from one of the best crime stories I’ve read, reader also gets familiar with events during and after the Chernobyl disaster, what additionally makes this novel is a real winner to buy.

— Regards, Milan

2008-11-05, 18:55: Added link (below) to an AP article on the story which includes images of the actual portrait.

Let see how long will it take for Barrack Obama’s (newly elected presidents of USA) massive portrait on Barcelona beach to show up on Google Maps (sattelite view) or Google Earth (if ever).

The portrait should show up here (if it shows up). Who knows how often does Google update satellite views of Earth?

You can read AP article with images of the actual portrait here.

View Larger Map

— Regards, Milan

Who among you Mac users, still hasn’t heard of 1Password - a password manager & auto-fill app for MacOS X? Well, if you haven’t heard of it, or you’re still considering to use it - stop being ignorant and start using it! Check out this screencast to see it in action. Believe me, this is one of the best apps I encountered in my computing history (and I’m not exaggerating at all) and it is well worth of ~40 $ license price. It will safely store all your password, credit card info and web-forms and consecutively make your life on the Web much much much easier. You should think of it as a Web Wallet —, and believe me you need a Web Wallet nowadays. Btw. 1Password supports virtually all know browsers for MacOS X (except Opera). The only thing I personally miss with 1Password, is that it has no Windows cousin, which I would like to see very much, as I use Windows at my job. And that takes us to the topic of this post..

Surfing the web and searching for a solution to somehow incorporate 1Password on my Windows machine, I came across this post which explains how this is possible using 1Password iPhone sync option. Priceless! However following instructions in that post I came across some problems, which I will warn you about here:

• Make sure to read “Warning” text on the top of that post. 1Password version 2.7.2 is the last version to support this - new version incorporate somehow different sync to iPhone and those instructions will not work for you anymore. Since the latest 1Password version — at the time of writing this post — is 2.9.4 you will probably have to downgrade to 2.7.2. You can find older version of 1Password here. Check your 1Password version using “1Password > About 1Password” menu in 1Password.app.

  

• When copying 1Password bookmark from Safari to Firefox, you will encounter truncation issuses. Even direct copy from Safari to Firefox, — as described in that post —, didn’t work for me. When I synced bookmarks between my Mac and Windows Firefox using Foxmarks, I was able to get 1Password page on my Windows, but login didn’t work. What I finally did was that I exported Safari bookmarks using “File > Export Bookmarks” option, manually transferred that file to my Windows machine, manually edited it using SCiTE, and copied out 1Password bookmark location field to Firefox. This finally did the magic. Manually transfering bookmarks described before wasn’t a good solution, because the bookmark created in Firefox worked only until I restarted Firefox, after that bookmark failed me again and I wasn’t able to login into 1Password page. I was however again successful avoiding this problem using a little bit different approach. What I did was that I took Safari Bookmarks.html file I previously exported from Safari and deleted everything before
  a href="*"
  and after
  /a
  tags containing 1Password bookmark in the original file. Than I save this file as 1Pass.html on my TrueCrypt encrypted drive and made a bookmark in Firefox, pointing to that HTML file. Now I first have to open this 1Pass.html page using bookmark, and after that I follow 1Password link in it.

  

So, there is an answer to the million dollar question - “How to use 1Password on my Windows (or Linux) machine“! Using Foxmarks you may be able to half-automate this job transferring 1Password bookmark from one Firefox to another, but you You will still have to sync 1Password.app to Safari manually, and also manually transfer bookmark from Safari to Firefox. So it’s not a perfect solution, but — at least for me — the idea of having my 1Password database on my Windows machine makes it well worth. One setback is also that you can’t upgrade 1Password.app on your Mac anymore if you want to use this function (at least till we get some other and maybe better solution). Also I should warn you to consider security: make sure to use strong encryption password when you sync your 1Password database to Safari bookmark and — when using Foxmarks — keep in mind that your 1Password database will be transferred to Foxmarks sync server, prior to reaching your other Firefox copies.

— Regards, Milan

Panoramic shot of my home town — Bled, I took yesterday while enjoying “the Sunday walk”.

— Regards, Milan