Reader Paul Waite was kind enough to comment, when I complained about mounting comment spam, that he thought Charles Arthur had found a solution for his WordPress blog. As it happens, Charles and I worked for the Independent in London together: Charles edited the Network section, wherein I penned a column.
I left a note on Charles’ blog, and he was kind enough to respond that Spam Karma 2 had made his blogging life vastly easier. We downloaded and installed it this evening: it found 8 spam comments already on the blog that I didn’t know existed, then caught a new incoming porn spam in its first minute on the job. I think this is the beginning of a beautiful relationship…
According to this post on the Parallels Support Forum – VT-X disabled by firmware update?, Mac Minis with firmware MM11.004B.B00 (the version my machine has) show VT-X working and not working. Parallels works OK, but is supposed to really fly with VT-X ‘on.’ Parallels reports mine is not working…
A guy in Hawaii replaced an aging rack of Celeron-based 1U servers with a Mac Mini running BSD in 2 Parallels virtual machines. His machines catch 10,000 accesses or so a week, and his power and air-conditioning bill have dropped considerably. Cool…
Parallels, the Mac OS X virtualization software that lets me run Windows XP on my Mac Mini, is awesome. With only 512 MB RAM (and the OS needs 128 MB for the video with XP installed) performance is perfectly usable. As hoped, the Mustek scanner’s Windows software is a bit less crash prone (albeit wierder) than the Mac OS 9 Color-It package. We managed 9 high-res scans of newsprint pages before it blew up (beyond task manager’s ability to kill). The 2 GB RAM upgrade is in the works…