Month: November 2009

Setting up virtualization for my father…

D'Arque Bishop

I have to say, I wasn’t quite expecting me to be on the personal use virtualization bandwagon… at least, not so soon, and not where family is concerned. Granted, we use VMware fairly heavily at the office, but I didn’t expect to start making it available for a family member.

Perhaps I should explain a little. For the past several years, my father has been addicted to a PC game called Re-Volt. It’s a racing game with RC vehicles, and the RC vehicles have toy weapons they can use. Almost every single night, Dad would be at his laptop, playing Re-Volt. However, a few months back the video chipset on his laptop corrupted itself, making it almost impossible to use. With few other options, Dad picked up a new laptop. The problem was that the new laptop runs Windows Vista, so Dad couldn’t get Re-Volt to work properly. In addition, a few other applications of Dad’s wouldn’t run. He wasn’t happy, but he eventually learned to deal with it.

Or at least, he did until this past Friday, when Jennifer and I were at Dave & Buster’s. While there, we encountered a Re-Volt arcade machine, which I took a picture of and emailed to my folks. Unfortunately, that only set off Dad wanting to play the game again. I sighed, and over the weekend I looked into installing it on his laptop. I couldn’t get it to work, so I decided to look into the next best thing: virtualization.

Fortunately, virtualizing XP is relatively easy, as I have a spare license of Windows XP Home Edition on hand. The big question became, “What software do I use?” I could have always used VMware, but I didn’t know whether VMware Player supported 3D accelerated graphics or not, and I wanted to keep to a free solution. I looked at Microsoft’s Virtual PC, but it didn’t support 3D accelerated graphics at all. So, I decided to go with Sun’s xVM VirtualBox, which I know has support for 3D accelerated graphics.

Actually, in retrospect, it’s kind of a good thing Dad decided not to go with Windows 7 after all. He mainly bought it for Windows XP Mode, and I know Re-Volt was one of the items he planned on using with it. Windows XP Mode works in such a way that 3D accelerated graphics don’t work with it either. I’m glad he didn’t find out about that one the hard way…

So, right now, I’ve got XP loaded onto the virtual machine and am doing updates to it, including DirectX and Microsoft Security Essentials. Of course, once this is done, the fun part will be copying the entire machine over to Dad’s laptop, installing VirtualBox on it, and teaching Dad how to use the damned thing. While I should be finished with the virtual machine by the end of the evening, I’ll probably wait until I’m back from New Orleans before I actually install it on his laptop. After all, I know he’ll end up having a ton of questions about it that I won’t want to answer while I’m on vacation.

In any event, like I said, this is the best solution I could come up with for his compatibility issue. I hadn’t thought I would ever need to set up virtual machines for the folks, but Dad wants his programs to run, so virtualization is the way to go. It should be amusing to see how it all works out in the end.

Using a new IM app for my iPhone…

D'Arque Bishop

Some time ago, I had written about using IM applications on my iPhone. I tend to do quite a bit of IMing when out on the road; unlike the AT&T Tilt I previously used, the iPhone didn’t come with an IM program of its own. Over time, I installed the official AIM and Yahoo apps, and they worked fine for what I did (the Yahoo one much better than the AIM one). While there were multi-protocol clients out for the iPhone, I was a bit leery about trying most of them. I had heard Trillian had been planning on releasing an iPhone app for a while, so I decided to wait and see what that one would be like. Well, a few days back, my friend Patrick McCarron informed me it had been released, so I went ahead and picked it up.

I have to say, I was rather impressed right off the bat. Trillian for iPhoneIf you have a Trillian Astra account, it automatically populates your mobile Trillian with the saved IM accounts and asks which ones to load on launch. From there, it signs the user in, and IM works right away. Typing in messages is easy and auto-caps and spell-check works fine. One might not think that would be such a big deal on iPhone, but the AIM app never really supported auto-caps. Push notifications come through fine as well. I actually spent from Friday evening to Saturday evening signed into Trillian on iPhone (as I was away from a PC most of that time), and it worked pretty much flawlessly.

Now, there are disadvantages. Apparently Facebook and Twitter support isn’t in place, which is really fine by me because I prefer using the official Facebook app and Twitterrific for those. There isn’t Skype support either, but then again the Windows Trillian app only acts as a frontend for an existing Skype install. Landscape keyboard support isn’t available, which may be a deal breaker for some; for me, it doesn’t really matter as I rarely use landscape keyboard. The final quibble I’ve heard some complain about is the fact that push notifications are only available for 24 hours between program sign-ons. Again, this doesn’t concern me much as I change my status and availability more often than that, especially if I’m going to bed and don’t want to be woken by incoming messages. :-)

All in all, though, Trillian for iPhone is a rather solid app. I’ve gone ahead and deleted the AIM app for iPhone (which I still consider junk), but I’m keeping the Yahoo app for those times where I just want to sign in to Yahoo to talk to Jennifer while on lunch or something. For $5, it’s hardly the most expensive app out there, and so far has worked out pretty nicely for me. I’ll likely be giving it even more use while in New Orleans later this week as well. If anything changes there, I’ll post about it later. For now, though, it’s a welcome addition to my iPhone app library.

The Bishop Birthday Bash!

D'Arque Bishop1 Comment

Well, this has been an interesting weekend.I'm showing off my cake.

