Anyway: the idea being I could replace my Thinkpad (currently dual-booting Ubuntu and Windows, and with VMWare in Windows with Debian Sarge, Nextenta) as well as replace my Dual G5 tower which I use only for JavaScript testing in Safari, a total waste. Some Photoshop wizard at work can take it instead and actually appreciate it. Then I'd have one laptop with OS X, Windows, Debian Sarge, Ubuntu, Xen playground, Solaris10/Nexenta, etc, etc.
Theory vs. reality:
Parallels ain't all there yet. It's no VMWare in terms of hardcore-edness. Notably:
-- it freezes if your machine sleeps (yes, I have beta6)
-- you then have to reboot your machine, and THEN reinstall parallels because "It could not communicate with one of its drivers".
-- it doesn't boot Nexenta ISOs.
-- it sometimes(!?!??!), like 1 in 4, boots Solaris 10 ISOs.
-- the UI is pretty horrid (it's good enough, though)
-- no snapshotting/branching (I can live without it. too bad I don't have LVM2 or ZFS on OS X though)
On the plus side, Parallels is improving rapidly. Qemu is also improving rapidly. And VMWare has an OS X product coming out soon. So the future is bright. Just a little sad the future isn't here yet. (see also: where's my f'ing flying car?)
In other news while I'm hating: Expat Perl bindings blow. But there's no other event-generating push parser in Perl (I don't want a DOM) and XML::LibXML::SAX only lets me feed it well-balanced chunks. F that. So fixing Expat Perl bindings it is.... but can only trigger the bug once in a rare while. So I have to start logging all traffic and writing a replay system for Danga::Socket so any crash I can then turn around and turn into a test case, played at full speed back to the system, getting same readable/writable/fake reads/null writes/fake alarms/fake err/hup, etc... all external influences logged. Blah. Will be useful, but didn't want to write it.
I should get to work.