Missives from the 6th Floor

First of all, a big f-you to Palm for making it so damn difficult to get data out of Palm Desktop.

A couple years ago, Vince gave Dawnise a Handspring Visor, which she used on and off for a while before relegating the device itself to the graveyard of unused gadgets.

She continued, however, to use the Palm Desktop software for managing her calendar and contacts - mostly due to inertia.

Since she hasn't used the Palm device itself in several years, I decided not to just install the Mac version of Palm Desktop, and to get her calendar and contacts into some standard format that she could import into Thunderbird and Lightning, or Address Book and iCal.

Palm Desktop will only export to "datebook archive" (.dba) - and googling led me to an amazing number of people with multi-step workarounds involving importing data into Yahoo! Calender, then back out to CSV, then into Outlook - which was a full stop as she doesn't have Outlook on her PC. I also found a pay-ware application that would do the "dba to csv" conversion in one step - but I wasn't about to pay 10 pounds for an application I'd use exactly once.

Fortunately, jpilot was but a yum install away on my Linux box. It'll export directly to the formats I wanted, but needs the data to be on the Palm device, which - as I said - hasn't been used in years.

I found the Visor, put in some batteries, and spent a good 20 minutes trying to get it to hotsync on Windows. Once that was done I was able to hotsync it to my linux box with only a modicum of hassle, and viola, out pops the data.

Elapsed time: waaay to long.

Fortunately, the migration of her Firefox and Thunderbird profiles was easy - just copy the entire profile directory from the Windows box to the appropriate place on the Mac and edit the profiles.ini file, adding the migrated profile.

She experimented briefly with just using Mail.app, but the prospect of migrating all her RSS feeds and local mail folders into a new application was a bit daunting. Also, the fact that Mail.app completely screwed the pooch when I changed the name of her IMAP server didn't inspire confidence in a successful migration. (For the curious - when I changed the IMAP server from it's address on our local network to it's mDNS name, it "lost" all the folders on the IMAP server aside from her inbox, and wouldn't sort it self out 'till I removed the profile and preferences files and set it up again from scratch.)

Aside from all that, her notebook is (and will be for the foreseeable future) a Windows box, so it seems preferable to sacrifice a bit of integration for the benefit of only one interface to learn and remember.

We spent a chunk of time downloading, installing, and starting to experiment with Parallels Desktop and VMWare Fusion. The two products are pretty similar - close enough that the reading I did last week didn't suss out a clear winner.

Initial impressions are that both are pretty good, though both took a bit of tweaking to successfully run the small set of casual games that were our test set, and neither got networking in the VM right out of the box (specifically, windows name resolution doesn't work). The "rootless" mode ("Coherence" in Parallels parlance and "Unity" in VMWare) offered by both products seems to work pretty nicely. Haven't spent enough time with either to pick a winner yet.

My thinking is that three Windows containers should be sufficient - one for her games and the small set of Windows specific "productivity" applications she needs (like this), one for Rhapsody, and one for "other stuff" - like the Netflix watch on demand feature that uses Windows DRM and hence may not play nice with Rhaposdy.

I'm thinking that the next step on the Windows front is to install BootCamp and see which VM is easier to point at that install.

On the OS X front, I'm sad to say that they haven't made any progress on multi-screen support, it sucks just as badly as it did when I wrote this back at the end of 2004. Nor have they improved the "on focus" mouse event behavior I mentioned in the same rant.