Editing remote files with Textmate and Cyberduck

I was trying to use macfusion to have a standard interface of working with remote files. While it integrated nicely with Finder, after loading up a new project in Textmate with all of the remote files (not a local copy, but references to the remote files) Textmate became very sluggish. After switching to another program and then coming back it would take about 30 seconds for Textmate to be useable again.

Well no more! I am now using Cyberduck for the FTP interface and Textmate to edit the text based files locally. When I save in Textmate, Cyberduck automatically updates the remote file for me.

Loving life...

I'm a New Scientist subscriber

I started doing a little digging into what I might like to do in the future with the degree in biology and found a lot of references to the New Scientist magazine website. The only problem was that a lot of their web content was for registered subscribers of their weekly magazine. It turned out to be $40 for a year of digital access to their content. This works out great for me cause I hate having to keep up with physical magazines on a bookshelf (and they just end up accumulating, otherwise I end up feeling like I'm throwing away money). Not sure why I think like that, but there it is...

So the deal is for a year I can go through and read as much of whatever they have in archive and whatever current content is in printed circulation through the site. Total win win for me... (I mean when's the last time anyone saw me without my backpack with my laptop in it!)

working on large NSIS projects remotely

One of the things I've been doing for a while now has been maintaining and updating Appian's software installers. These are pretty decent size installers: they install anywhere from 2 to 3 times the amount of data your normal Windows game might install before you can play.

Amazingly I've been able to shrink the install times down to 25 - 30 minutes (depending on the target machine's hardware), down from the 2 hours that it used to take. Even with this major improvement, there's still a couple of things to be desired:

• Faster build times (if at all possible)
• Better compression of the data
• More protection for the software installation process
• More stability on a broader range of operating systems
• Vista font issues
• faster testing (probably the longest holdup for releasing new versions of the installer)
• updating the installer codebase for compatibility with the latest NSIS release
  

From a developer's perspective there are things that I would love to do to make it easier to maintain and maintain these installations from out of the office. I have a Windows XP desktop machine in the office configured to run vmware workstation with multiple guest virtual machines: one for the installation development environment, and multiple others for testing various aspects of our software installation process. This type of setup makes it easier to back up the installer development environment, because of the many variables that are set in order for Direct Route or Territory Pro to run properly.

This is just a desktop machine that has power and an ethernet cable plugged into it. Up to this point we're still in the office though. Since I work from Stillwater during the school year now (or wherever I'm at when I'm not in school) I have been using logmein.com to access the physical machine's desktop to get into the development virtual machine to code and kick out installers. While this isn't exactly a terrible setup, it can be a bit laggy depending on the internet connection I'm working from and as a result can be a waste of time even just to modify a few lines of code and kick out a new installation to test.

I do have a couple of ideas that can at least help with the coding portion of the installer maintenance ritual. It might take a little bit of time to get all of this working properly, but I think it would be well worth the time overall, even for someone that would be working in the office.

My idea initially is to access the installer code on the live virtual machine over the internet directly on my Mac laptop over a Hamachi VPN connection. Next is once I'm done I need a quick way of kicking off the compilation process for the code I need and notification once the compilation ends (either by completing successfully, or by failing). What turns out to be the big project is how fast and what the best option is for rolling out quick web services as a means for project control after I'm ready to compile all of that code and start testing.

Just to be clear, there are several reasons why I don't carry the virtual machines directly on my laptop:

• size of the vm's
• security of the software
• security of the installer code
• easier means of integration with the internal backup strategy.
  

relearning ACL in CakePHP

I started looking into user management and access control lists (ACL) in CakePHP. I'm going to be rewriting filed away from C# .Net over to CakePHP and I figured I would do everything the right way. Up to this point every CakePHP project we've rolled has had its own custom user relationship model and tables custom to the project. So this academic approach to do things in the standard acceptable way is a little bit different, but overall going to be a great thing for any future projects.

Since CakePHP released its 1.2 Final just over Christmas and I've been meaning to jump on the rewrite, it's a good time to start hacking away on some new code.

Mamp Mysql setup lifesaver

I would have spent a lot more time trying to figure this out if I hadn't of found this on google:

http://www.fischerlaender.net/apple-mac/mac-os-x-trouble-with-mamp-mysql

started studing genetic algorithms

I changed my major over to Biology from Computer Science just a while ago. So next semester I'll start with introductory biology and chemistry. I've been researching bioinformatics and synthetic genomics as possible career options.

