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This is a pretty obscure problem, but I’m going to put a post up about it on the off chance I can help someone else out. My regular reader (hi dad!) will probably find this of no interest and should give it a miss

The situation I found myself in was upgrading a Boot Camp install of Windows Vista for the new release of Parallels Desktop 4.0 – no big deal, you may think. Unfortunately, I had forgotten that that particular install of Windows Vista wasn’t activated, which caused the automatic upgrade process to bork, dropping me back to manual mode.

To complete the upgrade I needed to run the Parallels Tools setup executable. However, since I hadn’t activated, I could only log in as far as getting the “please activate Windows now” screen. As it happened, I knew that I could get rid of this screen by feeding it the details of a Windows Vista license I own, but in order to do that I needed an Internet connection (I don’t think my PAYG phone had enough credit on it for an extended Microsoft call centre experience). However, to get an Internet connection I had to install the Parallels Ethernet Connection drivers, and hence the Tools. Catch 22!

The workaround is convoluted, to say the least. First, we need a command prompt in the restricted Vista activation session. You do this by clicking any of the links in the activation window: they should cause a browser to open. From here, you can ask the browser to “Open a file” and direct it to C:\Windows\System32\cmd.exe – this should initiate “download” of the executable. Click the option to run the file and voila!

Now you have a command prompt the fun really begins. You might think you could just type D:\setup.exe and the Tools would begin installing, but life just isn’t that simple – in Their infinite wisdom, Microsoft have imposed quotas on the resource consumption of the session they set up for the purposes of activation. This is probably the Right Thing to do from their POV, but it’s just a pain in the arse for us.

The workaround is to get the internet connection working, so you can do the activation and hence lift the resource limits. To do this, create a floppy disk image containing the Windows 2000 drivers for a Realtek 8029AS adapter (you should be able to get those from here, until Realtek break their incoming links again). Personally I did this by using another virtual machine to download the files and extract them onto a new floppy disk image (you can create a blank image on the Floppy Drive tab of the VM settings). I would make the fruits of this labour available to you as a simple download if it were not for (unfounded?) fear of Realtek’s highly trained attack lawyers.

Once you have the requisite image in your sweaty virtual paws you can proceed to mount it into the Vista VM. To finish up, type compmgmt.msc into that command prompt and update the drivers for the detected network adapter by searching for new ones on the A:\ drive.

You should now be free to run the online activation and break the Catch 22, allowing installation of the Tools – at this point feel free to help yourself to a cup of coffee and a ginger-snap biscuit to celebrate a difficult job done well (I know I did…).

I’m really quite suprised that I had to jump through this many hoops – the Realtek drivers allegedly come with Vista, for one thing. But – c’est la vie! It’s also quite pleasing that the humble, long outmoded, floppy drive still has a place in solving modern IT problems

I use OS X, and so for those rare cases where I must deign to run a program designed for Windows I make use of my copy of it hosted in Parallels Desktop. Now, Parallels has been generally good to me, but I recently came across the problem documented in this forum thread where its ability to launch Mac applications from Windows caused some basic file associations in Windows-land to stop working. For example, Excel files were listed as “xls_auto_file” by Explorer and double clicking on them only gave me the “Open With” dialog: not very helpful.

The thread does suggest a means of solving the problem, by creating a batch file that re-associates a white-list of some of the possibly affected extensions, like this:

REM Restores MS Office File Type Associations
assoc .doc=Word.Document.8
assoc .dochtml=wordhtmlfile
assoc .docmhtml=wordmhtmlfile
assoc .docxml=wordxmlfile
assoc .dot=Word.Template.8
assoc .pot=PowerPoint.Template.8
assoc .pps=PowerPoint.SlideShow.8
assoc .ppt=PowerPoint.Show.8
assoc .rtf=Word.RTF.8
assoc .wbk=Word.Backup.8
assoc .xlc=Excel.Chart.8
assoc .xlm=Excel.Macrosheet
assoc .xls=Excel.Sheet.8
assoc .xlt=Excel.Template
assoc .xlw=Excel.Workspace

However, this felt a bit ad-hoc to me, and in particular some of the extensions that were affected for me were not on the list. Thus, like any good programmer I went off and whipped up a utility designed to undo the damage inflicted on my poor defenseless HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT by Parallels.

Using it is pretty simple: just click “Scan” and then “Fix Selected” repeatedly until the scan finds nothing more of interest. Now, before I give you a download link to the utility, I need to give you the standard disclaimer to which you must agree in order to use it:

This utility is provided on an ‘as is’ basis, without warranties of any kind, and no warranty, express or implied, is given that the operation of the utility is correct or safe to use. I do not accept any liability for any error or omission. Use of the utility is at your own risk.

