For various reasons, mostly because the vast majority of business users are in a “Windows” environment, I also run Windows XP on my iMac (with Unix isn’t that out of this world?). All compatibility issues can be tested some applications that simply won’t run on  a Mac, can be installed. (and yes there are still fonts and Quicktime issues between the two platforms when exchanging multimedia files)

Trade software (stock exchange, financial analysis, legacy, third party utilities) developers often only cater to the largest market out there: the Microsoft hegemony. Although 

And the first one now
Will later be last

The Times They are A-Changin’. mostly because of the iPod’s and iPhone’s popularity, the design of the Mac and the overall flexibility and robustness of the Mac OS X feline releases. Tigers and Leopards are eating up market shares.

Read this fascinating article on Apple’s recent progression. The most dramatic aspect of their inroads are in the sales and profits they are making in comparison to Microsoft’s. In terms of OS installed base Microsoft has roughly ten times more but, in terms of profit, Apple is making a third of Microsoft’s (hardware and software combined). Microsoft is selling about 770,000 VISTAs a month and Apple is selling about 1 Million copies of Leopard monthly. Count me as both a Mac and Windows advocate when foes coexist… where do I fit in? I just think one should always consider the best tools for any given job, setting aside a priori opinion. I’m buyest for my personal computing but that’s another story. (end of intro I guess)

I picked Parallels over Bootcamp because I wanted the Mac to coexist with its PC foe to fight it out for CPU cycles. Yes this Mac is big enough for the “boot” of them. I recommend 1 Gig of RAM for Parallels as anything under that will make you wish you had chosen Bootcamp.

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I’m proud of myself today. Perseverance and research, trial and error have yielded a new way to install OS X Leopard remotely. My problem was that I own a PowerBook G4 with a broken DVD drive (long story) that I wanted to update to Leopard. To make a long story short, I used a strange combination of hardware and boot up key secrets (sooooo specific to Apple), to achieve the desired result.

I did quick research on the Internet and could not find a simple way of doing this aside from the usual forum best advice… I had tried to mount the PowerBook on my iMac Core Duo using a FireWire cable and “T” for target and then installing the system off the iMac’s drive with the PowerBook as the target installation drive.

Much to my dismay, Leopard’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Universal Binary installed an Intel personality on my perpetually “? booting ” PowerBook.

The solution was to mount a MacBook as a target Firewire drive on my PowerBook and boot the PowerBook using the”Alt”key to find a volume with an OS that would be the Leopard disk inserted in the MacBook’s DVD drive. Wow, how geeky can it get? I was running out of fingers, keyboards and wires. Are you up on your keys?

Here is a good primer for you:
On boot up  
hold the C key to start from CD 
hold the T key to put computer in FireWire Target Disk mode
hold the ⌥ key to show all startup disks 
hold the ⌥⇧⌘⌫ to start from external drive or CD

In the Finder
Pressing ⌃⌘-power will restart
Pressing ⌃⌥⌘-power will put computer to sleep
⌘-tab cycle forward through applications
⌥⌘-esc Force Quit Applications dialog
⇧⌘3 screen dump (entire screen)
⇧⌘4 screen dump (drag a rectangle)
⌘-space Spotlight

Read more for OS X keyboard shortcuts.

There is a lot more on the rixstep web site. They are programmers who chew UNIX like we chew gum. They make a couple of practical programs that they release under a suite. They are known for XFILE and CLIX that I had fun using for clearing caches. Check out Spike if you need a “real” file shredder. Outbox sounds like a very practical mailing application.

The main argument for their approach is that you should take control of your data, including hidden files. It makes sense to me. Revealing iPod_Control for example might be useful if you got your computer stolen and were left with your iPod as consolation.