wekadesign

After downloading the latest Windows 7 RC I loaded it into VMware Server 1.06 that I installed on Ubuntu Server a while back. All going well until the Windows 7 installer wouldn’t see the disk I had created. It seems that Windows 7 doesn’t like the SCSI virtual disk, so I removed that and created an IDE virtual disk and restarted the install.

Things were much better until it came time to install the VMware Tools and nothing happened. Things weren’t exactly snappy and without the tools installed, they weren’t going to get any better. It was time to make the upgrade from VMware 1.06 to 2.0 and as it turns out, is much easier than previous VMware installs.

Overall I followed the instructions from the LinuxGazette website and things worked flawlessly, but there were a couple of extras due to the upgrade.

Firstly (and fairly obviously), make sure you stop your current VMware daemon/service before starting the install. The VMware installer is pretty good, but I’m sure that your virtual machines would appreciate being offline before things get messed up.

sudo /etc/init.d/vmware stop

If you’re upgrading from VMware Server 1.06 the installer will also complain about the vmnet and vmmon modules being left from a previous version. So we need to get rid of those – using the correct kernel version. You can get that with “uname -r”.

sudo rm /lib/modules/2.6.24-22-server/misc/vmnet.o
sudo rm /lib/modules/2.6.24-22-server/misc/vmnet.ko
sudo rm /lib/modules/2.6.24-22-server/misc/vmmon.o
sudo rm /lib/modules/2.6.24-22-server/misc/vmmon.ko

After that it’s plain sailing. Just follow the instructions to untar your VMware download and run the installer. Assuming you used the default locations in the previous install, your virtual machines will be untouched and start happily under VMware Server 2.0

One of the final things to note in the install is that the new client interface is all browser based. To log into your VMware server requires a password and the Ubuntu root user does not have one by default. So on your server be sure to run,

sudo passwd root

and set a nice secure password for when you head to http://servername:8222. Firefox users will need to give the site security certificate the OK and all browsers will need to install the plugin to use the console to view your machines.

Hooray – Windows 7 now installs the VMware Tools properly and runs pretty well. At the moment I have no sound and the limited graphics under VMware don’t allow Aero fanciness, but I can now test and develop in the Windows world while meeting all license requirements. The Windows 7 RC license is valid until June 2010 although don’t wait that long as it’ll start making life hard for you in March 2010. That’s almost a year of free OS from Microsoft!

One of the annoying “missing features” I’ve struggled with under Ubuntu is that I was unable to wakeup the PC from suspend or hibernate with my keyboard. Of course, Windows just does it – tap the keyboard and the PC starts up again. I could press the power button on the front of the PC, but its down the side of the desk and not easily accessible.

I found an older post in the Ubuntu forums that had the fix for USB devices and it also works for PS2 with the simplest of changes. So follow these steps and you should be saving power and getting back to work faster.

Open a Terminal and type,

cat /proc/acpi/wakeup

Note the entries that come back and you should see a device called “PS2K” toward the top if you have a PS2 keyboard. For those with USB, it’ll be one of the USB items toward the bottom. The entry will probably also have “Disabled” on the same line, hence your problem.

To enable this entry, switch to a root session by typing,

sudo -s

and enter your password. Now type the following to update the acpi file and toggle “disabled” to “enabled”, (those with USB devices can try USB0, USB1, etc)

echo PS2K > /proc/acpi/wakeup

That should have now enabled your PS2 keyboard to wakeup your PC for this session. Give it a test by putting your machine to sleep and then tapping a key on your keyboard. Probably a good idea to save stuff first, just in case.

If you tried changing a USB device, it may take a few guesses until you find the KB. My mouse was USB0 and clicking any mouse button can also do the wakeup task.

To make this change permanant, you need to add that line to a script and run it when Ubuntu starts. So we create a file called wakeup.sh with the following contents,

#!/bin/bash
echo PS2K > /proc/acpi/wakeup

Save it and from a Terminal make it executable so it runs properly as a script and not just a text file,

chmod +x wakeup.sh

Now to add it to the startup area go back to your Terminal that’s running as root. We need to copy the file to the correct location and add it to the startup processes. You’ll need to run the cp command in the same folder as where you saved your wakeup.sh file.

cp wakeup.sh /etc/init.d/wakeup.sh
update-rc.d wakeup.sh defaults

Now when you reboot, the script will run and enable your PS2 keyboard in ACPI so you can wakeup your PC.

Simple and sometimes unnecessary function to add table cells together and populate another with the total. Using jQuery because its easy and it works and we all love it.

$(document).ready(function() {
    var x = 0;
    $("td.num").each(function() {
        x += parseInt($(this).html());
    })
    $("td#total").html(x);
});

Where your table cells to add up are <td class=”num”> and the table cell that has the total is <td id=”total”>.

A while back I wrote about a few little tools from Microsoft that allowed an easy way to create remote print queues. One of the things I didn’t realise then was that another handy tool exists (in the Server 2003 Resource Kit) called setprinter.exe that opens up a few more options.

