Follow #Mumbai situation (almost) in real-time

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

1Password license for free, anybody?

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

Parallels Desktop 4 vs. VMWare Fusion 2

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 here ((You will have to register at both sites to get a trial key)).

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 key ((14 days was more than enough do to all the tests)).

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 mouse ((Parallels started sharing mouse after Parallels Desktop Tools were once installed on the system)) 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 is ((However it is truth that I didn’t check if I could enable same thing in VMware’s preferences)).

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.

RSS QuickMarks are back

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

A Tribute to Koornk

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 × 250 (download, 188 KB)

Size 180×150 (download, 120 KB)

Size 120 × 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.