Where’s the Beef

I don’t know if you remember (I’m probably showing my age) an old advert for one hamburger chain or another, where the catch-phrase was: “Where’s the Beef”.

Well, that’s how I feel after having briefly sifted through the reports from the Apple WWDC keynote earlier today. It very much looks that my predictions were right from my post a couple of days ago. The “top secret” features that were promised during last year’s keynote was just a cop-out, empty promises. I don’t think that anything that was presented today can be classified as a top secret feature; heck most of it was presented last year anyway.

Don’t get me wrong Leopard looks great, and I certainly want to get my hands on it, but top secret features; no effing way!

More Traveling Woes

It seems that the last couple of days have not been the best for air traveling in USA. Rich posted this piece a couple of days, and I haven’t had the best of luck either:

I am teaching in Boston this week (starting Monday 11:th) , and I thought it would a good idea to fly into New York on Friday to get a couple of days in the Big Apple, and then go up to Boston on train. Well, flying out from London to Detroit (I was flying NWA) was not a problem, the problems started in Detroit.

I passed immigrations, got my bag from the carousel and handed it over to te baggage handlers to route it through to Newark.  When I came into the NWA lounge in Detroit I saw that my flight was delayed an hour – apparently due to bad weather (this was not exactly true as it later turned out). Well an hour is not too bad, however after a while it came up on the boardds that the flight was even more delayed, and looking at the news channels it turned out that FAA had computer problems on the east coast and most east coast airports had major problems.

Anyway, the departure time for my flight came closer so I left the lounge to get something to read and then go to the gate. I bought my book and was supposed to go to the gate and when I looked at the departure boards my flight came up as cancelled, together with quite a few others for the east coast! Bummer!!!

I went back to the lounge and queued up with everyone else that wanted to know what was going on.  When I finally came to the counter they told me that; yes my flight was cancelled and I was being put up in a hotel for the night. I also was told that I had been rebooked the next day. Not so bad apart from the fact that all direct flghts to the New York area was fully booked, so I was booked Detroit – Albany – Newark, arriving in Newark 4 pm! 19 hours later than originally planned!!

Well, nothing much I could do, so I took the shuttle to the hotel and  crashed. As my bags were “deep in the bowels” of Detroit airport, I could not get my toiletries, or any clothes. My bags, they told me, were routed the same route by the way.

Next morning I went back to the airport, and of course my flight to Albany was delayed, not so much that it would affect me connection in Albany. Eventually I arrived in Albany and started to wait for my flight to Newark. Boarding started eventually and I got on-board first. When I and one other person had boarded the stewardess told us we had to un-board as we were not allowed to take off!!! Apparently the airports in the New York area had too many planes coming in, so they refuse arrivals from nearby airports.

We ended up sitting further three hours in Albany, before we were allowed to take off. I eventually arrived in Newark 21 hours after my originally time. Well, at least I was in Newark so I only had to collec my bags and then get a cab into Manhattan. By now you probably have guessed what happens next; yup, the bags were lost! It also seemed that a couple of other passengers that had been routed the same way as me had lost their bags

So I’m writing this in my hotel in New York Sunday morning, and no one has any idea where my  bags are. Last night I went out and got some clothes and some toiletries, so I at least won’t smell when I start the gig tomorrow morning!!

So, this last few days have not been the best to travel in USA.

Time for Apple’s WWDC

Next week one of the biggest events for Mac users comes around; the World Wide Developers Conference. As usual for the Mac World a lot of blogs, etc has started speculating what “his greatness” Jobs will reveal.

I guess one thing all agrees on is that it will be a lot of Leopard coverage. However, what it will entail is not that clear. Don’t forget that Steve Jobs at last years WWDC said that Leopard had certain top secrets features that he didn’t want to reveal at that time. Call me a cynical, but I don’t think we’ll see any new features that can be considered top secrets, and Jobs mentioning these “top secrets” was just a cop-out. My personal opinion is that Apple is moving away more and more from the core OS business, just look at the move earlier this year to drop Computers from the name, and that OS development won’t be that important anymore.

Anyway, I certainly hope I’m wrong and that Jobs pulls something really, really cool from his hat. But if he doesn’t, don’t forget I said so :-).

By the way, I really, really want one of the new MacBook Pro’s to replace my MacBook.

VMWare Fusion Beta 4 Released

Yesterday I posted about a new feature – Unity – in VMWare’s virtualizaton product for Mac; Fusion, and how I wanted to get my “grubby” little hands on it ASAP. Well, lo and behold – VMWare must have heard me, because they released Beta 4 last night!

I have just installed it, I haven’t had time to do anything much apart from checking that my VM’s run in this release; they do. This is good as I am on my way to Boston to teach (writing this on a train, going down to London). It looks though that I won’t be able to use the Unity feature, as – at the moment – it is only available for XP VM’s and all my VM’s are either Win 2003 Server or LongHorn Server. I guess I better set up an XP VM just to check it out.

VMWare and Unity

Back in December 2006 I posted how both Parallels and VMWare had released betas of their respective virtualization products for Mac OSX. At that time I used Parallels almost exclusively, and I’ve been doing that up until quite recently (actually until VMWare Fusion Beta 3). I have now switched (more or less wholesale) to VMWare Fusion.  Some of the reasons for this:

• Feels more polished
• Support for 64-bit guests
• Support for multi-core on guests

One thing that Parallels has however, that VMWare doesn’t is what they call Coherence. It is the concept of being able to run Windows apps on the Mac desktop as if they are “native” Mac apps. I.e. you don’t run the app inside the VM window, but on the Mac desktop.

Well, VMWare doesn’t have it – yet. Yesterday they released a demo video on YouTube showing off what they call Unity, which is their implementation of the same concept. It is awesome. Have a look:

I so hope VMWare will release a new version with this feature ASAP!!

SQL Server 2008 (Katmai) June CTP Released

So during Tech-Ed Microsoft released with very little hoopla the first public CTP of the next version of SQL Server. It goes under the code name Katmai, but will most likely be called SQL Server 2008.

After a lot of hassle I finally managed to install it last evening in a Windows 2003 Server Virtual Machine, so Ihaven’t had much time to look at it. However, one thing I saw was that it now supports table like structures as input parameters to stored procs – wohoo!!!!!

Tomorrow I’m off to Boston to teach a gig there, hopefully I’ll have time during the flight to have a more thorough look of this new version. I’ll report back anything interesting I see.