I've been reading some biology ebooks I downloaded a little while ago and its been really interesting. I haven't lost complete interest in programming though. I'm researching genetic algorithms. So far I started with Genetic Algorithm Tutorial by Darrel Whitley.

I'll be updating this post with my notes later.

I'm not going to blow up twitter with these...

• My car is broke again
• I'm taking a 15 hour train ride on Tuesday to go to San Antonio for 2 weeks
• I love Spore
• Seven Pounds, the new Will Smith movie, was amazing
• I need to go to the gym and run
• I need a new computer monitor (the one I've got wont work with my mac)
• I need to update the generated emails html stuff for Appian's contact forms
• I need to work on some installations
• I need to finish the update on the mass upload application for TDC
  

I need to get photoshop on my laptop to see what's supposedly so much better about PS on the Mac vs the Windows version.

My desktop has been unplugged while I was out of town last week. It would be nice if it just came back on without any complications, but I'm not getting my hopes up.

I started reading Twilight and managed to say no to everyone that wanted me to go watch the movie with them. I'm terrible about just going to see the movie and then just dropping the book afterwords.

A little stressed out lately

I've had a lot on my plate lately with both Appian and school. The occasional TDC problem is welcome, but they are normally pretty self-maintained.

Appian has had some installation problems with a new component upgrade that we're trying to deploy with our latest release of our software. For some reason this has been an especially big pain in my ass. The code is almost identical, and the paths for all the configuration files match up. Needless to say this has consumed plenty of my late night sleeping hours as of late.

I've got two tests on Thursday to worry about: one in Government (not so worried about it) and the other in Philosophy (the source of my stress woes). I've been reading the required texts, but I haven't started on a study guide for the example exam questions. Sure this is going to consume most of my day tomorrow.

Now with the time change for Daylight savings, its been getting way too dark way too fast. I'm sure that's not helping either.

logmein and different browsers on the mac

As any other technically inclined convert I've been an avid user of Firefox for some time now. I will say that I have made the switch to Google's Chrome (at least for the most part). For reasons not researched by myself yet, Logmein has a mac client that seems a separate accessing component apart from the browser itself. This little component has proven to be a little more bug prone than the Firefox plugin on my windows machines, it has worked well enough to keep me on the machines I need access to, so I've been happy.

Now back to Chrome: before I converted over to my beloved MacBook Pro, I quite fancied the UI Chrome offered. (In all fairness, when I'm in VMWare on my mac I use Chrome as my primary browser) The big setback Chrome had (from my POV) is a lack of a plugin api. As of today's date, I do not believe Chrome has an extensible api for plugin interfacing. What this translates to me is that I could not completely do away with Firefox because I still needed access to my Logmein machines.

If Logmein were to create a client component with the same cross browser compatibility as they have on the Mac, I would be a happy camper. Better yet, if Google released a Chrome for the Mac. ...oh to dream. (I'm sure it's on its way in fair time)

I'll be doing some research on these topics for an update later I'm sure.

a little automated windows administration

I started looking into some automated Windows administration over the weekend. I've never had to automate the backup of a database, but one of my clients got a little happy with the delete features of a web application I built for them, and I didn't have any automated backups for the database. So I've at least done that.

This whole scenario made me think of a new feature: Undelete. basically its a customized website for holding documents that can be privately/securely accessed by their clients. Undelete for virtually any of the files, categories, or users and their permissions would be a nice feature to have in order to remedy any issues similar to what they're facing now.

Goodbye Basecamp

So I stumbled upon Project Pier, an open source project management tool not that dissimilar from basecamp. (I actually think the project started out as a ripoff of basecamp)

So I downloaded it, installed it on one of my dev machines, and started using it for a couple of days instead of basecamp to see how it would compare. With the exception of no comments on task lists or task items themselves, I must say I'm in love with it. The UI could use some work, but the project does have a full theme system built in (at least I think I saw that out on the site somewhere) There is even some discussion of importing basecamp projects from xml, so I'm super excited about all of this.