It’s my birthday today. Normally I don’t go out of my way to celebrate my birthday; at the most, all I’d ever do is go out to dinner with my parents. In fact, the last time I had a birthday party of any kind was twenty-five years ago. I had mentioned that to Jennifer, and she resolved to do something about that. She spent the past couple of weeks working behind the scenes getting the party ready, and also working to get me gifts. We scheduled the party for this past Friday, set the venue, and I simply waited for the time to come…
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The Ultimate Mortal Kombat Annihilation Rant…

D'Arque Bishop1 Comment

The following is a reposting of an article/rant made by a now-former member of the Mortal Kombat fan community named “FatSatan”. Like many people, FatSatan HATED Mortal Kombat Annihilation; this prompted him to collect every single thing he found wrong about the movie and gripe about it. After the website it was hosted on went offline, I got his permission to host it on my server. After showing it to Jennifer this evening (in response to her question asking what was so bad about the movie), I decided to go ahead and post it on the main site and not just on a subdomain somewhere. So, for your enjoyment… his Ultimate Mortal Kombat Annihilation Rant.
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A play, a convention, and two scary movies…

D'Arque Bishop

This has been something of an interesting weekend.

I spent the weekend with Jennifer, and we got to do quite a bit of fun stuff. We started off at Birraporetti’s downtown in the Theatre District, where we had a very nice dinner. That done, we wandered around the immediate area a little, taking in the sights and talking, before we went to see Our Town at the Alley Theatre. The show was very good, and well worth watching. Once the play was over, we wandered a block away over to Bayou Place, where we intended having a drink at the Hard Rock Cafe. On the way, we saw a rather… interesting sight: six guys dressed as superheroes dancing around a light pole. In retrospect, I wish I had been closer so I could have gotten a good picture of it. We went into the Hard Rock, had a drink and listened to a band whose name escapes me, and then made our way to Jennifer’s favorite martini bar. After having a couple of drinks there, we headed back to her place for the night.

The next day was something of a new one for both of us. We had learned that Randall Milholland, the author of one of my favorite webcomics, Something*Positive, was in town for a convention called Oni-Con. In addition, some of Jennifer’s coworkers were going to the event as well. So, not ever having been to a convention before, we decided to give it a go. When we arrived at the Marriott Westchase, we were struck by just how many people there were in costume. In fact, Jennifer said nothing but “wow” for four or five minutes straight. Once we got some cash for the tickets, we met up with her coworkers Joseph and Andrew, and got into line for tickets. Tickets bought, we wandered through the area, trying to navigate through the packed hallways. I even encountered one of MY coworkers while walking around.

At one point, we found a ballroom area that had many arcade and console machines set up. What drew my attention, however, was the fact that they had a working Doctor Who pinball machine. I was in heaven for a bit as I got to play (ironically, it’s the pinball machine I’m best at). Once done there, we moved on to the next ballroom, where we watched as attendees engaged in mock battles. We then crossed the hall into a room where vendors sold clothing and other items. One company, WLP, had three t-shirts I wanted. I bought two; one was a very neat IT one, and the other referenced a popular German forklift safety training video. They didn’t have the third one I wanted in my size, however…

That done, we wandered down the hall again, where we ran into Randy Milholland’s table. We talked to him for a bit, and he was kind enough to do a sketch of the characters Davan and Vanessa for me. Vanessa and Davan Sketch The guy was just as hilarious in person as he is in his comic and on his Twitter, I must say. I also got a copy of Super Stupor, which is his parody of superhero comics (and pretty funny to boot). We even got to see Clarine Harp, who is the inspiration for the character of Aubrey in S*P. Randy said he was about to do a panel on webcomics, so we made our way over to where it was, where we were entertained for an hour as he and other webcomic artists answered questions about doing webcomics and talking about their backgrounds. One of them asked why those who wanted to do a webcomic hadn’t done it yet; I almost replied that my art skills make Xkcd look like DaVinci’s work. All in all, though, it was extremely interesting… though by the end of the panel, Jennifer was geeked out, and the overheated room did nothing to make her feel better. So, after grabbing one more game of Doctor Who pinball, we walked over to Outback Steakhouse for dinner, and then made our way back to her house for trick or treaters and scary movies.

Once we got to her house, we got the candy ready for the trick or treaters, and sat down for the first of the two movies of the night: Event Horizon. Jennifer had never seen it before, and wanted to give it a try. An hour into the film, she was definitely unnerved, but we were also a bit disappointed. Not in the movie, though, but in the trick or treaters: we had only gotten two or three coming by. We turned out the lights and proceeded to finish the film. After it was done, she was a bit freaked out, but we went ahead with the next film: Prince of Darkness. If anything, that film scared her even more. She retaliated by threatening to make me watch Twilight; in the end, she put on Bram Stoker’s Dracula which was showing on Channel 55. In retrospect, that movie really wasn’t as close to the original novel as we liked, and we ended up shaking our heads at the Mina/Dracula romance. After that, we called it a night… with a couple of nightmares to boot.

All in all, it was a very fun weekend. I’m not sure when or if we’d do another con, but we’re definitely looking into seeing more plays at the Alley. We’re also looking at a couple more movies to watch at some point. For now, though, it’s the start of a new week, and it’s back to work for both of us. Fun fun…