We use a non-standard print processor at work to insert barcodes on certain output from SAP. So to set all the printers on the print server or just one to use the new print processor, we just run,

setprinter \\myserver 2 pPrintProcessor="SAP Barcode"

setprinter \\myserver\printer01 2 pPrintProcessor="SAP Barcode"

Lots of other properties can also be changed using setprinter.exe, pretty much everything other than security permissions and for that you can use another tool in the RK, subinacl.exe. To view the properties of a queue and what you can change, just cycle through the property groups 0-9 (that’s the 2 in the above commands).

for %i in (0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9) do setprinter -show \\myserver\printer01 %i

Jeff Atwood takes an interesting look at the history of changes to wiki pages and the balance between opinion and fact. The larger wikis (e.g. Wikipedia) have a huge amount of data around page edits and Jeff’s article also highlights an IBM study on how the more popular Wikipedia content evolves over time.

There’s also a comment about one of my favourite subjects – reading too much into statistics. Apparently Jimmy Wales (Wikipedia co-founder) looked into who was responsible for most of the articles changes and found that 0.7% of users were responsible for over 50% of all edits. But an “edit” may be a spelling correction rather than adding content or altering the facts or meaning in an article. As it turns out, the data points to these hyper-active users doing just that – cleaning up after everyone else.

Kisimi uses a basic string comparison function called simple_text() to show the relative difference between two versions of a page. We could also use the Levenshtein function which gives the minimum changes to go from string A to sting B, but that doesn’t always make much sense for larger content changes. If someone sees that two versions are 96% the same then it’s obvious they’re much the same.

The NYTimes has an interesting article about the cost of txt messages that I’m sure most of us have suspected in the past.
Not only is it extremely cheap for a mobile provider to run a txt message service, the data uses a portion of the transmission that gets sent anyway.
A scientist at the University of Leicester recently published some calculations that show txt messaging is a number of times more expensive than sending data to the Hubble space telescope.
Anyone smell a price-fixing investigation?

I’d like to say that I could make a title like “did you know . . .?” into a series of short articles but I’m not that knowledgeable or interesting. But one thing I did discover today was that Windows can mount external USB drives into folders and not just drive letters.

We have a long standing problem in that normal users cannot change the drive letters that Windows XP assigns to memory sticks/thumb drives/external hard drives. Not a biggie but in some cases XP decides to mount the drive using the same letter as a network drive. Your thumb drive is detected and mounted OK but can’t be used. Bugger. It seems that XP ‘user-space’ doesn’t talk with XP ‘storage-space’ about who gets what.

To get around this we remotely use Disk Manager to change the drive letter. Windows ‘remembers’ the drive letter is associated with the USB device’s unique ID and in the future will keep using the same letter. Again, not a biggie and for the odd user in 10,000 a simple fix.

But with the proliferation of USB storage for anything and everything, the fight of the USB device versus the network drive for drive letters may be a problem for some. Enter the mounting of USB storage to NTFS folders! Users can create a folder on their local machine with a suitable name like, ‘My Pimptastic Red USB Stick – 2GB‘ and mount the device in that folder. No drive letters, no XP tripping over itself and a near infinite number of options.

Now who wants to write a tool that allows users to do that? You’d have my vote in any election.

Update – this old problem is resolved in Windows XP SP3. It knows to check your network mappings if you insert a USB drive when logged in.

Installing the free VMware Server is a common but slightly tricky process on some newer Linux systems. Having had to go through it again recently I thought I’d write some of it down. Of course if you are using Ubuntu 7.10 then the simple option is to enable the Canonical Partner repository and just use Synaptic to select and install VMware Server.

For the others in the audience that are installing on Ubuntu 8.04 or another Linux system that doesn’t have packages, you should have a working VMware Server install with web interface and a client console by the bottom of the page. Read more »

Often one of the more difficult things in running a help desk is measuring performance. It’s right up there with trying to find talented staff, but often doesn’t become an issue until everything else is in place.

If you’re part of a reasonably sized company, no doubt your employee reviews contain some sort of performance measurement, so everyone gets judged and maybe even rewarded. In some parts of the business, it’s fairly easy to measure an employee’s work e.g. marketing could get rated on new customers and the sales team by how many extra widgets you sold this month.

As a team offering a service, rather than a product, to their customers, the help desk team often solely gets scored on the number of phone calls or tickets they receive or close. Pretty soon these measurements will create behaviours among your staff trying to increase their performance in these metrics. Team members will go for the high volumes of the easy fixes, or calls that can get handed on to 2nd or 3rd level areas, to pump up their stats. Read more »

Read/Write Web has a list of . . . lists. All containing information about Web2.0 sites springing up like daisies around the internet.

What’s a Web2.0 site you ask? It’s one of those good-looking, fancy acting websites you’ve probably seen around. The developer of these sites use more acronyms than before, like AJAX, JSON, etc that allow users to interact in ways they couldn’t a couple of years ago. Some of these sites are so cool they drop vowels from their names – Flickr and HappyCodr are a couple of examples.

Overall they still need content and community but some of them are just beautiful to look at and fun to play with.