Being that its all open source, we won't be restricted to a set number of projects or have to pay the monthly SaaS fee. Its codebase is entirely in PHP, so we'll be able to throw it on our linux hosting that we already have. The only thing that wasn't straight forward and does make less sense (from a users perspective) is that the installation requires its MySQL database server to run InnoDB instead of the MyISAM data storage engine. I can understand if it made the project easier to get started development-wise, but now that its released to the public, you would think that they would use as much standardization as possible. (my dev box's mysql server was easy enough to configure properly, but I'm sure it will be a nice little battle to talk to our web hosting platform into helping us configure our linux machine's mysql servers to run the proper storage engine) I guess in all fairness there is a 'hack' around the innodb stuff so that it will run through the myisam storage engine, but it is just that: a hack....

Well there you have it. I'm sure I'll be posting more about Pier in the near future.

This seems to be the way to go...

Installer woes

I have been working like a madman for the past few days trying to clean up some installation problems that have crept up on some old releases that are still being distributed to Appian's update client list...

One of the components of the installer has a US and a Canada version that seem to be working separately, but when we combine them to run as one process using all of the data for both versions, it starts getting a little foggy and the service isn't starting anymore for some reason.

For a while I was using some nonstandard/funky end of line characters that Windows' notepad didn't particularly care for. (square boxes instead of text resuming on the next line, but wordpad opens it up just fine... go figure) Anyways so I figured out that in NSIS I need to put in
$/r$/n
for an end of line, instead of what i've been using in c# (just the classic /n).

So I thought all was well, but now I'm finding that I didn't update all of my code like I thought I had. So I've been going through each installer to make sure that I've got everything updated with the correct end of line character...

Some of my tests have also turned up that not all of the required data for the US is installing correctly. There are a number of files that do not exist on the target machine after my installer completes.

So if I never have to reverse engineer someone else's installer just to streamline our own installation process I will be a very happy man. It pays the bills, but boy is it ever so tedious, meticulous, and error prone.

Installing XP on a Vista Toshiba laptop

I had to slipstream the sata controller driver into an nLite XP build for a Toshiba satellite a205-s4777. I've never done this before but the driver seems to have been picked up just fine. Hopefully the laptop will boot up so I can make this guy happy. It was soo difficult trying to get anything to work at all on this machine I'm really not surprised he had me take it to throw xp on it.. Everything from the mouse to any removeable media (including usb drives) needed a driver. Stuff like this is such a pain in the butt to get working...

All the drivers listed on the Toshiba support site for this laptop were Vista drivers, so I'm hoping (pinkies crossed) that all the drivers are either backward compatible (not likely) or there are XP versions of them available. I'm preemptively doing some research while I'm waiting for this to load so I'm not completely heartbroken here in about 20 minutes....

lower level

I've got plenty of work to keep me busy for a very long time, but for some reason I'm still left a little unsatisfied. Up to this point I've tried to fill whatever "challenge" void I've had by trying to just take on more work. This is a failed approach for me because I've hated "busy work" (the stuff that just keeps you busy but doesn't really put my mind to use) since I signed up for some Advanced courses in high school only to be disappointed because they just threw more math problems at us instead of more difficult ones.

So I'm breaking the convention. Zack and I both have decided to start doing some research for getting into some game development. He's got some great ideas that I think have potential to be really great, so I'm definitely excited. Game development is going to help me with my little "challenge void" mainly because it's something new and employs all aspects of computers that I've up to this point used individually on many levels.

I'm particularly interested in algorithms for some kind of custom artificial intelligence engine. So I'm going to be JP from Grandma's boy for the next year or so I'm sure. (joke. If I reach that point I'm giving anyone that knows of this permission to smack me enough to bring me back.. ha). Programming AI algorithms is something I've been interested in since I first started playing games like Doom (yeah the 1st one) and picking up the programming basics...

So far the standards that we've decided on up to this point are

• C++ for our modules
• Python for a dynamic module binding backend
• PHP for any web stuff (probably the highest level language I'm not tired of... just personal reasons though)
• OpenGL (I'm running my new Mac and the PS3 seems to be doing just fine with OpenGL rendering only)

The research is starting with me continuing to learn Python, getting more familiar with C++ (not my first rodeo), and learning a bit of OpenGL. I'm fairly confident that I'm going to end up doing the backend game logic (where I feel more comfortable and really am more interested) while Zack heads up the graphical end with Blender model rendering and things like collision detection.

