Another round-up of the best Mac OS X software I can find.

Piping Microsoft and VMWare to the post relative unknowns Parallels are on beta 6 of their Parallels Workstation for Mac OS X/Intel.

Getting my blog out of Blogger.com and into Subtext was not as easy as I’d hoped…

BlogML is an XML format designed to encapsulate a blog, it’s posts, comments and categories. Sounds great for transferring between blogs… Alas while SubText and many other engines support it Blogger.com does not.

It’s been long overdue but you can thank Blogger for being down for long enough to force me to move my blog to the same host as my web site.

I’ve been wanting categories, track-backs and finer control for some time. I looked at dasBlog, .Text and CommunityServer and rejected each for one reason or another before settling on Subtext. It is far from perfect but it’s the best .NET blogging engine for me right now – yes I know there are some great PHP blog systems out there but I have an aversion to PHP.

Apple have announced the 17″ MacBook Pro at their US Store that should be shipping within the next 7-10 days (early May).

The machine is almost identical to the 2GHz models of the 15.4″ MacBook with the following differences;

One of the great new features in .NET 2.0 is support for nullable types – especially important when dealing with value types such as Int or DateTime values coming from a database. Previously you were forced to either set and track another binary flag or to use a “special” value to represent null that sooner or later would turn up in real data.

In C# 2.0 thanks to a bit of syntactic sugar we can do this;

Getting a new machine often spurs me to go out and find some new tools and utilities. Here’s some recent finds:

DiskMon – see disk activity

Kristian Dupont Knudsen has written a top 10 of programming advice notnot to follow with his rationalisation for each one. Being a programmer I thought I’d chip in with my 2 bits.

Joel recommends not using exceptions because they are “invisible in the source code” and that they create “too many possible exit points”.

This article was written when Boot Camp had limited device driver support and is now therefore out of date.

Apple’s Boot Camp provides the majority of drivers required including the elusive ATI Mobility Radeon X1600 driver however there are a few devices without official drivers. These are;

This article was written when Boot Camp had limited device driver support and is now therefore out of date.

There are a few annoyances with the MacBook Pro keyboard when in use under Windows XP via Boot Camp. The lack of back lighting and the swapped WindowsWindowsAltAlt keys I can’t help with but the getting the Fn key operational, replacing Alt GrAlt Gr and switching misplaced symbols I can.

Just a few quickies regarding my favorite laptop…

iFixit has published a MacBook Pro disassembly with photographs guiding you each step of the way.