We have Parallels and VMWare to do virtualization. However these are commercial products, so some amount of money is required to be able to use it legally. Just recently, Sun releases its own virtualization product, FREE and OPEN SOURCE!

You can know more about this product at the VirtualBox home page.

Coincidentally there is a video presentation (~16Mb) at MacWorld that discusses what it is, how you can use it, and how it performs.

I’d try using this with an image of Ubuntu Hardy Heron. I’ll be posting the results later.

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Looking for an inexpensive phone that I can use to replace it, I chanced upon a phone by LG that seems to be the most inexpensive 3G phone currently in the market.

The LG KU250 was the winning proposal for the 3G For All programme started by the GSM Association. The 3G for All programme’s aim is to produce an affordable 3G handset “that would bring 3G multimedia services and mobile internet access to a mass-market user base around the world”.

If you’re wondering how affordable a 3G phone like this can be, I got it for less than Php5000 (open line, no free prepaid SIM included) from Mega Cellular Network Inc.’s SM San Lazaro shop.

What does a Php5000 3G phone has in store? Read further:

• Tri-Band GSM (900/1800/1900 MHz), UMTS 2100
• Dimensions: 111 x 47 x 15.6 mm
• Weight: 85 g
• Battery: Li - Polymer, 950 mAh (230 min Talk time, 17 days Stand-by time)
• Screen: 1.76 inches, 176 x 220 pixels, 262,144 colors, TFT
• Camera: 1.3 megapixels (Back), VGA (Front)
• Memory: microSD support, 10Mb internal (approx.)
• Internet: WAP 2.0, xHTML
• USB: Yes
• Bluetooth: 1.2, Stereo Bluetooth
• Connectors: Proprietary
• PhoneBook:
  Caller groups, 500-names capacity, Multiple Numbers Per Contact, Picture ID, Ring ID
• PIM: Alarm, Calendar, Calculator, TO-DO, Memo, Secret Memo
• Voice: Recording, Speaker Phone
• Email: IMAP/POP3/SMTP

The whole package includes the phone itself, user manuals, a battery, a handsfree set, a mini CD for the drivers, a power adapter, and a USB cable. The phone comes only in one shade, black. The keypad is made of soft plastic, which can be quite noisy for those who write SMS using multi-tap. The USB/Charger connector is located on the side of the phone, as well as the microSD slot. A hole for attaching a lanyard and a connector for an external antenna are also present on the top side of the phone, near the rear camera. Build quality is okay, spare the creaks that you hear every now and then as you dial in numbers or compose SMS.

I wasn’t expecting anything that is extraordinary about it. Yes you can change ringtones, download them over-the-air (OTA), use the Bluetooth transmitter to connect it to your computer and use it as a 3G modem, create MMS, browse the internet using its internal browser, make voice and video calls, take pictures and movies, and load Java applications. However, when you think about it for yet another moment, these features cannot be found on mobile phones that are in the same price range as the KU250!

Kudos to LG for showing the consumers that these features can be obtained without the exorbitant prices that other manufacturers extort from their customers.

Now if we could just convince the carriers to lower their 3G/data rates to close to zero…

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Getting addicted to Plurk was a result of several things. As you may know, I spend my life on Twitter for some time already. It turns out that Twitter wasn’t designed the way it should be, thus when the number of total users swelled to a large size, bugs appeared in the form of Tweets not loading, delayed entries, etc. I am using Twitterrific, a standalone client, to update my Tweets — this one isn’t working properly as well. Given the impression that the Twitter developers aren’t really that concerned about a glaring problem in the design of the database, I have decided to jump ship when I read some of the Twitter friends posted about it.

As it turned out, a lot of Twitter friends are on Plurk as well! Given the timeline approach to different posts and a threaded view for all replies, you see everything organized in a manner similar to a ticker tape of threaded messages.

One feature that causes quite a stir among the users is the Karma system. Depending on your activity, Karma plus points are given to you, depending on your activity over a period of time. Some despise this, yet some actually liked it. Enough Karma points would unlock several items on the profile editing page.

So what are you waiting for? Join me at Plurk!

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Not only does it show a graphical representation of how the storm progresses, but the site also posts news articles about what’s going on.

