When I was in the USA I bought an Apple TV and brought it back home to Belgium.

Last night, it broke down entirely after just a couple of months of operation. When I hook it up to the power socket, nothing happens. The front light doesn't light up, and I can hear no noises of the hard drive spinning up either. Seems to me that either a fuse broke, or something else just fried.

I spent some time with the Apple support line, both in the USA and in Belgium and they both say that I can only have it services in USA. I'll thus have to wait 'till my next trip to San Francisco in October to have the Apple TV repaired.

This sucks, I thought that all Apple products had worldwide warranties, apparently some of them don't.

This blog entry is just to speak up about the ongoing blogosphere effort to show the need for Java 1.6 on MacOSX.

If you are a Java developer that uses MacOSX, please create a blog post with this string:

13949712720901ForOSX

Also, file a bug with Apple and explain why you think that Java 1.6 support is important.

I personally am still confident that Apple will release it in the coming months since they need Java support for their server products. Not keeping up with this would significantly cut their customer-base there. The fact that there have been several pre-releases is also encouraging. It's a shame though that none of those are available anymore.

It would be very frustrating to have to move to another operating system just due to the lack of Java 1.6 on MacOSX. None of the other operating systems give me as much joy and productivity both with work and personal use of the computer.

Apple, please don't disappoint the large Java community that adopted MacOSX ... and release JDK 1.6 soon.

After having sent in my Macbook Pro Core Duo 1 in for repairs last year, with a broken motherboard, I was sort of pissed since it took 3 weeks to get back to me. I had to rent another machine to be able to continue development since I was heavily using Parallels. I easily got over it though, since I knew it was the first revision of the hardware platform and that there were bound to be problems like this.

Anyway, when the Macbook Pro Core Duo 2 was released at the end of 2006, I decided to get one. The much improved ventilation (virtually silent), more ram, a faster CPU and a glossy screen were too tempting to pass on. It's been a smooth ride, until the day before yesterday!

I was happily working when all of a sudden, the Mac Gray Screen of Death slowly slides from top to bottom. Yeah, I've been having them so frequently over the past two years, that they can start competing with Windows' Blue version. As usual, I do a hard reboot and ... nothing. Screen stays black, no startup chime, nothing works. I tried everything, resetting the PMU and PRAM, starting from a DVD, starting from another volume, using target disk mode, ... nothing. I call Apple Support, they make me do it all again while being on the phone, surprisingly the results are the same (another hour lost), and they tell me that I have to bring it into an official repair center.

I really dislike this new policy where you have to bring a laptop yourself to a store, even when you have bought the additional Apple Care support. A few years ago, they at least had FedEx pick it up at your place. Now, the burden is on you.

So, I drive over to the nearest qualified store (doPi in Mons, 35 kms from where I live) and drop off the machine. Yesterday was spent setting everything back up with my 'old' Core Duo 1 machine.

This morning the phone rings, it's the store where I left my Macbook Pro. They tell me that they're being put out of business by the state and that I have to hurry to pick up my machine, otherwise I wouldn't be able to recuperate it. So I drive back to them and then to another store in Brussels.

Bottom line, I drove 150 kms today and 70 kms the day before yesterday, just to hand over my machine for repairs ... 6 months after I bought it, and while having an extended Apple Care warranty.

Apple tech support in Belgium sucks!

Parallels released beta3 of their Virtual Machine for MacOSX today. I installed it immediately and all my earlier problems were solved. Networking works perfectly, no more crashes or kernel panics, no more cpu usage during idle time, and best of all ... it's fast as hell!

One of RIFE's test suites that takes 117 seconds to run on the console in MacOSX, took 124 seconds in Ubuntu Linux inside Parallels. That's almost exactly as fast!

I'm taking out my credit card right now to pre-order Parallels Workstation for MacOSX. This is the greatest virtualization technology that I've ever seen.

After setting up Apple Boot Camp completely, I decided to give Parallels Workstation Beta a try.

I installed WindowsXP on it and almost finished setting up a fully functional environment. The first thing that strikes you is that it's amazingly fast. Apart from the occasional minor lag in screen updates, the CPU seems to run at full speed. However, when I installed TortoiseSVN, something went wrong. Windows started to spit out bad memory access errors and Explorer failed to work properly anymore. At that point I was unable to do anything with the virtual machine since I had no working shell for Windows available, I erased it.

The main reason for me to run a virtual machine is to be able to access Oracle Database 10g Release 2 under MacOSX (no, the PPC version doesn't work under Rosetta). I decided to create a virtual machine for Ubuntu Linux 5.10 next.

The Linux installation went fine and the entire Oracle database together with the creation of an initial database took only 10 minutes. That's really a proof of how fast the virtual machine is. Sadly however, for my purpose, Parallels turns out to be unusable for me. It seems that there's a bug that makes your MacOSX kernel panic when there's traffic on the bridged network interface (either from the VM or from the MacOSX primary OS). I get this crash consistently whenever I try to access the VM Oracle from MacOSX.

I'm eagerly waiting for the next beta of Parallels Workstation. I hope they'll fix the bug that crashes your entire machine soon. When that's done, I'll certainly buy a license of Parallels since the speed is simply mind blowing. Even VMware on Linux never felt this fast to me. You have a wonderful and promising product here, Parallels!