Sorry for the legalese but this utility is modifying your registry and hence (though I feel it is highly unlikely) could get something quite, quite wrong. You would be also wise to have a backup of the HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT registry branch to restore in case you aren’t happy with the changes made by the utility.

That said, without further ado here is the utility and its source code (C# 3.0), both of which (being of my sole authorship) I release into the public domain. I hope someone else finds it useful!

So, I finally switched to Mac a month ago. I’ve had a Mac laptop since last summer and have been very pleased with the experience, so since Windows Vista has been giving me huge amounts of trouble (e.g. see my last post on getting Cygwin to work, though I won’t go into the full gamut of issues I had here) I decided to go for an Apple desktop machine too.

Happily, Steve Jobs has heard my cries of Windows-inflicted pain and ordered his minions to release a new revision of this baby:

Beautiful, isn’t it? With 8 cores of Xeon love, it’s no slouch in the performance department either. Salivation-inducing hardware aside, it comes with OS X, which is so much better than Vista that its simply not even funny. Overall it’s fair to say that I’ve been very pleased with my purchase

There have been some problems switching, of course. I have Parallels Desktop installed so that I can still develop using C# and I will probably end up installing Office 2007 on there at some point as well, but for pretty much everything else I’ve been able to find an acceptable or beyond-acceptable alternative for OS X. Here are some of my favourites:

	LaunchBar is a very neat application that you can use to quickly access many things on your Mac. For instance, if I want to play the album “Twin Cinema” in iTunes, I just press Option-Space, type “twin” into the box that comes up and press enter: fast and convenient. Similarly, if I wanted to open TextMate I simply press Option-Space and type “mate”. Of course, there are loads more things you can do with it such as running any AppleScript you like or make a Google search.. the list goes on. LaunchBar learns over time what abbreviations you want to associate with an action, and hence it becomes so natural that so you soon find it hard to live without it! Unfortunately it is payware, but it’s certainly well worth the price tag.
	Plot is a really nice graphing application. On Windows I was using Gnuplot, which is doubtless powerful but insanely hard to use. Plot just works and supports pretty much every feature I need. The graphs it outputs look very professional: see for yourself.
	LyX is what I’m using instead of Office (NeoOffice, the OS X OpenOffice port, is too sluggish for words so I’m trying to avoid it). It’s a nice friendly interface onto an OS X LaTeX distribution that makes the common case fast while still letting you access the full power of LaTeX when you need it. The application is actually nominally cross platform but I had numerous problems with crashes and weird behavior in the Windows version that have yet to occur on Mac.
	I bought 1Password (it actually came as part of the MacHeist deal) to replace my long-time Windows password manager Password Manager XP. I have no complaints: on the contrary, 1Passwords integration with Firefox and the OS is much more reliable and complete than Password Manager XP ever managed. What’s more, they are about to release a service called my1Password that will let me get web-enabled access to my passwords from any location and platform! I’m happy as a clam about this as it’s proven impossible to find a decent cross platform desktop password manager application. I should give a shout out to Clipperz here as they have had a decent implementation of this for a while, but the lack of integration with my main password manager (so I have to maintain two lists) and minuscule password limit have put me off using it regularly. UPDATE: Marco Barulli from Clipperz has responded to what I said here: please read this post to get the full story.
	Time Machine, oh Time Machine, how did I ever get backups done before I had you? The answer is: with great difficulty. On Windows I set up a scheduled task to use SyncBack to clone my hard disk to another server. Unfortunately, this was pretty unreliable (partly because I was backing up onto a Linux file system that had an imperfect emulation of Windows security and didn’t seem to support Unicode properly) and also meant that I only had a backup of the most recent version of my filesystem. With Time Machine everything is seamless and I can go back weeks or months in time to see my files at any point, all from within the Finder! Awesome!
	And finally, maybe you don’t find the OS X Terminal very exciting, but for someone who has wasted many hours struggling with Cygwin and its numerous problems (e.g. the awkward attempt to reconcile the Windows and Unix permission models) it is a godsend to finally have a real Unix shell available

I haven’t even mentioned some perennial favourites like Transmission, Perian or AppFresh, but my time is limited! If you really feel the need to peek into all the applications I have installed, take a peek at my iusethis profile.

Overall my switching experience has been almost entirely painless and has certainly made me more productive and satisfied with my machine. Here’s to many more happy years with Apple computers!