What's really great is that this new little endeavor is something that is both challenging and also something we can both be passionate about.

MacPorts

I started looking into MacPorts today and it looks like it would save a lot of time in the future when I start looking into porting my C# ASP.Net to Mono. I don't think that mono would be that hard to deploy, but I think I would definitely enjoy something closer to debians apt-get package management solution...

So I went to install the release for Leopard and I got an error that (after some googling) I found was because rsync appeared to be blocked by a firewall. I haven't looked at it long enough to determine if this firewall issue is at the router level or on the local machine (more what I suspect).

Suppose when I need Mono support I'll play with it long enough to get it all figured out....

Mac convinced me to buy things I never would have before

I do think its a little odd that iTunes would not have built in functionality to remove duplicates. (I'm guessing its an effort out against music piracy) Either way its always been a pain in the butt to manage all of my music collection amongst the multiple machines that I've laid it out across. Now that I'm working primarily off of my macbook, I imagine it will be a little easier to do, but there's still the big import process of transferring all of that music from my other machines to this laptop... So I bit the bullet and bought some software that will sort out all of my duplicates and make it easier to manage all of my music file duplicates. It was 15 bucks which might be a little steep for some, but it just saved me about 30 minutes in just transferring all of my music off of my old laptop alone...

Normally I would have been interested in this as a side project (and I still might in the future). I just don't have the time to take on any more code projects at the current moment. Something about working for all the benefits a computer has to offer is starting to get to me, to say the least. These things are supposed to make life easy right?

I'm probably going to be upgrading both the hard drive and the memory in this new little toy of mine soon enough. Its a nice machine, don't get me wrong... I just have a ton of media that I like to listen to on demand. I found a 500GB laptop hard drive on Newegg for around $150 so I hope switching that out isn't going to be that big a deal... (never has been on any of my windows machines) That along with the fact that I will costantly have vmware fusion running my Visual Studio for .Net development means that I'll be using all of that maxed out 4gb of ram I'll be throwing in here.

That's the latest mac update... I think the more time I spend on this thing, the more I love it.

Things I'm learning this weekend...

I've got plenty of NSIS and C# to go over this weekend, but its been a while since I've had some time to take up something new in programming land. I've been wanting to get into Python for some time, since there's such a huge following from Google (with their app engine), django python web framework, and a general sense of adoption by the science community.

Anyways so I've been reading through some beginner tutorials and running through some code with textmate. (Textmate makes things really nice by the way)

http://wiki.python.org/moin/SimplePrograms - a list of simple applications to code in order to get a feel for the language. I went through and coded them all out by hand (I've learned that I pick things up easier with a hands on approach)

I'm sure I'll have more to rave about Python at a later date. It's pretty much the big deal in CS right now...

a late night work ramble...

I have been developing a set of installers for quite a large amount of data for the past year now. All of the releases have been stable for some time now, but there's always going to be that extra feature, or the data itself gets updated from our vendor... Anyways, through testing I've found that the installers themselves compile faster and with fewer complications after I configured a virtual machine (vmware) for NSIS development.

I have two vm's on a single machine: one I use for development and the other for testing purposes. Between the two of them I have run through an entire 500gb drive and am no longer able to shutdown the vm's and back them up so I can throw an archive backup on our file server. So I've got a 1TB drive coming in from Newegg that I'll be installing early next week to remedy this. In the meantime I've kept all of the NSIS code itself version controled in a series of SVN repositories.

I'll have to update the C# data deployment application (just a windows form app that is kicked off in NSIS as part of the installer). I've got two versions of this data deployment application: one for the installer (cleanmapcopy runs off of registry settings) and another (mapcopy offers a full gui for our technical support to use for installation troubleshooting).

We are fully 64bit OS compliant now, so the next thing to do is to figure out the difference in the way I'm successfully installing fonts in Windows XP and what has changed as far as installing fonts in Vista and Server 2008.

I'm starting to lose interest in scripting languages. It's probably just because I've been working in NSIS and PHP for I don't know how long. I just miss the feel of a full C# or Java or C++ to work with. (something general purpose that I can do whatever I set out to do in) Freedom if you will... I think Zack and I both are kind of spent on Web programming at the moment. I don't mind it as much as he does probably, but it just seems like there's so much bloat out on the web of redundant features for "this" SaaS app that are also found in "that" one too.... Kinda feels like this type of programming has lost that zeal of personal application or useful touch I once saw in it.

