ambled on over to the parallels site to register the software.

much to my suprise i was unable to order it. the site was broken for firefox (who doesn’t make their site compatible with firefox?). i filled out the order form but there was no “next” or “submit” button. i managed to find it cleverly hidden on the web page and finally clicked to the page where i could chose payment. usually i pick paypal if the options is available. but when it got to the page that would re-direct you to paypal, but button was non-existent there was text there but nothing clickable.

so i decided to start the whole process over again this time using the firefox extension ie tab. the “next” buttons showed up, but when i chose the payment method again, it said thanks for your order and gave me an order reference number. no redirect to paypal.

ok, i’ll just leave feedback tell them a few things are broken. turns out you need your key before you can get “free email support” there was an option to leave feed back if you weren’t a customer, but they took down fewer details. the email will probably get lost in the shuffle.

because it mishandled the paypal payment option so badly i’m hesitant to actually use my credit card to order… if i don’t hear from them soon, i’ll try that out. i don’t actually expect that to work either.

turns out that buried in the troubleshooting section of the parallels user guide pdf solved my networking problem. my firewall was the problem. once i fixed that, parallels worked great. MUCH faster than vmware, virtual pc, or virtualbox.

i like it enough to actually use it on a regular basis. i still need to keep windows around though. and for the linux fan boys that are wondering why, i can give you a list of programs where there’s no linux equivalent. my goal is to tackle the software i need one by one and get it working under parallels/ubuntu.

i bought my toshiba laptop about a year ago, and at the time i vaguely recall that onenote 2003 was installed on it. i found out later that toshiba was putting it on all their laptops. a month or so ago i was starting a largish project and i wanted some kind of notetaking software. i fired up onenote and after working with it for less than 10 minutes i became a fan. i liked it so much i went out and bought onenote 2007. i like it even better that the version i got free with the laptop.

if think if i wasn’t using onenote i’d probably using ideamason that looks like a seriously cool piece of software.

a few weeks ago i installed safari for windows. it’s main problem is that it still looks like it’s on a mac (itunes for windows suffers the same problem). i use windowblinds so i can change the look to pretty much anything i want when i want.

a few years ago i paid for opera because it had more features than netscape (never used ie). but once firefox came out with extensions, i left all the other browsers behind.

i just can’t live without extensions installed. i’m typing this into a firefox extension because there’s no decent wordpress client that isn’t total overkill.

leo laporte has mentioned parallels several times in the twit podcasts. a windows version was mentioned so i thought i would at least check out the trial version. it was as fast as they claim, but i couldn’t get any internet connection out of it. the laptop i tried it on is less than a year old.

it’s not as far along as the mac version, but not ready for windows.

i was told about virtualbox so i installed it to try it out also. it couldn’t get through the goblin iso i have around for vm tests.

neither one is ready for primetime.

i did try vmware a few months ago, an after it installed kitchen sink drivers that are probably so buried on my system they’ll still be there long after this machine is in a landfill, it worked. but way too much overhead.

i’m starting to think the more linux specific jumpboxes have more potential than a full blown vm.