Visit it at: http://maybagyo.com

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June 12, 2008 was my MacBook’s last day for free technical support. The following day would be its first year. Only then did I realize that I have to make a crucial choice: to get an extended warranty for it through AppleCare Protection Plan (ACPP), or just leave it without support and warranty for the rest of its life. This thing didn’t came to my mind since the past few weeks I was busy with more important things, but then I had to act fast if I decide to get ACPP.

As the image in the Apple Support site illustrates:

ACPP will extend the service and telephone support rendered for some Apple products.

After asking some co-employees who are Mac users, as well as those from PhilMUG, I decided on getting it. As to the reason why: I don’t think I would be able to spend as much money for gadgets in the following years as compared to now (my son would be going to school next year), so I better get ACPP to make sure that I won’t be paying later if something breaks down. So after work I immediately went to iStudio in Gateway Mall, Cubao and took the ACPP plunge.

People in iStudio were quite friendly. When they knew that the last day of my MacBook’s year-long support is on the same day that I would be applying for ACPP, they immediately called some Apple-certified techs to make sure that I could still use what I would be buying from them. All the while, my MacBook got cleaned, and its registration online was confirmed.

After making sure that everything would be okay, we went ahead and registered ACPP. In 5 minutes of less I could already see the confirmation message. That was it! My MacBook is protected for 2 more years!

Upon reaching home I checked the contents of the ACPP box. It has two booklets that contain the registration number and the ACPP Warranty information. It also came with a CD of TechTool Deluxe. Unfortunately the version included was outdated, so I just downloaded the latest from the Apple Support site.

It may indeed be expensive (at Php10,500) but it would be well worth it considering the peace of mind I get when I think about the service I will get in the following years.

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It’s a bag!

It’s supposed to replace my CaseLogic messenger bag, whose seams at the side pockets wore out after just several months of use — creating unsightly holes.

The Considerable Embarrassment has a padded compartment for my MacBook, several pockets to hold the power adapter and other accessories, and yet some more space for books and documents. It holds fairly the same volume as my old messenger bag, but this feels less bulky. The material used by the bag may be the key, which is of the rip stop nylon type, unlike the CaseLogic which uses ballistic nylon.

The padded shoulder strap is a welcome addition. I never knew that these make a big difference when you carry the laptop along for an extended time.

One thing I find better with this bag are the strap holders. They maybe made of plastic, but they look sturdy enough. The ones in the CaseLogic bag are metallic, but are spaced large enough that they tend to shift vertically when I carry the bag with the strap going across my chest. This doesn’t happen with the Crumpler bag.

Another welcome feature is the double locking system. The Considerable Embarrassment has Velcro and clip release flaps — which means somebody just can’t reach and unflap the bag without your knowledge.

I never expected something like this, since we’re preparing for a big event later this year, but this is a welcome replacement to what I use everyday.

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A lot, actually.

Over the course of the next few days after my last post, I got busy with things at work. Since the distribution of mid-year bonuses to company employees is approaching soon, as a Supervisor I had to complete some performance appraisal documents for my team members. Of course I had to discuss details of the appraisal to each one of them. We also had to prepare for crucial work items that I had barely time to create new posts by the time I get home.

Then came the unexpected. On the last week of May my wife had difficulty breathing, and she was at work during that time. Luckily the place where she works is just a few buildings away from mine so I was there in less than 15 minutes. I had to rush her to a nearby hospital and we found out that she had Potassium deficiency that caused her breathing muscles to not function properly. I took the next day off just to take care of her. She got better by afternoon, and I told myself everything’s okay now. I can go back to work tomorrow. Or so I thought.

It was almost midnight when I received a phone call from my sister telling me that our father had to be rushed to the hospital. He fell unconscious while preparing to take a bath. When we reached the hospital’s emergency room, it turns out that he had difficulty breathing and his hemoglobin levels were way too high. He was attached to a respirator (luckily CT scans revealed he suffered no head injury when he fell unconscious) and sent to the ICU after the ER doctors and personnel were able to bring oxygen levels in his blood back to normal levels.

My Father stayed in the ER for a week. During that time I was busy going to and from some government offices to do some paperwork to lower down the costs incurred for his hospitalization. Once he was transferred to a regular room, it was evident that he needed to take a lot of rest, and that he needed an oxygen tank for emergency purposes at home. So there I was looking for and buying a new sofa bed and two oxygen tanks to prepare for his return home.

