Parallels report, part 3
Monday, April 02, 2007 by Dave Winer.
I've been running Parallels and Windows XP on my 17-inch MacBook Pro for a few days, and I still like it! It's not quite as bizarre for me as it is for others because I administer my servers, which mostly run Windows, using Microsoft's Remote Desktop Connection, which puts Windows inside a window on my Mac. But this is stranger, because it's using my local machine to simulate a real machine. Okay, I know other people have run emulators before, but this is my first time, so humor me. 
I like it because Windows has won so many wars with me that I like the idea that finally I get to win one. This is the ultimate revenge for having made a fool of me so many times, now I've got it fooled into thinking it's got a whole machine, when in fact it's just an app! Hehe.
Did you see Men In Black and how there were galaxies everywhere inside everything, even inside a piece of jewelry? That's what it feels like. There's a whole little universe, and inside there they don't know they're just living in a dog collar! Oh Microsoft, I hope you'll understand, please don't take it personal.
Anyway, back to the serious stuff.
I had to run Windows somewhere new because both of my Windows laptops had died and I needed to test new builds of the Windows version of the OPML Editor because the new version of Internet Explorer broke it. We did something fancy, we embedded the browser control in the MDI window, thinking we could do something cool with it, but we never did, and now it's just a liability.
I'm at the point where I think I've managed to disable the feature enough to stop the crashing, but according to Amyloo, it leaves the app looking bad, but (key point) not on my machine.
So I swallowed hard and installed IE7 in the virtual machine, in the process I had to validate and then activate my machine (the one that doesn't actually exist, heh) but it turns out you have to do it the other way round (this is Windows after all) so I happily did that, and IE7 is now theoretically installed on the machine. I'll let you know how it goes.
PS: This is what happened when I tried to launch IE7. I guess it's (virtual) Big Red Switch time. Luckily, it reboots much faster than a real PC does.
PPS: I had to reboot several times to get the machine to respond. Oy. Maybe installing IE7 on a virtual machine wasn't such a hot idea. Anyway, I did finally get it to reboot successfully, and was able to reproduce the condition that Amyloo reported.