Ok well its time to get some rest. Going to test out this http://sleep.fm/ alarm clock I setup.

Mac Convert update

I wouldn't consider myself an Apple Pro quite yet, but I will say that I took the laptop down to the city to work at Appian in office and everything worked out just nicely. Its still a great machine and I love the way everything feels about it.

Something I've noticed: I think my fingers got a little too used to the smaller keyboard on the older laptop and I can feel my fingers stretching outside the normal typing zone to hit keys. (This isn't necessarily a bad thing, I just need to figure out what the best way to go about typing in all the key combos for all the menu shortcuts and I'm sure that it will go unnoticed in the near future...) Also the home and end keys are a little different... On my macbook pro the home and end key functionality (at least what I expect when on a windows machine) can be attained by command + (left) or (right) arrow keys... Again, little different, but definitely something I could get used to.

I went in the office today and got a stack of software that I will be working on for the rest of the year... At least I know what I'm going to be doing. ...I guess. It was refreshing getting a taste of the quasi professional environment. I really did enjoy the break from the college scene to get some real work done and feel a little appreciated. I've kind of learned that people have their own ways of showing appreciation. (I think one of my bosses shows it by stacking more work on top of me...)

After work today, we headed out over to the Cross Eyed Moose and had a few pitchers 'o beers. (Been a little bit since I've had some wheat beer) Tonight was an awesome combination of world series baseball (wasn't up for anyone to win in particular), hot tub, beer, and cigars with some of the guys from the office. Gotta wake up for class in the AM and I'm spent...

Vmware vprobes: a way to run dtrace on OS's without dtrace support

http://blip.tv/file/950760

This video from vmware is about debugging vmware guest OS's with dtrace through vmware itself without dtrace having to be explicitly supported on the OS itself. This makes things very interesting for testing almost any application in virtual environments...

Me, the new Mac kinda guy...

I purchased a MacBook Pro (no not one of the newest ones, but rather an older model) Although it might have been nicer to save up a little longer and get the latest and greatest from Apple, I decided that I would not fall subject to the group-think that is "get the newest one"...

I can say that I'm happy with what I've got. It might not have the newest gpu from NVidia, but it does have a 512mb video card anyways (which is the best card I've ever had in a laptop to date). Seeing how this new machine will be primarily used for development purposes it might still be a little bit overkill...

Now onto my thoughts of switching. So far all of my applications that I've used to develop on Windows either already offered Mac versions or were easily replaced by other Mac software (all of it open source up to this point. Hoping to keep it this way...)

I've already got vmware fusion 2.0 installed with windows xp. Suppose I could have ran Vista, but I know that XP takes up less resources and this is still a laptop...

The best thing about this laptop is what I initially feared the most: the deviant one button trackpad. I absolutely love the way this thing works. Scrolling is simply amazing and I find myself not even wanting to use a regular mouse because I cannot use the scroll on the trackpad as easily.

Another thing that I find myself thinking about, is that I have been waiting for something bad to happen, as though I was answering to a heavy backend windows kernel or something. I really like the way that this whole OSX feels like I'm making it do what I want instead of bending to the will of the machine. (it could also have something to do with the difference in the way the main menu bar is translated to whatever the current application running needs...)

Not everything turned out as great as I had expected it to. I was extremely disappointed that my new MacBook Pro is having issues displaying a proper picture on my 24" Samsung SyncMaster 245BW monitor. Not sure exactly what the issue is; the only thing I found in a quick google search was that SyncResX was a possible solution (this was courtesy of youtube, and like many, I'm not very fond of any user submitted "knowledge" gained there)

I might try the mighty mouse to see if its something I would like to work with more. (I was just so extremely impressed with the scrolling of the trackpad, I don't think I would feel right missing out on that feature by going back to a regular mouse)

So there you have it: my very short, humble opinion of my first day's encounter with my MacBook Pro.