After another week at the hospital he was cleared to go home. Unfortunately being bedridden for two weeks caused his leg muscles to weaken that he could barely stand up. Fortunately my father is a fighter, and he’s continuously forcing himself to be able to stand up on his own again. Nowadays he could stand up and hold on to a sturdy object as he makes small steps from one area of the house to the other (as compared to his first day home where I had to almost carry him up the stairs), and he uses the oxygen tank less often.

So that was it. I’m resting right now, but I’ll be going back to work tomorrow, looking forward to working for 5 days straight.

No tech-related stuff for this post. I’ll save things for the following ones.

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(Part 1 of my Ubuntu installation series)

Almost three weeks ago the latest release of the Ubuntu Linux distribution, Hardy Heron, was made available for download from numerous servers across the internet. I went and downloaded the i386 ISO image directly from the servers overnight, only to find out that it timed out somewhere on the 500Mb mark. Luckily I was able to find a torrent link from Distrowatch, and by then my download went fast and problem-free. By friday night I had the ISO images for Ubuntu and its siblings Kubuntu and Xubuntu.

What is new in this distro? Read the release notes here.

The following days happen to be weekends, so I have all the time in the world on Saturday and Sunday to do a little experiment: to finally convert my MacBook into one that dual-boots Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger and Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron. So, here’s how it all went out.

On a side note: It’s been close to a year since I bought my MacBook, and that was when I left Linux temporarily to dip my feet into the Mac OS X platform. I’m not really new with regards to using the platform since I had some projects at work that required the use of Mac OS X, but this will be the first time that I’d be using it as my primary OS at home. I find Mac OS X to be a pretty and stable operating system, with a community that gives all-out support to its members. However I find that I miss using Linux from time to time, since the hand-tweaking that I normally do on it is almost unnecessary on Mac OS X.

The first thing to do was to resize the partition of my MacBook’s hard disk. As we all know, Mac OS X gets the entire hard disk space for itself during installation. I did this by firing up Terminal and typing in the following commands:

sudo diskutil resizeVolume disk0s2 90G Linux Linux 20G

My MacBook came with a 120Gb hard disk. In actual use, this translates to a little over 110Gbytes since the computation being used in determining the capacity of the drive is in units of “millions” of bytes (1Mb=1,000,000 bytes as compared to 1Meg=1,048,576 bytes). Part of it has been occupied by the EFI firmware and the root partition for Mac OS X. As the command above states, I have decided to reduce the size of the OS X partition to 90Gb, and allocating the 20Gb freed up for Linux. Take note that this resizing process would take anywhere from 5 to 30 minutes depending on how full the Mac OS X partition is.

After resizing the partition I downloaded rEFIt from SourceForge. This is an open source boot manager that can take over during the MacBook’s startup so that the user can decide which partition to boot. The installation is pretty straightforward, I just clicked on the mpkg file, and left the rest to the install application. It will automatically identify all available partitions and present it as boot options at startup (by this time I only have the original Mac OS X partition and an empty one, so at bootup it shows as an icon for a Windows partition).

Now that the boot manager is in place, I burned the Ubuntu ISO to disc and booted the MacBook from CD. If you’re wondering how to do this, after the ‘bong’ sound, press on the ‘C’ key. After a moment you can hear the disc drive whirring to life as it starts to read the disc’s contents. From here on Ubuntu will run live, from which the installation program can be started.

The installation process is pretty much like the previous release, so I won’t comment about how it looks or how everything carries out. However, during the partition phase of the installation, create only ONE partition for the root directory and do not create one for the swap (the swap will be dealt with in my next post — in real world tests 1Gb of RAM doesn’t really need that much space).

After the installation has completed and a reboot is triggered by the Ubuntu installer, you would now see two options in the rEFIt boot menu: one for Mac OS X, and one for Linux (the icon for the additional partition automatically changed to an image of Tux!). Choosing the Linux icon will take you straight to Ubuntu. A few setting changes later, this is how it looks on my MacBook:

Pretty, isn’t it?

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I don’t know how long Mac clones like this would last, but an article on OSNews may be correct in saying that machines like this that run Mac OS X could be rendered useless through Software update, just like what they do during an iPhone firmware update.

So, how do we call them, by then? Hackintosh, Frankenmac, or Jailbroken Macs?

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