Technology Tales

Turning the world on its head: running VMware on Ubuntu

When Windows XP was my base operating system, I used VMware Workstation to peer into the worlds of Windows 2000, Solaris and various flavours of Linux, including Ubuntu. Now that I am using Ubuntu instead of what became a very flaky XP instance, VMware is still with me and I am using it to keep a foot in the Windows universe. In fact, I have Windows 2000 and Windows XP virtual machines available to me and they should supply my Windows needs.

A evaluation version of Workstation 6 is what I am using to power them and I must admit that I am likely to purchase a license before the evaluation period expires. Installation turned out to be a relatively simple affair, starting with my downloading a compressed tarball from the VMware website. The next steps were to decompress the tarball (Ubuntu has an excellent tool, replete with a GUI, for this) and run vmware-install.pl. I didn’t change any of the defaults and everything was set up without a bother.

In use, a few things have come to light. The first is that virtual machines must be stored on drives formatted with EXt3 or some other native Linux file system rather than on NTFS. Do the latter and you get memory errors when you try starting a virtual machine; I know that I did and that every attempt resulted in failure. After a spot of backing up files, I converted one of my SATA drives from NTFS to Ext3. For sake of safety, I also mounted it as my home directory; the instructions on Ubuntu Unleashed turned out to be invaluable for this. I moved my Windows 2000 VM over and it worked perfectly.

Next on the list was a serious of peculiar errors that cam to light when I was attempting to install Windows XP in a VM created for it. VMware was complaining about a CPU not being to run fast enough; 2 MHz was being stated for an Athlon 64 3000+ chip running at 1,58 GHz! Clearly, something was getting confused. Also, my XP installation came to a halt with a BSOD stating that a driver had gone into a loop with Framebuf fingered as the suspect. I was seeing two symptoms of the same problem and its remedy was unclear. A message on a web forum put the idea of rebooting Ubuntu into my head and that resolved the problem. I’ll be keeping an eye on it, though.

Otherwise, everything  seems to be going well with this approach and that’s an encouraging sign. It looks as my current Linux-based set up is one with which I am going to stay. This week has been an interesting one already and I have no doubt that I’ll continue to learn more as time goes on.

Faster IE7 phishing monitoring

The standard phishing detection that comes with IE7 really does slow things down when it comes to navigating web pages. In contrast, the option offered as part of Norton 360 is much faster. So much so that you hardly notice that it’s there at all. When I restored IE7 on my PC and ran it for the first time, Norton asked me to be its default fraud detection and I was away from there. Norton 360 offers nothing for Firefox, my preferred and default option but there may be plug-ins that address that need.

Evaluating an ergonomic mouse

Recent hectic mouse work has left my right hand feeling the worse for wear so a recent opportunity to try out a work colleague’s Evoluent VerticalMouse 3 was one that I took up. I gave it a go for a day and it left me impressed enough to go out and order one for myself. It’s not a cheap item with some selling for a smidgen less than £60 and others selling for significantly more than this. Also, it is a handed item with the latest version being available to right handers like myself and an earlier one for lefties. It will work with Windows 2000 but the supplied software is for XP and later.

The idea behind the gadget is an intriguing one: rather than having your hand held parallel to your desk as with a conventional mouse, you have it almost perpendicular to it. The claim is that when you have your arm this way, it is less likely to get tired. The arrangment sounds as if it might not work but it does in practice: your thumb is the anchor for the hand and the little finger (lúidín in Irish) rests on a little ledge that stops it getting dragged along either the mouse mat or the surface of the desk. This arrangement does allow you to relax your hand on the mouse. You get the usual mouse functions plus extra buttons that you can use to go back and forward through web pages; even without installing the included software, you get these. However, I have observed drift of the mouse cursor across the screen of my home PC when the unit is not being moved around. At first, I wasn’t sure what is causing this but it now appears to be the mouse mat that I was using. I’ll continue to give it a go.

Update: a mouse such as this really needs you to rest your arm on the desk for it to be at its most helpful. That’s fine for work but my home set up had me stretching my arm and that leads to a lot of discomfort. That isn’t the fault of the mouse: it is actually telling me something useful. The primary cause is a pull out keyboard drawer that I have to use due to lack space on the desk itself. So, I raised up my full tower computer case a little from the floor and now use that as a platform for the mouse. I know that it’s an unconventional approach but it seems to be working so far and I can make further adjustments if needs be…

Repairing Windows XP

I have been having an accident-prone time of it with Windows XP recently and have had plenty of reason to be thankful for the ability to perform a repair installation. Here are the steps:

1. Pop the installation disk into your PC’s DVD drive and reboot the PC.
2. If you have your PC set it up to boot from DVD’s in its BIOS, then you at least will have to option to do this. You may find that this happens by default but I needed to tell it to do the deed.
3. Select normal installation from the first menu that is presented to you by the installer.
4. Accept the licence agreement.
5. Press R at the next menu and that’ll repair the installation.
6. Follow all of the menus from there on; it’ll be all the usual stuff from here on in and there should be no need to reactivate Windows or reinstall all of your other software afterwards.

