I’ve been beta testing VMware Fusion 3 for Mac, which begins shipping on October 27th. It introduces support for Windows Aero and all the fancy glass what-not; I got it working after fiddling around with the video drivers a bit. It made overall VM performance a bit more sluggish, it’s really not worth the performance tax. With Aero effects disabled, Fusion 3 seems to use fewer system resources than v2 which is nice.
I like to keep Fusion running in the background because it takes too long to suspend and startup a VM on a whim. Unfortunately, even when it’s idling, the VM can slow the computer down quite a bit. That’s where the “kill” Terminal command comes in, of course:
kill -STOP <process ID number>
…where <process ID number> correlates with “vmware-vmx.” And to unfreeze the process:
kill -CONT <process ID number>
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» Shut up woman, get on my horse.
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I do quite a bit of QA over at gdgt, which means testing out site functionality in Internet Explorer. It’s a chore to get IE6, IE7, and IE8 running side-by-side on the same Windows machine. I’ve tried Multiple IE and various registry hacks floating around the web, and they work… just not very well. Even though I managed to get all three versions of IE running simultaneously using these hacks, they aren’t always stable, and it all feels a bit dodgy.
Enter IETester.
IETester is an application for Windows that loads webpages using the rendering engines from IE6, IE7, and IE8. It works, and it works well.
The wonderful people behind IETester also make an ace plugin called DebugBar — think Firebug for Internet Explorer. DebugBar integrates with IETester so you can inspect code while testing in different rendering engines.
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» Classic: Whose Line: Sound Effects [YouTube]
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