TechShorts

Heavy boots of lead, fills his victims full of dread.... If I were a Hero I would be: Iron Man Iron Man 90% Hulk 85% Spider-Man 75% Green Lantern 65% The Flash 55% Catwoman 50% Superman 50% Robin 45% Wonder Woman 45% Supergirl 45% Batman 25% Inventor. Businessman. Genius. Click here to take the Superhero Personality Quiz This is interesting in that I can see myself as any one of the top three listed.

This is pretty impressive.  The KVM is a hardware virtualization that should have better performance than software  VM's.  Check out the video to see  how responsive it is.   Windows XP Virtual Machine On Linux (KVM) - video powered by Metacafe

Just got an email about the 6.0 version of the VMWare Workstation and all I can say is "Wow!"  These are the features I am mainly interested in: Multiple monitor display - You can configure a VM to span multiple monitors, or multiple VMs to each display on separate monitors. Integrated Virtual Debugger - Workstation integrates with Visual Studio and Eclipse so you can deploy, run, and debug programs in a VM directly from your preferred IDE Headless mode - You can run VMs in the background without the Workstation UI These new features will help me at work as it really does fit into my work style.  The next PC I get I'm going to install a base system then VM's for everything else, all development will be done in a VM sandboxes. The question now becomes:  Will VMServer have these features?

I actually got a MythTV machine up and running yesterday!  Man I was so excited, I have tried several times in the past but with no luck.  However after finding a good How-To on the Ubuntu web site I was up and running in (almost) no time. I have tried using MythDora but I could not get it to work.  I think the reason was because of the stupid pain in the ass to set up ATI All-In-One card.  This card has never worked right for me, either in Linux or Windows so it is time to chunk it. This past week I came across a How-To site using Fedora Core 6 which I was prepared to follow.  But then I got to thinking that there should be something similar for Ubuntu, which I prefer over Fedora.  Sure enough the community site had one so I was in business. The first attempt I made failed.  It failed because I attempted to install the proprietary drivers for that stupid $%^@ ATI card, something I will never attempt again with this card as it is going in the trash soon.  So I wiped out the inst

I have several Open Source projects I am following and to facilitate downloading the code I created a simple NAnt script.  The script worked great until the other day one of the projects started failing to update. Most of the projects I'm tracking are in Subversion.  All I'm doing is checking out the trunk then about once or twice a week doing an update.  So when the project started failing to update I figured it would be a simple matter of deleting the project folder and just checking it out again. Wasn't going to happen.  One of the directories would no delete, no matter what I tried.  I tracked it down to a couple of file in hidden _svn folders.  I could delete every other file in this folder except for these.  Nothing seemed to work. I finally dropped to a command window and attempted to DEL the file, that is when I got the first real clue what the problem was:  the file name  was too long.  The root folder of all the projects I was updating was on my Desktop so the

  Ok, what kind of ass-hat idiotic thing is this? Source: [GIT PATCH] more Driver core patches for 2.6.19 That has got to be one of the funniest things I've read in a long time.  Well, at least in the last 24 hrs.

  And that easy solution must work in a similar way to this: 1. Via a GUI app found on the /Administration menu that lists the 10 most wanted proprietary applications and asks the user to check the boxes of the apps he wants to install. Show a license agreement that waives the distro off any legal problems and then download and install the requested software. 2. When a user tries to load an mp3 or a .wmv, have patched your multimedia apps (e.g. Sound Juicer, Rhythmbox, Banshee, XMMS, Totem) to inform the user why they can't play these files and ask if he/she wants to download the codecs. If the user says "yes", show the license agreement that waives the distro from any legal problems and download/install the requested software. If installing the MP3 codec, also install the required Gnome mp3 profile so users can actually rip in MP3 with Sound Juicer. Source: A Call to Distros: Give Users What They Want - OSNews.com I couldn't agree more with this.  When I go to

I've been playing around with VMWare and vitalization for a while now and I have to say I really like it.  I have a virtual Ubuntu image that I am using to learn Ruby on Rails with.  I installed VMWare's server on my file server so I can run VM's from any PC in my house. So last night I was working on my gateway PC when the thought hit me:  Why not create my own virtual domain?  I could create an image and install IPCop on it, add three virtual Ethernet cards to the VM and bridge the fourth to a real NIC and viola - Instant Domain.  Just add more servers. From there I could add servers to the Green, Orange and Blue Virtual zones and just play around with configurations.  I could create a mini-web farm, play around with MySQL replication, a virtual cluster, anything. Granted I would bump into a Hardware wall pretty quick, I dumped all my old PC's so now I don't have that many to play with.  But I bet I could still but together something pretty cool.

I am working on automating our build process and one of the things I am trying to do now is to add FxCop to the mix.  There are a couple of ways to run the process, one using an exec task to call the executable directly, the other is through a Contrib task <fxcop>. I tried the first method with no success.  For some reason I couldn't get the output file name to be recognized by the executable.  I eventually had to switch to the <fxcop> task but I had to set a system envitonment variable to the executable first.  It eventually looked like this:   <target name="analyze.fxcop" description="Runs FxCop on build output"> <setenv name="PATH" value="${tools.dir}\fxcop;%PATH%" /> <mkdir dir="${build.dir}\\fxcop" /> <fxcop directOutputToConsole="false" analysisReportFilename="${build.dir}\\fxcop\\fxcop.xml" failonerror="false"> <targets> <inc