Apple’s Boot Camp has been creating quite a flurry of online activity. Honestly, far more than it is probably worth, but since, hey, this is Apple allowing you to run Windows on a Macintosh, it’s easy to understand why everyone’s panties are in a twist.

In between dealing with the multitudinous wildfires we have at work, which I’m still not really wanting to talk about, I manage to surface for a few minutes each day to try, in vain, to catch up on my email and RSS subscriptions. With so much buzz about Boot Camp, I was waiting to hear from John Gruber, given his very well-formed thoughts, reasoning and opinions on matters. I didn’t have to wait long, as he’s just posted an article with his thoughts on Boot Camp.

Reading through, I found something I simply had to quote here:

Right now, it’s a dual-boot situation, which is obviously less than ideal. It’s not hard to imagine, though, that the version of Boot Camp Apple is building into the upcoming Mac OS X 10.5 (a.k.a. Leopard) will be a concurrent virtualization tool — i.e. that Windows (and perhaps any other PC OS) could be hosted within a running Mac OS X session, obviating the rather annoying need to reboot to switch between OSes.

Mac OS X as a host to multiple guest virtualized systems leveraging the hardware virtualization capabilities of the Intel Core CPUs, running guest operating systems at near to full hardware speeds. All running without having to sacrifice a working, productive session in Mac OS X just to run an app or session in another OS. From the very day of the announcement of the Intel switch by Apple last year, I have been fervently hoping for this as a capability, and if I tune my Reality Distortion Field Detector just so, I think I can hear Jobs saying that it’ll be true.

As someone that lives in several OS environments for a living (Mac OS X, Linux, Windows XP), such an announcement would pretty much seal the fact that I’m buying Apple for my personal systems pretty much forever. I drool in anticipation.

What do you think?

I think this is especially tempting considering the new (top-end) dual-core Intel goodness that the Mac Mini really is. If I can build a nice, fat MythTV back-end server with lots and lots (and lots) of disk space relatively inexpensively, then all I really need is a gigabit link from that server to a Mac Mini in the living room.

Think about it. All the heat, noise and bother of a multiple-tuner-and-cable-box setup tucked away in some other room, and nothing but this nice, small, silver box on top of your TV. Add in a bluetooth keyboard and mouse, the TV-out adapter (sorry, no HTDV in my house yet), and you’ve got yourself a combination computer / TiVo-killer to die for.

There’s a short writup here about using the Mini as a High-Def video source, and it seems to work fairly well, overall.

Something bothers me, though, about having the television be the highest-powered computing device in the house…

That said, the Mac Mini is the perfect blend of cool looks, incredibly small size, and decent computing power. I wonder if the Apple Remote is useful for controlling MythTV, or if I’ll need to get something else. If I do go with a Mini for the TV, that means all my other work will be going into building the back-end server.

Parts list:

• Athlon X2 64
• Suitable motherboard
• Two Hauppage WinTV PVR-250 cards
• pcHDTV 3000 tuner card
• 3Ware SATA RAID controller
• Five-drive hot-swap SATA drive cage
• Five 400GB or 500GB SATA drives (buku storage!)
• Wheelbarrow of cash for SDG&E

There’s a few things missing from that list, but I already have most of a computer there already (granted, with a fried motherboard). Should be a freaky box. Now, it’s also on the bottom of the list in terms of priorities for budgetary issues, so we’ll see if I ever get to build it.

When you have a chance to use some truely nice technology, you just want more.

So, a few weeks ago I was handed, gratis, a purple Indigo^2 Extreme, a 20″ Silicon Graphics monitor and a Silicon Graphics keyboard. The monitor needs some help (it’s all tinted green) and the keyboard is just a PS/2 101-key kit in SGI skin, but with the addition of a PS/2 mouse, I have a complete system.

Well, okay, I had to go on ebay and find some RAM and drive “sleds” so I could actually make it usable. But now it’s perfectly usable. After you let it warm up for about half an hour. Otherwise the graphics output looks unhappy.

While I was surfing around for the parts to make my Indigo^2 complete, I found someone selling an Octane for cheap, with no bidders. Nice box (once I fixed the damage from shipping with crappy packing), and I’m rooting around for an external SCSI cdrom so i can install the OS from scratch.

Yes, while looking around to fix up the SGI box I already had, I was somehow compelled to get another one. It’s newer! Faster! Better! I needed it! Really, I did! Because… well… Do I have to answer?

I’ll probably get rid of the Indigo^2 once I get it all patched up to IRIX 6.5.22 (the last version that supports that machine. It’s a heavy beast. I’ll probably get rid of the monitor, too, if it can’t be fixed, though I need to consult with an electronics wizard I know before I do that.

So, you may be asking, why, now, am I collecting more old computers? That’s actually a good question. Part of it is that I’ve decided I’d like to broaden my horizons and learn more than just Linux and Mac OS X in terms of Unix systems. To wit, I’ve got a Sun SPARCstation5 that I’m going to load Solaris 9 onto for learning and experimentation. I’ve got this SGI Octane. I might even do some graphics programming, and I’m one of the oddball people that likes to get his code working on as many platforms as possible.

And, as it should be already apparent, I’m just a geek.

My latest gadget has arrived, and after a rough start, finally got going.

So, my MiniMate has arrived.

And, you’re in luck. I did a full review, complete with how to take it apart, even more complete with pictures.

I freely admit to being a computer geek. It seems, now, I need to admit to also being a consumer whore. (And how!)

Okay, so it’s not that bad. I’ve been looking for an elegant solution that would give me something approaching a low-complexity hookup for the various external drives I’ve been using as my backup solution so far. I’m using two 250GB drives for rotating as “backup media” with Retrospect Backup Desktop to perform rotating backups of my 15″ PowerBook, and will eventually be doing this several nights a week, and including my wife’s Windows PC and PowerMac G3 once I get my desk arranged (which will be another story). I also have a floppy drive that I occasionally use, a Sony USB Memory Stick reader that I use for getting pictures from our digital camera, and a USB keyboard & mouse. I’ve also been giving some serious thought to having another external hard drive around to serve specifically as an emergency boot volume, and would ideally be an exact duplicate of the hard drive inside my PowerBook.

So, imagine my surprise when I saw the MicroNet MiniMate plugged on Slashdot. It’s the perfect companion for a Mac Mini, but, with a little thought, I realized it’s also a good companion for a PowerBook desk setup. It’s small enough that it would sit nicely on top of my external FireWire drive enclosures (this item at NewEgg.com) and provide a powered USB Hub for the floppy and Memory Stick reader. The single remaining USB port would be used by either a PS/2 Keyboard/Mouse USB adapter that I have, or a single USB cable from a KVM I’m looking at getting. And it’s got an 80GB hard drive built into it as well, all for less than what a FireWire Hub, USB2 Hub, and an external drive would have cost me separately.

Seems like a perfect fit. I’ll let you know how it works out once I get it, which should be some time next week.

Proof positive that MIT students have too much time on their hands, or at least spend too little of it on their studies.

It must be things like this that distract MIT students to such an extent that undocumented immigrant high-school children can kick MIT’s ass.

Actually, that statement was entirely unfair to those high-school students. But my point is that if maybe MIT students didn’t focus on things like USB disco dance floors, they wouldn’t be out-smarted and out-engineered by studends supposedly four years behind them.