Wednesday, December 30, 2009

Hellgate London: Exodus, Book 1

Exodus (Hellgate, London, Book 1) (Bk. 1)
Just finished reading Hellgate London: Exodus and was hooked from the beginning. Never been much of a fan of books based on games I haven't played, but I really enjoyed this one and I'm about to start on book 2 Hellgate London: Goetia.

The story takes place in the year 2038 when a rift opens between earth and the Demon world (Hellgates) over the city of London. Through these Hellgates demons start pouring out overtaking the city and turning London into a living nightmare.

The following description is taken from Amazon.com
The once-great city lies in ruins. A massive gash in the fabric of our reality roils against the horizon as it blends into a permanently darkened sky. The world as we know it has come to an end. Demons, the visions of our nightmares, walk the Earth. Mankind, driven in retreat to the sanctuary of the Underground, struggles to survive the Hellish apocalypse.
Among the survivors are those who foresaw the coming of the darkness, those who see it as an opportunity to improve the standing of man, and those who seek revenge for what was lost. All are now banding together in the shadows, arming themselves with futuristic weapons and arcane spells designed for one purpose -- to battle the demonic hordes and take back their world.
About the Author
Mel Odom has written over sixty books which include the novelisation of the movie BLADE and original novels for both the Buffy and Angel series. He has written fantasy, game related fiction, science fiction, movie novelisations, horror, young adult, juvenile, computer strategy guides, action-adventure and comics.


Saturday, October 31, 2009

Boot Camp under VMWare Fusion

After playing around with Windows 7 under Boot Camp on my iMac I decided to give VMWare Fusion a try. I launched VMWare Fusion and was surprised that it had my Boot Camp partition listed in my Virtual Machine list. It went through a configuration stage which lasted about a minute and began to boot the virtual machine, boot time was much faster than running a traditional Virtual Machine and once I logged in it automatically started to load the VMWare Tools software.

Now I have the option to run my Boot Camp installation either by booting directly into the Windows 7 partition or run it as a Virtual Machine with VMWare Fusion. This gives me a lot of flexibility since I won't need to restart and switch from OSX to Windows 7, I can now run them both at the same time. Unity (an option under VMWare Fusion) allows me to remove the desktop window and run any of the applications under Windows 7 as if they were installed on my OSX system.

More info on:

Friday, October 30, 2009

Windows 7 on my iMac

I’m exited about writing this post using “Windows Live Writer” which means that I’ve been able to get Windows 7 running under Boot Camp on my iMac. I still much prefer using OSX than Windows, but this will allow me to code windows specific software on my iMac.

The speed is amazing even though my iMac is two years old, it’s even snappier than my brand new Dell at work (Optiplex 960). Apple has done a great job on getting Windows running on their hardware (I think it run better on Apple hardware then hardware meant for Microsoft products). Anyway, all of my drivers have been detected with no issues what so ever.

Next, I will try to get the Boot Camp/Windows 7 partition loaded into a VMWare Fusion Virtual Machine. From what I’ve heard it runs pretty well since it’s using a partition instead of an image file.

One nice feature is being able to access all of my HFS disks directly from windows (read/write). I’ve had a few bad experiences in the past using my HFS drives on Windows boxes.

I will post any updates if I encounter any issues.

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