Moving Media

I just bought two external USB drives to serve as a mirrored set. Setting up the RAID was easy using Disk Utility. Now I'm copying over iTunes, iPhoto, etc. Here's some handy instructions for iTunes: http://support.apple.com/kb/ht1449

WP7 Emulator on Parallels 6 for Mac

I just upgraded to Parallels 6 and thought I would attempt to run the Windows Phone 7 emulator. Simply building and running did not work. However, I ran the emulator from the Start menu. It took a long time for it to start up. The emulator rebooted a few times, then it arrived at the phone home screen. From there, I could launch the debugger from Visual Studio.

While re-testing for this post, I would occasionally see the following error when attempting to attach the debugger:

a specified communication resource (port) is already in use by another application.

I did a Build -> Clean and retried. Success!

The app that I built does nothing. It was simply the Visual Studio template. So I can’t yet attest to performance while debugging, or the availability of features.

The virtual machine is Windows 7 Ultimate. With the first few tests, it had 1 processor and 1GB of ram, which was an error in configuration. I changed it to 2 processors and 4GB of ram. That didn't seem to increase the speed of the emulator startup by very much.

Please give it a try! I am curious if others can reproduce the success.

Uninstall XCode

sudo /Developer/Library/uninstall-devtools --mode=all

Thanks: macdevelopertips.com

Mac OS X System Icons

Mac OS X's system icons are located at

System » Library » CoreServices » CoreTypes.bundle » Contents » Resources

Thanks macoshints.com.

Time Machine & Airport Extreme

As I type, my MacBook is backing itself up to a network Time Machine drive. The drive (1TB LaCie) is attached as a USB AirPort Disk to my AirPort Extreme. It took a fair amount of trial and error to get it going. However, once I figured it out, there really isn't anything to it. While most of what I have found on the interwebs cheers that this is a relatively new feature for the AirPort Extreme, the posts out there aren't especially helpful in discussing exactly how to do it. Thus, here are my notes.

1. To begin, attach the drive to a physical Mac.
2. Use the Disk Utility and erase the disk using the "Mac OS Extended (Journaled)" format type.
   
3. (optional) I went ahead and made two partitions; a little one at the end as a general purpose file share for the network. Not sure if that is a good or bad idea, but thought it would be fun since (I think) I can delete it or resize either partition later.
   
   
   
4. Unmount the drive from the Mac and plug it in to the AirPort Extreme.
5. On your Mac, open the AirPort Utility and click the Disks tab.
6. Click the "File Sharing" button and "Enable file sharing" with "With a disk password". It's kind of a bummer that the APE will not secure each partition with a different option. I would prefer to secure the file share with accounts. Oh well.
   
7. The AirPort will probably have to reboot.
8. When it is back online, open a Finder window and double click the AirPort icon under "Shared".
9. Open your backup disk, supplying the disk password. You should see a disk icon of your backup disk on the desktop.
10. Open System Preferences and click Time Machine.
11. Click Change Disk. You should see your AirPort backup disk as an option.
12. Choose this disk. When you are prompted for a username and password, provide the name of the disk as the username.
    
13. Let it start backing up. It will take a while.

OK. That's where I am right now. I will post more on this topic as it progresses. I hope to get all three Macs in the house automatically doing this. I also read that I can configure the Windows boxes to participate, so I'll try that as well.

High Contrast

It really is a bummer that Windows and Mac can't accommodate a dark, (or high contrast) color scheme. I'm trying it right now. It is much easier on the eyes, but lots of images and applications are wonky.