I use my MacBook Pro for both business and personal. At home, I try to use the Mac side as much as possible while still running a Windows Vista virtual machine at the same time for development stuff. When I’m at work, all I run is Vista from my virtual machine on the MacBook and then iTunes in the background from the Mac side.I was getting ready for a conference call last Thursday. I closed my MacBook and with that in tow, I headed for one of the conference rooms. When I got to the room, I opened my lid and to my surprise my screen didn’t come right back on like it usually does. I power cycled it … still no screen. After my call I went back to my desk and plugged into my external LCD display … nothing. Granted my Time Machine backup was current, so that…

A couple of weeks ago I posted a story about virtualized performance where I did a comparison between VMware Fusion and Sun’s VirtualBox.I wanted to update that story to include some details on Windows performance when Parallels is added to the mix.Interestingly enough, Parallels really isn’t that much further behind Fusion in terms of average boot time. To be precise, the difference is about .8 seconds between the two. Probably not that noticeable to the average user.It comes down to features in that case. I also think there is a lot to be said about the stability of Fusion given VMware’s years of experience and product maturity. This will be a very important year in the Parallels development cycle. We’ll see what they have up their sleeves.

In my previous post, I talked about the difficulty keeping all your social networking sites up to date. When I was trying out Blogo tonight, I came across Ping.fm.The premise of Ping.fm is that “Ping.fm is a simple service that makes updating your social networks a snap.”Exactly what I need. Once you create your free account at Ping.fm, the dashboard allows you to add a number of social networks like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Plaxo, Flickr, and lots more. That means that you update from one spot, and the update gets pushed to the rest of those services automatically. Pretty neat stuff.

Although primarily I’m a PC, I do like to see what options are available outside my virtualized environment and available on the Mac.Mac has a whole array of blogging applications available with a variety of features, but I’ve never been a fan of any of them. I’ve stayed pretty close to Windows Live Writer and have done most of my blogging from that platform. That being said, it’s been a couple of months and I thought I’d do a another search for some good blogging tools for the Mac. I came across two of them tonight, one of which I am using for this entry. First of all is ScribeFire. This is a nice little blogging tool that integrates directly into the Firefox browser. No separate application installation required, just a small plug-in for the browser. Full editor with a lot of the features that most bloggers would be looking…

Lots of folks are trying to save money in their data centers by optimizing their infrastructure usage with virtualization. Interestingly enough, with the release of Hyper-V and Microsoft’s program for hardware virtualization vendors, the support policy for Exchange and other applications has changed.A couple of weeks ago, a post appeared on the Exchange Team Blog asking the question, “Should you virtualize your Exchange 2007 environment?” They lay out several scenarios where virtualizing at least some of the Exchange infrastructure might make sense.Take a look here.