Just to give a taste of the sorts of things Jeff and I have worked on outside of Magnetk, my SIGGRAPH paper about an interactive preview rendering system I’ve been building with Industrial Light & Magic and Tippett Studio just made the top story on MIT Technology Review:
Developing on Windows can be a real pain. I spent a few hours looking around for an easy way to perform simple HTTP GET calls inside vanilla win32 code. What a pain. WinINet is a disaster and WinHTTP is not much better. It also isn’t supported on all the versions of Windows we target, argh.
It turns out that you can get libcurl [one of favorite libraries] to work on Windows within Visual Studio. Here is a quick overview how to make it happen with the 7.16.4 release.
Download the source and load lib\curllib.vcproj in Visual Studio
In curllib project properties->Configuration Properties->C/C++->Code Generation->Runtime Library change the value to Multi-Threaded /MT [assuming a release build] so it correctly builds as a static library
Then in the project you intend to use libcurl - in the preprocessor section, define CURL_STATICLIB and add the curl include directories
In the linker section add curllib.lib, ws2_32.lib, winmm.lib
Prosper
For good measure, I’ve uploaded a release build of this lib that you can link to in your project [skip steps 1 and 2]
This is what I’ve been looking for! I’ve complained before that the default Airport dropdown is hopelessly inadequate if you’re looking to discover an open access point, or select one that has the strongest signal. Thankfully, this guy went and made it happen. Awesome.
Here is a screenshot from their website that shows you what’s up:
OK Computer is now 10 years old. In honor of that Stereogum has put together a great covers album by some fairly notable folks:
“To celebrate the 10th anniversary of Radiohead’s OK Computer we’ve asked some of our favorite musicians to participate in a song-by-song covers compilation. Indicative of the album’s continued importance, each invitee jumped at the chance; the results are personal, intense, tellingly various. Slow down, dig in, enjoy. But note: we did this all legal and everything, so we can’t keep these up forever…get ‘em before someone else does. Ambition makes you look pretty.”
Joyent Slingshot, which we helped develop, has just been released to the public as an Open Source project under GPL v2. Along with Slingshot, Connector is being made available too. Grab the source, help make it awesome.
I’ve gotten a few questions regarding my Switch to VMWare Fusion post - namely, how do you go about converting your existing Parallels virtual disk so it’ll run inside VMWare Fusion.
Unexpected answer - VMWare Converter. This free tool is designed to convert a physical machine into a VMWare format virtual machine. Nothing says you can’t have it convert a virtual machine, usually, it just doesn’t make much sense.
You’ll need to either install VMWare converter inside your Parallels VM or do a “remote” connection to it, set a few configuration options and then let’r rip. Hope you’ve got some extra hard drive space, you’ll need room to store the additional copy of your virtual hard drive while the conversion is being performed. Enjoy.
UPDATE: VMWare has some detailed instructions on this process in their forums
Right now we’re offering a promotion where you’ll get a completely free license of SftpDrive when you sign up for a BlueHost account - referred through us.
It’s a pretty fantastic deal, $6.95 a month gets you 300GB of storage with 3TB of transfer a month, all mounted quite nicely as a drive letter in Windows. Oh, and there are a whole bunch of other features. Although we’re currently sitting on a lovely Joyent Accelerator [which is a dream], we used BlueHost for a couple years while starting up Magnetk. They served us quite well. As a warning, I think they still require you to email/fax a copy of a photo ID for ssh access, which I admit, is annoying.
So, to review. For $6.95 a month you get a free copy of SftpDrive and a 300gig drive out in the cloud to do whatever you want with. We’re going to set up similar deals with other hosting companies that offer affiliate/referral programs. Let me know if you have any suggestions.
Click here to sign up here.
Once you’re signed up with BlueHost, just email us with the info and we’ll process the coupon.
I’m a proud owner of Parallels Desktop for OS X. It has served me admirably, but it’s time to move on.
A while back, when Parallels announced they could finally boot my BootCamp partition directly, I was in love. I had visions of Visual Studio and XCode existing side by side. Working on the SftpDrive Windows and OS X clients at the same time. Wouldn’t that be grand?
Then I tried it out, and was distinctly less enamored. It was SLOW. It worked, but I didn’t just buy a brand new MacBook Pro so I could have a slow, often painful, primary work environment that lacked any graphics acceleration. I’d love for it to have worked, but I switched back to plain old BootCamp. What can I say, I need my speed.
SWSoft is adding features to Parallels at a rapid pace, which I appreciate. However, their “core” virtualization experience really isn’t that good. Especially compared to VMWare Workstation, which I spend a huge amount of time using. I hate to do this, but let’s go over some of the major offenses:
20% CPU usage while the VM is completely idle, on a fresh install. No need to explain this further, not acceptable. For references - VMWare gives me about 2-4% usage.
It only supports one processor. That sucks.
Disk usage: Parallels Virtual Disk access is WAAAY slower, especially in BootCamp. I get around a 75% performance hit using the disk in BootCamp mode. That’s a made up number, but it feels SLOW. Copying around a 1GB file, painful. With VMWare I experience no such grief.
Memory usage: Man, nothing makes my system, with 2GB RAM, go turbo like trying to run a VM in Parallels with over 512 megs of RAM then switch to another memory-heavy applications, like XCode.
Thanks, Parallels - you really lit a fire under VMWare’s ass. It has taken a while to get here, but VMWare Fusion is at RC1. It’s time you gave it a shot. They are using the same x86 virtualization technologies that they’ve fined tuned in other products for nearly 10 years. It’s really good - you’ll notice the difference. It’s still free, so why not? VMWare is quickly approaching feature parity with Parallels, and it blows down the doors with the performance.
We recently added a screencast to the front page of SftpDrive.com, it’s a good place to start if you’re not entirely sure what SftpDrive does or what it is different.
Screencasts are an incredible way of cleary conveying what a program does or how it is supposed to be used. It allows you to walk anyone through a complex sequence of events at a specifically chosen pace and add however much additional instruction or annotation that is needed.
The tough part is making them. You’re often confronted with a choice between a small file with blurry images or a gigantic file that is still imperfect. To get it right requires some experience and finesse. You’ll probably also want some expensive software if you’re going to do a real bang up job. Forget about all the effort it takes to learn how to use it.
What if you want to just make a simple screencast and not have it suck? I thought I’d write a bit on how we attempted to achieve that lofty goal. (more…)
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