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I’m jumping ship – VMware Fusion

VMwareI just installed VMware fusion on my Macbook; Parallels they crept up behind you. Don’t get me wrong I love parallels and its incarnations, but VMware has a smaller feature set and its fast.

I have been running Fedora 7 through VMware, with it emulating to cores thats right you can virtulise stuff on multiple cores. It screams. I had a little trouble getting the resolutions right (this is because Fedora isn’t a supported OS) but a bit of googling (who knew this was now a verb) and I got it going.

I now have a fully operational Death Star, for use with my many future Ruby on Rails Projects. I am really looking forward to seeing what Parallels comes up with in there next version, all it really needs is more performance and I will have a dilemma which to use?

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BTs Top Ten Causes For Slowness

I have been experiencing some heavy packet shaping by my usually pretty good ISP BT, when I emailed them to ask what was with the excessive packet shaping I got this reply.

If there is an EMI then the connection may drop or you may experience slow browsing. Please make sure that the modem is not placed near any of the following electro magnetic devices such as:

1. Halogen desk lamps near the modem or telephone line, especially those with dimmers.
2. Any electrical dimmer switch.
3. Electronic devices, such as stereo speakers, PC speakers, televisions, monitors, microwave ovens, etc.
4. Routing the telephone line parallel to an AC power cord for more than a few inches.
5. Electronic insect electrocution devices (bug zappers).
6. Low quality 900MHz cordless telephones.
7. Any other emitter of high frequency electromagnetic radiation.
8. Should not be placed above the computer tower.
9. Should not be placed directly on a carpeted floor.

How does carpet create an EMI, or for that matter any of them really effect speed of my connection.

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Trixbox Pro Released

TrixboxToday marks the release of Trixbox Pro, a more business orientated version of my favorite VOIP system asterisk. Fonality are doing some clever stuff with Pro and its great that I can use it without paying mega money (in fact not a penny)

It looks exactly what I have been looking for, Asterisk based, but stupidly simple to manage, and no editing the conf files manually. I just want something that doesn’t take forever to learn and make work. I am running Trixbox CE at the moment and its one update away from reinstall so it looks like a perfect opportunity to change to Trixbox Pro.

I will have a review posted as soon as I get Trixbox Pro Installed and running.

Trixbox CE – Community Edition

Trixbox Pro

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BBC Clogging the Tubes

Senior executives, including BT Retail’s Ian Livingston, The Carphone Warehouse boss Charles Dunstone and Tiscali UK’s chief Mary Turner have held informal talks amid growing anger over the BBC’s hitching a ‘free ride’ with its new iPlayer system for downloading TV programmes over the web. Link

Oh no the ISPs don’t like there bandwidth being actually used. Call me stupid but we pay the ISPs for bandwidth, so why should the BBC have to pay, the ISPs already get the money from the consumer least they could do is put the money back in and invest it and give us more speed.