There is a repair option on the first screen (step 3 above) but this takes you into the dark recesses of the command line and isn’t what I was needing. I do have to say that they do leave the required option late on in the installation process and that assumes on users having a risk taking streak in them, something that definitely does not apply to everyone. If your boot.ini file is not well, you may find yourself needing to do the full installation and that wipes the slate clean on you, extending the recovery process.

Filename autocompletion on the command line

The Windows 2000 command line feels an austere primitive when compared with the wonders of the UNIX/Linux equivalent. Windows XP feels a little better and PowerShell is another animal altogether. With the latter pair, you do get file or folder autocompletion upon hitting the TAB key. What I didn’t realise until recently was that continued tabbed cycled through the possibilities; I was hitting it once and retyping when I got the wrong folder or file. I stand corrected. With the shell in Linux/UNIX, you can get a listing of possibilities when you hit TAB for the second time and the first time only gives you completion as far as it can go with certainty; you’ll never get to the wrong place but you may not get anywhere at all. This works for bash but not ksh88 as far as I can see. It’s interesting how you can take two different approaches in order to reach the same end.

Missing borders in Internet Explorer

It’s quite hard to describe this observation in a title so here goes with a longer description in a post. One thing that I spotted with the Prosumer theme used on this blog is that the links on the horizontal navigation bar underneath the mast head were not appearing as they should. The links have been formatted using CSS to appear in boxes with borders that are more apparent when you hover over them. In IE, the top and bottom borders were missing. After a spot of digging, I came up with the line-height property being the cause and I was right: the extremities of the boxes surrounding the text were being cut off because they exceeded the allotted space. As if to emphasise that IE7 isn’t as major a leap forward from IE6 as we would have liked, the problem affected that browser as well.

Aside: Link text colours weren’t being honoured by IE7 like they are by IE6, Firefox and Opera so another tweak to the CSS was needed.

IE7 on the way up…

I don’t spend too much time looking at that stats in Google Analytics but I do find it useful to see what people come to see. Another thing that I keep on radar is the browser technologies that visitors are using. Screen resolution is a particular interest of mine. However, browsers and their versions are watched too and I have spotted the ascent of IE7 from where it was; there seems to be a surge in recent times. I am unsure as to the cause for this but it’s definitely happening and Vista take up seems to have noting to do with it.

HAL.DLL: a roadblock on the resurrection of a poorly PC

My PC is very poorly at the moment and Windows XP re-installation is the prescribed course of action. However, I have getting errors reporting missing or damaged HAL.DLL at the first reboot of the system during installation. I thought that there might be hard disk confusion and so unplugged all but the Windows boot drive. That only gave me an error about hard drives not being set up properly. Thankfully, a quick outing on Google turn up a few ideas. I should really have started with Microsoft since they have an article on the problem. About.com has also got something to offer on the subject and seems to be a good resource on installing XP to boot: I had forgotten how to do a repair installation and couldn’t find the place in the installation menus. In any event, a complete refresh should be a good thing in the long run, even if it is going to be a very disruptive process. I did consider moving to Vista at the point but getting XP back online seems the quickest route to getting things back together again. Strangely, I feel like a fish out of water right now but that’ll soon change…

Update: It was in fact my boot.ini that was causing this and replacement of the existing contents with defaults resolved the problem…

Using external JavaScript files? Just don’t load them at the bottom of the page…

Looking through Google Analytics for my websites, I have always been struck by the lack of IE7 uptake seemingly apparent from the statistics. However, I recently discovered that there may be a reason for this. I use the Ultimate GA plugin with my WordPress blogs and that adds the JavaScript code block near the bottom of the page. However, I recently saw that giving me scripting errors in IE7 and a spot of manual coding saw it travel to the header section of the web page. That, and the deactivation of the said plugin, was sufficient to rid of the errors in question. Seeing the effect of my changes on the reported share of visitors using IE7 could be interesting. It might even boost the Vista numbers as well.

An inappropriate use of JavaScript

I have seen a web application that displays thousands of records in a scrollable table (please bear with me, there is a very good reason for this). from the appearance of the table, it would be reasonable to assume that the table is generated by the server and output directly to the screen but this isn’t the case. What actually happens is that the server more or less outputs JavaScript code that is then executed. This takes the form of large arrays that are slotted into the DOM as the contents of the required table by a JavaScript function. With the large amounts of data involved, this means that the browser fully loads the client CPU while the JavaScript processing takes place, something that takes up to a minute to complete. Admittedly, the browser is IE6 but this was all on a PC with a 2.53 GHz Pentium 4 and 512 MB of memory. Getting the server to deliver standards-compliant (X)HTML for what is needed in the first place seems a much, much better approach to me.