…To MacBook

I saw that Snow Leopard was only going to be $29 and I was so ready to jump on that bandwagon until the day they released it. Rumors went around that Parallels 3.0 does not work on Snow Leopard. This doesn’t work for me because I have a windows XP drive set up with parallels 3.0 which I use when some clients require me to use Windows or to test web pages on IE. Some people recommended I use a different VM but I spent a long time just setting up the windows on parallels that I don’t want to do that all over again.

Just when I quit on the idea of upgrading to snow leaopard, I found this site that has a large list of application compatibility with Snow Leopard:

http://snowleopard.wikidot.com/o-t

That’s where I found out that Parallels 4.0 works with Snow Leopard, so I decided to upgrade. I just spent $56.98 to upgrade to 4.0.

Installation is pretty straight forward. I downloaded a .dmg file from Parallels, double click on the file and you get a window that has the installation package. Just double click the installation package and follow the instructions. I just went with all the defaults without changing anything.

Before starting parallels 4.0 up, remember to first back up your windows installation just in case something goes horribly wrong. I’m using time machine and will be forcing it to do a backup right before I start it up. If you don’t have time machine set up then you could just as easily go to where you installed your windows VM and you should find two files. The first is a .pvs file, should be a small file that just has the VM configuration (mine is called “Microsoft Windows XP PRO.pvs”). The second file is the actual virtual hard drive (yeah I said actual virtual!) with a .hdd extension (mine is called winxp.hdd). You can also save the .fdd file (the floppy drive) but I don’t think that’s necessary but why not just back that up as well.

After installation, I ran the windows vm configuration by double clicking on it. I got a prompt that asked me to upgrade the VM to the new version with a warning to back up before doing so. Because we’ve already backed everything up, I just went ahead with the upgrade process. After a few minutes, parallels 4 started normally. The only problem I’ve been having is an issue with the floppy drive not being recognized which I don’t really care about because I don’t use it, everything else is working.

I was looking for a good way to stream my MP3s and Videos from my itunes to my xbox 360. The xbox talks about connecting to a media pc on your local system and there was no obvious way of connecting the xbox to my mac, until I found Nullriver’s Connect 360. I first downloaded their trial version from here. Installation was a breeze, just unzip the file and then double click on the “Connect360.prefPane” file and connect 360 gets installed in your System Preferences pane under the “Other” section:

Preferences Pane with Connect 360 installed

Once you open the Connect 360 preference, all you have to do is click the “Start” button and it will index your iTunes content and make it available for xbox 360. You will then see your computer’s name come up on the 360 when you go to the music or video library.

I didn’t even have to think about going to the site and paying the $20 fee to nullriver. It was so easy to install, so easy to get started and when I played some of the MP3s on the 360 and saw how well it worked I immediately bought a key to activate the full version. I would highly recommend this to anyone who has a mac and an xbox 360.

When an application in OS X is stalling on you and you have given up on regaining control of it, the best thing to do is kill it before it takes down your whole machine. Usually you would right click on the application icon in the Dock and choose the menu item “Quit” or “Force Quit” if available and that should do the trick.

Dock Menu When Right Clicking Application

Or you could click on the top left corner “apple” icon which will bring up a menu where you will see something called “Force Quit”. Choosing that option will open a small window with a list of the running applications which you can forcibly kill.

Force Quit Applications

Sometimes though a key component of OS X fails on you which you don’t have an option to force quit like the above mentioned methods. I came to such a situation when the Dock froze on me the other day. It just would not come up at all. Today I had a similar situation when I had cover flow switched on in the finder while I was browsing an external hard drive that has 20 gigs of hundreds of subfolders inside hundreds of subfolders that contain thousands of photos. Cover flow could not handle this and it wouldn’t allow me to do antyhing else either. I had an application crunching data for the past 5 hours so restarting the machine was definitely not an option. I needed a way to cleanly kill Finder without destroying any other work going on. In situations like this you need to go beyond the GUI and directly to the terminal. Yes, I know, now that I am writing this article, I noticed that the “Force Quit” application actually has Finder as an option but being someone from a linux background I immediately go to Terminal for anything I need rather than look for GUI solutions.

What you need to do is find the PID (Process ID) of the application you need to kill. To do this, type the following in Terminal:

ps aux | grep Finder

The result of that command will be something like:

sergemadenian   131 97.1 25.9  1213744 542124   ??  R    Fri12PM  54:49.70 /System/Library/CoreServices/Finder.app/Contents/MacOS/Finder -psn_0_40970
sergemadenian  3932   0.1  0.0   590472    192 s000  R+   10:07PM   0:00.00 grep Finder

“ps aux” is the command that prints out all the currently running processes from all users. ” | grep Finder” will restrict the results of the “ps” command to show only the lines that contain the word “Finder”.

From the above result you can tell that the Finder application is question is the first line and I have set the PID in Bold and red “131″. You can also tell that this process is struggling because immediately after the pid we see the CPU and memory usage which in this case is “97.1 25.9″ (those are percentages).

Now that we know the PID (131) all you need to do is run the command:

kill -9 131

“-9″ tells the OS to kill immediately. That took care of the offending Finder window and I noticed that a new Finder process had been kicked off by the OS. If a new process had not automatically been kicked off, I would have had to start it manually by running the command that was running before which I’ve marked in blue and bold ”

Same process applies to any application including the Dock. All you need to do is find the specific PID by changing what you filter with grep. For the Dock as an example, you will need to run:

ps aux | grep Dock

Remember that the PID is not a universal number (that is your Finder application will not have 131, even my computer will have a different PID for Finder when I restart it) so you need to always find the unique PID running at the time.

Here’s another post that will be a short one for mac OS X. The best way to control what will run on startup is to go to System Preferences -> Accounts Pick the user you want to modify the startup list for and choose the “Login Items” tab. You should see something like this:

Account Login Items

At this point just pick the application you want to stop running on startup and click on the “-” sign to remove it from the list.

I recently heard about, and installed Understudy; an open source plugin for Front Row that allows access to streamin media. It currently supports Netflix streaming and Hulu. I don’t really care about Hulu but I do have a netflix account and I already use netflix to watch movies on my xbox. Installing front row was straight forward but once in the front row interface, it was a little tricky to get used to the operation of the plugin.

First you need to go into the understudy category and add new feed. From the netflix menu you can add different categories like the most popular list of all time, the newest movies avaqilable to watch instantly, most popular last week and so on. You need to open safari before loading front row and you need to be logged into your netflix account. In true front row fashion the list shows up on the right and a thumbnail with a description of the movie on the left.

What I like about the plugin is the clean interface of front row to browse the movies. I also like the fact that I can browse list of movies especially the latest additions to the instant system. The code seems to work fine without any problems.

My gripe though is that I need to open safari, go to netflix.com, log in and then open front row. If I need to do all that then why not just continue using safari? I wish this plugin had an area where I could put my username and password and it would log into netflix wihtout the need to start safari. The other issue is that my own movie queue does not show up which is available on the xbox version. Both the xbox and understudy have no way of searching the netflix library and you are pretty much stuck just using the lists that are available. It’s a little ahead of the xbox because of the ability to browse some lists at least whereas the xbox only has your queue. To watch anything on the xbox you need to first log into your account on a computer, find the movie and add it to your queue.

Even though it’s missing some of the features that I’d like to see, understudy is in it’s infancy and is a great step forward in streaming movies on front row. I encourage mac users to download the plugin.