Israel: There and Back

I went to Israel last week—which, if nothing else, explains why this blog posting is a day or two late. I had been scheduled to go to London and was dreading it because the tales of woe from Heathrow Airport were making news. The airport had clearly been unprepared for the knee-jerk change to security procedures—to the extent that laptops and other valuable gear was being lost in transit. Legal cases will follow.

However, I ducked that particular bullet and was redirected to Israel to look at some emerging video technology. It was impressive—and when I'm no longer bound by non-disclosure, I'll spill the beans. The personal impact on me of the London “liquid bombers” was that I lost my toothpaste and shaving cream at Newark Airport. No great loss really, but the bad guys have chalked up yet another small victory over the frequent flyer. No longer can you clean your teeth on the airplane, when you fly the red eye. Forget mouthwash too.

A number of the Israelis I met expressed gratitude that I had come and not been put off by the rocket showers near the Lebanese border. Truth is that I'd been more worried by the possibility of losing my laptop at Heathrow.

Migrating To Apple

If straws in the wind are anything to go by, there is now a very clear Mac migration trend in progress. I keep running into professionals who are making the move for the sake of a less troublesome computing life. So, having just bought a 17" Mac Pro laptop—that might not survive a trip through Heathrow, but would probably recover from a near miss (but not a direct hit) from a Katyusha rocket—I also bought the Parallels software that allows you to run Windows in a virtual machine on the Mac and a copy of Windows XP.

Here's the good news. Parallels works fine—brilliantly even. Estimates suggest that Windows consumes 15% more CPU under Parallels than if you load it using Boot Camp, but it also lets you cut and paste from Windows to OS X and you can define a shared directory for files so that all the Windows files are available to Mac. Parallels lets you make other devices available to Windows (particularly important is the DVD so you can load software) and the mouse pointer flips seamlessly from one OS to the other as you move it into and out of the Windows window.

Parallels thus delivers an excellent migration capability. What I've done in my implementation is use Parallels as a kind of sandbox. I'm running MS Word, Excel and Powerpoint in Windows along with one or two other Windows legacy apps. Admittedly I could have bought Office for the Mac, but why bother. I use Apple's Pages as my regular word processor (it can read and write doc files) but I need Word for red-lined documents. Working in this way, I can remove Explorer and Outlook. Parallels allows you to prevent Windows from having access to the Internet, and that's exactly how I've configured it. So I'm running Windows in a box, just like I once used to run MS DOS in a box. I'm holding all my files in a common directory and if a virus did manage to infect my machine—by telepathy perhaps—I could delete Windows and reinstall with very little effort.

I ran into someone who works for a publishing company that has a large number of “creatives”—who have both a Mac and a Windows PC on their desk (they discovered that Windows emulation on the Power PC Macs was too slow to be viable for their work). Parallels is a solution for them for sure and he's going to try to persuade management to introduce it.

I haven't got any meaningful figures, but I've watched the resource utilization of Windows (under Parallels) and OS X. It looks to me as though OS X is much more economic in its use of resources. I'll try to do some direct comparisons in the next few weeks to see if this is true.

And here's the bad news. Windows (running under Parallels) keeps prompting me to buy AV software and get Windows updates. I've found no way of silencing these messages, so I just have to click on them to make them go away. There's always something.

Apple User Note: I have been wanting to kill the caps lock key on the PC forever. I keep hitting it by accident and then having to retype half a sentence. And I've been doing that since the first time I used a PC. I never use the caps lock key and I don't want it. Long ago I lost hope of slaying it. It never occurred to me that Apple would let me disable it—so I've suffered this irritation for the 18 months that I've been an Apple user. But with Apple you can disable it—under System Preferences, Keyboard & Mouse, Keyboard, Modifier Keys.