Lentic - photography

I am happy to admit being a bit geeky from time to time, and I’m sure my wife agrees as well. Today, just as a mean to run Windoze XP so I could view my web page in IE, I installed a free virtual machine called VirtualBox 2 from Sun. It is open source and free, and it works on all Windows, Linux, Mac and Solaris. So I downloaded and within 5 minutes I was installing Windows XP SP1 from my old CD. This one is useless with bootcamp which requires SP2, and I don’t want to reboot the computer anyway. I also made a virtual machine for Ubuntu Linux as well, just for fun, and it all worked so smooth. 

I haven’t used any other VM, so I can’t compare, but the way this worked was awesome. By installing a couple of drivers that came with the installation, I could put the VM into something they called “Seamless mode”. Instead of running Windows in its own window, it looks like it runs directly in OSX, much the same as Wine runs the applications on Linux. The Internet Explorer windows can by resized and moved freely around the OSX desktop, but the window frame is Windows XP style. Also, the windows taskbar is just placed down at the bottom of the screen.

And what did I discover about my web page? Well, IE did not render the galleries right (no surprise). I changed them to some java based greybox gallery template instead and the problem was solved. Unless you hate java scripts, but then I would suggest therapy. Java scripts are here to stay whether you like it or not.