I think possibly one of the most practical upgrades in VMware Server 2 appears to be the ability to automatically turn on virtual machines in a stagnated order. I have fond memories of turning on a server with 10 virtual machines, and when they all turn on at once, the hard disk grinds to a halt. This forced me to turn on the machines manually afterwards. +1 VMware in my books.

I now have successful installation of VMware Server 2 (Beta RC1) on top of Ubuntu 8.04 64-bit. I have been using various virtualization technologies for years, and VMware is usually the easiest to install and configure. So far, VMware Server 2 RC1, has proven to be the exception to the rule. That said, I am very excited by the direction VMware is taking – this new server version looks to have great potential.

Installing the tools in VMware Server 2 is a little different than Workstation or the previous versions of VMware Server. Under the Summary tab of your Virtual Machine, look for a link that says “Install VMware Tools” – click it. Wait for ‘Success’ to show up on the bottom, and jump into your virtual machine. Mount the tools as so: mount /dev/cdrom /media/cdrom And install as normal (copy the .tar.gz to /usr/src, extract it, install it). Easy peasy.

The laptop had 1 GB of memory and ran Windows Vista. I heard a memorable quote today: “I think Vista plus Office equals Monster.” That was followed by: “I just clicked the exsomething.exe with the somethingelse.exe and hit end task. Now my desktop went black.”

I needed another Python fix, and I need one pretty badly. I spent the weekend wondering why it appears to be impossible to edit the GUIDs inside an Exchange mailbox store (read: NOT the GUIDs stored in AD for Exchange). Anyways, I digress. My goals were simple. I wanted to use Python, wanted something to do with traffic, and wanted to play around with Glade/PyGTK and graphing stuff. My end result was a little app that allows you to specify a GPX file, and it plots the waypoints (and calculates the moving average!). Pretty simple, pretty useless, but pretty fun. I really do like pretty pictures.

I had a mere 12 minutes until my laptop, running Ubuntu 7.10, finished upgrading to the newest release, so it seemed like the perfect time to share a few updates from my life. The last few weeks have been chaotic, to say the least. I found my own place at last! I am now in Pendle Hills. The commute to work isn’t much different, and taking the bus may even be a little faster. Living in a house again, rather than an apartment, is nice. I am quickly warming to the idea and generally enjoying the house.

I showed a few of my co-workers my graph and one replied – oh! that’s really cool. (I think only two of my co-workers are actually interested in my geekyness). He then emailed me tonight a .kmz file containing a colorized file of his speed. I looked at the kml and noticed it appeared to be dynamically allocated judging by the top speed. Well, as you could guess, I surely had to modify my code to include colors.

I recently have been playing with parsing GPX files and spitting out the results into a special KML file. I initially wrote a parser using minidom, yet after running this the first time – and my Core2Duo laptop reaching 100% utilization for 10 seconds – I realized I needed to re-write it using something else. I spent a little time reading the different parsers for XML and eventually read more about cElementTree. And it is included with Python2.5, sweet.

I have had to search for the commands to setup a Windows 2003 box as an ntp client a few times now, so have decided to finally write them down here for my own good measure. Funny thing is, I’m pretty sure there are three ways to setup a 2003 box as an ntp client. Open up the cmd prompt and type in: w32tm /config /manualpeerlist:"0.pool.ntp.org 1.pool.ntp.org 2.pool.ntp.org 3.pool.ntp.org" /syncfromflags:MANUAL /reliable:YES /update net time setsntp: "0.pool.ntp.org 1.pool.ntp.org 2.pool.ntp.org 3.pool.ntp.org" Type in gpedit.msc and your local GPO editor will pop up. Go to the folder as indicated in the below screenshot and Enable the “Enable Windows NTP Client” option. Next …

Status: ✅ You can likely tell that I’ve been having some fun with graphing and mapping recently. I was reading a few articles about GIS and stumbled upon a pretty darn cool project at Webopticon, which included cool pictures. I showed it to a friend thinking they would find it interesting, and then realized: oh! KML has an altitude attribute. That could be interesting. One of my projects is to create maps of Sydney’s traffic, so I have been experimenting heavily with Mapnik and OSM. I figured I could have some fun and finally parse some gps tracks and display the data.