For the last 8 months i have been trying to move from my Dell (Windows) based system to my new MacBook Pro, using VMWare Fusion has helped the process along.

After lots and lots of tests i have finally moved my Dell from the primary space on my desk and my MacBook Pro with Dual screens has taken the spot and can now do everything i need on a daily bases.

This is good news as i upgraded my MacBook Pro to 4gb of memory and added a 320gb WD hard drive to make it my new monster PC MAC.

My List of must have tools to convert from PC to MAC

1. VMWare Fusion
   
2. Time Machine(Yes you must also backup your MAC)
   
3. Windows Vista running in VMWare Fusion
   
4. Office 2007 for Vista
   
5. Skype for Mac
   
6. MSN for Mac
    

As I also do .net deveopment running Visual Studio 2008 on my Vista system is just perfect.

Working with some RFP software can be link taking a stab in the dark. Most of them are not easy to use and mostly do not work.

I have been using a product called SantSuite from Sant corp, and it is the worst software i have seen in a long while. Not easy to use and very buggy....

Well i back to coding....or maybe we should develope RFP software....

For those that have been following the development of the new ASPPortal.NET portal on this site(powered by ASPPortal.NET), you would be glad to know that development is continuing strongly.

We have focused on creating a portal that you can use out of the box but also customize. We have focused on the look and feel so that we can use the power of CSS in our portal.

We are also looking implementing a new Photo gallery for the portal as user do use that often, but we need to make it better and more AJAX enabled.

For those of you that need to download a portal right now then you can still download our free ASPPortal from http://www.aspportal.net

Please send us your comments support@aspportal.net

With our new ASPPortal.NET portal we are implementing AJAX and .Net 3.5 framework

You can look at the ASP.Net AJAX Show case

http://www.asp.net/ajax/showcase/

If you would like to try it your self then go and download it from http://www.asp.net/ajax/downloads/

After the new release of FCKEditor 2.6.3 we updated our ASP.NET Portal to see if the fix is working or not, well the good news is that it works really well. Below you will see the release notes from the FCKEditor website.

FCKEditor 2.6.3 Release notes
This new version of our ASP.Net integration fixes incompatibility issues with the Microsoft ASP.Net AJAX UpdatePanel. Other minor fixes are also included.

What's New?

Version 2.6.3 (Download Zip or GZip from Sourceforge.net)

Version 2.6.3

Fixed Bugs:

• [#2412] FCK.InsertHtml() is now properly removing selected contents after content insertion in Firefox.
• [#2420] Spelling mistake corrections made by the spell checking dialog are now undoable.
• [#2411] Insert anchor was not working for non-empty selections.
• [#2426] It was impossible to switch between editor areas with a single click.
• Language file updates for the following languages:
  • Canadian French
  • [#2402] Catalan
  • [#2400] Chinese (Simplified and Traditional)
  • [#2401] Croatian
  • [#2422] Czech
  • [#2417] Dutch
  • [#2428] French
  • German
  • [#2427] Hebrew
  • [#2410] Hindi
  • [#2405] Japanese
  • [#2409] Norwegian and Norwegian Bokmål
  • [#2429] Spanish
  • [#2406] Vietnamese

This version has been sponsored by Data Illusion survey software solutions.

Welcome to the ASPPortal.NET development portal, yes we have been working very hard on the new ASPPortal.NET portal. This new Portal is based on the .NET 3.5 framework and uses loads of new AJAX goodies.

We will be updating this site daily with new features as this is our first public view of the new portal.

So what can you expect in the new .NET portal, well we will be going into more Web 2.0 / AJAX web development and we will also include some of your most requested items that you have sent thru in the last year.

Well back to development....

The ASPPortal.NET Development Team
 

Expanding the disk itself is very easy.

1) Open a Terminal
2) cd to the directory with the .vmdk you wish to expand.
3) Run: "/Applications/VMware\ Fusion.app/Contents/MacOS/diskTool -X 50GB " where 50GB is the size you want and file.vmdk is the correct name for your VM.
4) Wait.

Now, the issue you run into is that you're increasing the physical (virtual) drive size, but the guest OS doesn't know about this. Just as if you had a 100GB drive, formatted it, installed Windows, and then somehow magically increased the disk to 120GB -- the formatting/partitioning is still set for 100GB.

What this means is that you'll have a larger drive, but the Windows install will only be configured for the old size. You must expand the partition within the VM. You can do this via something like Partition Magic or Acronis Disk Suite. I recently used Gparted (free) to expand a partition in a VM and it worked fine.

If you are running Cisco's VPNClient on Mac OSX, you might be familiar with (or tormented by)
"Error 51: Unable to communicate with the VPN subsystem"

The simple fix is to quit VPNClient, open a Terminal window, (Applications -> Utilities -> Terminal) and type the following:

sudo /System/Library/StartupItems/CiscoVPN/CiscoVPN restart

and give your password when it asks. This will stop and start the "VPN Subsystem", or in other words restart the CiscoVPN.kext extension. Cisco seems to have problems when network adapters disappear and reappear, something that happens commonly in Wireless or Dial-up scenerios. Sometimes putting a system to sleep, disconnecting an Ethernet cable or simply reconnecting your wireless will cause CiscoVPN to loose track of the network adapters on the system. Considering that CiscoVPN is typically used by telecommuters, this is an astonishing oversight on Cisco's part. The above hack should side-step all of these issues by causing the CiscoVPN to re-initialize. It makes one ask, why couldn't Cisco have just put the restart into their client? Or a better idea would be to not reinvent the wheel and use the existing IPSec VPN support in OSX! Am I missing something?

Thank you Anders.com for this post http://www.anders.com/cms/192/CiscoVPN/Error.51:.Unable.to.communicate.with.the.VPN.subsystem

As you have seen in my other posts i have been having some fun with my MacBook Pro, so for other users that would like to upgrade or just see what a MacBook Pro looks like inside please use this link http://www.ifixit.com/ as these guys have great articles with pictures to show you how it is done.

Oh, do not forget that this will Void your waranty for your MacBook Pro.

I have been using Microsoft products for a long time but recently i decided to give Apple(Mac OS X) a try. Well things started off great and i have been close to converting to a full time Mac user, but as with Windows i have not yet experienced a crash on my Mac. 

I also decided that 2gb of memory for my MacBook Pro was no what i needed to a upgraded to 4gb. When i received the memory i installed it in my MacBook Pro as instructed in the installation guide on apples website.

Then i booted and things got weird, well to make a long story short one of the memory modules was BAD so it caused my drive to corrupt some files and also OS X. Now i was stuck with a MacBook Pro that will not boot and i cannot fix or repair the hard drive with the utilities online or on the Mac repair disk.

After 2days of searching on the internet and trying a few things i finally got my system back but running on a Firewire drive, this allowed me to recover my files from my mac and start from scratch again.

So i now have my system back but with a bad taste in my mouth. What i mean by this is that when you install a bad memory module in a Windows system and boot then it goes nuts and you reboot after you removed the module and life is good again but not on a mac, so now i understand why Apple only runs on Apple hardware as it is so sensitive.

Well this leaves me back with a better feeling of Microsoft and it made me think that we all have bad things to say about Microsoft but it is just because we have not gone thru the pains with other systems.

So for the average user Windows is still the safer platform.

Well back to my Mac as I need to get VMWare Fusion going with Vista to work on the ASPPortal code.