By mike
So, on the heels of my post pointing out some tips on ways to increase the chances of successful physical-to-virtual conversions using VMWare’s Converter, you’ve decided to take the plunge and get rid of all those PowerEdge 2600’s you’ve got lying around.
Good for you! You’ve successfully finished a clone of your server’s physical hard drive(s), and the conversion process is almost done. BUT: At anywhere between 94% and 99%, the VMWare Converter console shows a failed conversion at reconfiguring your target virtual machine. So you switch to your VM and try to just power it on: BSOD. What now?
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By mike
One of the tasks I’ve been working on for the past two months has been the conversion of a large number of physical servers to virtual machines using VMWare’s Converter 4.0. Once again, VMWare offers up a free product to get you sucked into it’s technology. I’ve used other P2V tools in the past, some paid for, and the technology has come a mighty long way.
For a free product, I’ve got to say this is an amazing piece of software and pretty bombproof if some basic steps are taken to maximize the chances of success with using it. I hope to outline some basic steps you can take in order to up those chances, focusing on Windows 2000 and 2003. I can tell you I wish I had known a lot of this info previously when having performed some other clones… Read more »
By mike
Yeah, got off my butt and posted these up on my Picasa Web account for all to see…
By mike
Ever look at some of the reviews of iPhone apps? Ever actually read the idiocy that people think is okay to put up there?
Get a new system of ratings, or at least moderate the most stupid ones, Apple.
By mike
I’ve found that two things get in the way of updating this site: skiing and starting a new job. I mean, being married and having a very active dog and wife and it being prime motorbike weather doesn’t usually put as much of a crimp on at least posting some new pics of the most recent ski season, but with this new position I’ve most definitely stepped into the major leagues. I’ve been working on an ESX deployment that takes virtualization to an entirely new level that I’ve never experienced before - DRS, HA, NetApp NFS storage with snapshotting, and much much higher uptime expectations from my customers. It’s exciting, if terrifying at the same time. 
By mike
…just drop me a line. Apparently I had something to do with it.
By mike
To quote Gizmodo today:
Sure, you can get a fuel-efficient hybrid car, but it’ll cost tens of thousands of dollars. That’s too much for the Top Gear crew, who’ve set out to build a 70MPG car for only $7,000.
They’re doing this by buying a 28-year-old Volkswagen Rabbit, driving it up to CWS Tuning in Saskatchewan, replacing the engine with a “modern, computer-controlled, turbocharged VW TDI engine” and then driving it down to UCLA where aerodynamics professor John McNulty will help, as they say “make the car more slippery.”
And for reference, a 2009 Toyota Prius achieves 48MPG and costs $22,720, while a 2009 Honda Civic Hybrid achieves 40MPG and costs $24,320. This thing will get 70MPG for $7,000.
It’s a downright awesome project, one that they’ll be covering step by step online via video and images. And they’re looking to get the internet to name it for them, so look for the Ballsmobile to hitting the road in the near future. We can’t wait.
By mike
Yeah, there were a whole ton of people all pissed off about the latest Facebook terms of service (ToS). As Consumerist says:
Make sure you never upload anything you don’t feel comfortable giving away forever, because it’s Facebook’s now.
Queue the millions making FB groups denouncing Mark Zuckerberg, and so on. It now looks like the people at FB are taking a longer look at their decision:
Over the past few days, we have received a lot of feedback about the new terms we posted two weeks ago. Because of this response, we have decided to return to our previous Terms of Use while we resolve the issues that people have raised. For more information, visit the Facebook Blog.
If you want to share your thoughts on what should be in the new terms, check out our group Facebook Bill of Rights and Responsibilities.
Whether you decide to keep your Facebook account or not, you might want to get just a wee bit more paranoid about who can see your stuff. And thus the recommendation of an excellent article over at AllFacebook: 10 Privacy Settings Every Facebook User Should Know. There were more than a few good suggestions in there that I had no idea you could do. Read it. Facebook it.
By mike
Click for larger image
’cause I’m dead-set on an iPhone, and I’m dead-set against T-Mobile. But how cool of a feature is My Tracks?
Many GPS receivers require you to plug a separate device into a computer, install software, transfer, convert and upload your track to the web. With My Tracks, this has become a whole lot simpler. I no longer need to carry multiple devices when I go out for a ride, and I can easily share my rides on the spot with anyone I’d like by recording and uploading my track right from my phone and then sharing it out via email or even Twitter.
Granted, I think that Twitter is utterly stupid, but how useful would this be for motorbike rides, 4-wheeling, mountain biking, proving just how many tracks you got in last weekend at Mary Jane? So cool…
EDIT: The folks at TheAdventureLife.org have posted up their top 25 outdoor iPhone apps. Maybe “Trails”?
By mike
I have no idea how I missed this - I guess I keep my desktop too cluttered up with stuff to notice? I’ve been running Windows 7 since it was released as Beta and love it. Enough so that the next laptop most likely will be a PC? (gasp!) Anyhoo, I had disabled User Account Control in Windows 7 simply because I’ve honestly never run into an issue in the past on non-UAC-enabled Windows versions like XP - read: I have no problem running everything as administrator. But disabling UAC ended up closing all my gadgets. And I’ve liked gadgets in the past and I want them back. How do you do it? Via the registry, of course.
Fire up regedit and navigate to:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE \ SOFTWARE \ Microsoft \ Windows \ CurrentVersion \ Sidebar \ Settings
Create a new DWORD (not a 64-bit QWORD) named AllowElevatedProcess. Set that value to 1 and close regedit. No need to reboot or anything. Go back to Control Panel, and gadgetize-away.
Take this all with a grain of salt, as there are those that view this issue as a major security flaw: Sacrificing security for usability: UAC security flaw in Windows 7 beta.
