How to virtualize Windows on an Ubuntu host for an optimized dev / qa environment

Posted on by Sol Young with 3 Comments

 Ubu-Xu-dows

After converting my MacBook Pro in to a Windows developer dream, I wanted to have the same experience on a more portable, commodity hardware unit. Virtualizing Windows within Windows with VMware Server is something I’m familiar with. It’s something many Windows developers may prefer (and I recommend if you’re not comfy with linux as your host OS).

Quick background: Virtualizing a development/qa environment allows one to have an easily cleaned control environment. When a machine gets dirty (too many installs, tests, builds, or other garbage collects), you can simply delete the virtual instance and copy a fresh installation back over. This saves a ton of time. In dev, this allows a safe, clean, environment to test builds in. In a QA environment, this allows a very fast way to return to a known state.

My goal in a virtualized dev/qa environment is to run a host which consumes an absolute minimum amount of resources. I run virtualization software that allows more than one running VM at a time, such as VMware Workstation (PC), VMware Fusion (Mac), or VMware Server (PC or Linux). If you’re running Windows as your host OS, I recommend Windows 2000 Advanced Server because it is tunable to consume less resources than any other flavor of Windows (including Windows 2000 Professional).

Given that Linux runs on wrist-watch sized systems, it’s a safe assumption that one will get better performance from virtual machines than on a virtualized Windows environment. I chose Ubuntu since it’s super simple to install, is fairly reliable, offers similar features to Windows, and is still a smaller footprint my Win2kAS machines.

I started with version 8.04 desktop (hardy). The installation was a piece of cake, but there are no tuning options in the basic .iso. I installed VMware Server, but just while running the OS I could tell I would run in to performance issues later. The desktop flavor of Ubuntu isn’t light enough to pass all the processing power through to the VMs.

Instructions

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Posted in Education, Microsoft, OS X, QA, Software Development, Ubuntu, VMware, Windows, Xubuntu

Micro-blogging a 10-mile run – Broad Street Philadelphia, 2008 – Utterz

Posted on by Sol Young with 5 Comments

I ran Philadelphia’s Broad Street run, a 10-mile race today, while carrying an iPhone, making calls, checking Twitter, and taking and posting pics. I chronicled the day with Twitter, Utterz, Flickr, and TwitPic. I used Snapture, iFlickr, and SendPics iPhone apps.

Quick Links to the streams:

My plan was to Twitter my progress and TwitPic/Flickr the pics out to my followers. But I woke up at 3am from a caffeine rush and a thought of typing for an hour becoming a nightmare – and boring. Utterz.com, a service doing pretty slick mashups of audio/video/text/photographs/etc, while harnessing APIs from pretty much every popular social networking service, caught my eye (more on Utterz later).

Here’s the day – check the Flickr photostream and the Utterz links below for my audio commentary while I running…

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Utterz

  1. Lined up and ready to go
  2. Started!
  3. Mile 1
  4. Mile 2
  5. Mile 3
  6. Live music between mile 3 and 4
  7. Mile 4
  8. Mile 5
  9. Passing Ed Rendell, governor of PA
  10. Mile 7
  11. Mile 9
  12. Finished!

IMG_0177IMG_0132

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Posted in Blogging, Featured, Flickr, iPhone, Jaiku, Jailbreak, Micro-blogging, Microblogging, Nike+, Pownce, Running, Social Networking, TwitPic, Twitter, Utterz, Wearing, Web Services

The night before the Broad Street 10-miler – thumbs and feet ready

Posted on by Sol Young with 1 Comment

Hand Painted Twitter Shirt

After a few months of preparing for the Broad Street 10-miler, it’s now the night before and pre-race excitement is setting in. iofy‘s new office in the Navy Yard of Philadelphia is a block away from the finish line, so this will be a pretty nice way to finish a race. There are showers and refreshments in the building… Life will be good.

The race starts at 8:30am EDT. For the first time while running a race I’ll be Twittering. This is partially because I want to try it as a social experiment, and partly because I’ve been sick and not training for the last week (read: I’d like an excuse to run slightly slower than usual).

If you see someone blow by you, with the above on the back of his shirt, send a text message to 40404 with “follow sol”…

Gear:

  • iPhone
  • Nike+iPod Nano

Software & Services:

  • Twitter
  • TwitPic (Send a pic to twitpic and have it announced on Twitter)
  • Flickr (Get the photostream here)
  • MobileTwitter (stable jailbroken iPhone Twitter client)
  • Twinkle (jailbroken iPhone geolocation + Twitter)
  • Snapture (jailbroken iPhone camera.app replacement)

Good luck and see you at the finish line!

Posted in Blogging, Flickr, Geolocation, iofy, iPhone, Nike+, Running, Social Networking, TwitPic, Twitter, Wearing

Twitter did some Spring cleaning – stale accounts pruned?

Posted on by Sol Young with 3 Comments

Black Holes

While doing my typical searches for new and interesting people on Twitter to add to the flow, I noticed something indicative of Spring cleaning. You see, when you search Twitter, you usually get pages of people who haven’t updated in a year or accounts with zero updates – ever – and six months stale.

None of those cases seem to be true for my latest search results. There are a couple accounts with no updates in a year, but they’ve got a lot of updates, so they’d likely not be pruned. Either Twitter created a better search algorithm (unlikely, since the results are haphazard and not chronological) or they pruned the dead accounts (makes a lot of sense – I myself got an old account). When I’ve worked at community driven companies, we’ve done plenty of account trimmings.

Twitter doing prunings makes a lot of sense. This is a benefit to the user base, and a huge benefit to Twitter’s load. If this is truly the case, you might do a search for your favorite name about now… And if it isn’t, at least rejoice in a better mechanism to find the people you’re looking for.

Posted in Flow, Prediction, Twitter, Web Services