SVN woes

So I'm trying to sort out exactly what is going on with the svn repositories for the installer code I've been working on.  The symptoms seem to be that the svn client is creating repositories that the webdav svn apache module cannot interpret because they are in a newer file system version.  I saw this because of the apache error log message:

[Fri Oct 17 15:52:22 2008] [error] [client ##.##.##.###] (20014)Internal error: Expected FS format '2'; found format '3'

and this is displayed in the browser

Could not open the requested SVN filesystem

When I go out to search on the web all I can find is that webdav svn isn't supposed to work with apache 2.2.  I do have other svn repos that were made with earlier releases of tortoisesvn and svnadmin that do work still, so I'm completely confused at this point.

What I'm doing now is testing with Wamp to see if I should switch.  Just testing on a vm right now, but hopefully it works...

---

Update:
I was able to get everything working with existing installation of the apache 2.2 web server already on that machine. I downloaded the latest stable release windows binary from http://subversion.tigris.org/servlets/ProjectDocumentList?folderID=8100 After recreating the repository that I wasn't able to connect to previously everything started working. (I also had to update my mod_dav_svn.so apache module with the latest release from that same zip).

Server stuff

It seems like I've been doing a lot of support related stuff lately and not really digging in developing anything.  I've got a couple of projects that I've been wanting to get into, but with all the server config I've been doing lately, its been hard to get time to really dig in.  (suppose it doesn't help that I was sick in bed all day yesterday either)

Exciting news... I am supposed to get my macbook pro tomorrow, and I'm a little stoked about it.  I've had the dell laptop and homebrew pc combo for as long as I can remember now, so it will be nice to just have the one machine to use. Turning the desktop into a solaris: zfs backup server.  I've been wanting to mess with zfs for some time now.  Supposed to be a top of the line software raid solution.

As for school: I haven't been to my gov/politcs or econ classes for about two weeks.  Yesterday I had a test in the gov but I made a 90/100 so I was relatively pleased with that since I only studied for about an hour for about 3 weeks worth of information.  Gonna work on Sunday and Monday, so I am going to have to start studying for econ tonight at some point.

Suppose I should get back sneezing a little more (still not 100%) and making some money.

GPS data from a blackberry

I want to find a way to access GPS Data on a blackberry. I have a couple of ideas for mobile apps that I would like to tie into some of Google's data services. I know that there's a huge push in the newly sprung location based marketing area, but I would like to tie this into a couple of applications I plan on getting started on once my Christmas ...hrmm I mean Winter holiday... break allows for some more coding time.

Ideally for testing it would be nice to access a stream of GPS data over the USB cable so that I don't get charged for Data transmission on the device. I'm sure Sprint already wants to charge me an arm and a leg if I browse the web anymore than I already do on my Blackberry Pearl...

I found a couple of open source applications that to learn from. http://www.blackberryforums.com/developer-forum/51-updated-open-source-blackberry-apps-develop-your-own.html

Blackberry has a nice JDE eclipse plugin to develop with. So I grabbed that along with the Full JDE to make sure that I had all the source code that TonyB recommended in his answer to my StackOverflow question.

In other news I found some interesting stuff for porting J2ME apps to other platforms using alcheMo. So far it looks like it supports BREW, iPhone, and Windows Mobile. Sounds interesting enough, but I couldn't find anything to download and play with. Hopefully there's more news of this to come in the future...

School these days

Ok so I've been focusing much of my energy on work lately and I think school is starting to bite back. Not too crazy yet, but I definitely could use some sleep. Over the past week I've been staying up almost all night, getting maybe 3 or 4 hours of sleep and getting back up to face the chaos that is my day and then I take a nap for an hour or two and then wake up for another all-nighter..

I have a test tomorrow, a big quiz on next Tuesday and a (hopefully light) test next Thursday.

We shall see... Better get back to the study guide I'm still working on for that Philosophy test.

IMG00093.jpg

It is either this early or this late.

expanding a vmware virtual disc

I'm going to attempt to expand the virtual disc size of a development virtual machine I use for some installers I've written. I found a gui VMDiskSize but in the notes it states I cannot resize a disc of a virtual machine that has snapshots.

For development purposes, I have various snapshots saved before and after I've made changes here or there. The snapshot manager could probably use some cleanup but its not on my priority list if I can get around having to mess with it right now.

I found a whitepaper on Using VMware Virtual Disk Manager. As always I've created a backup of the vm (which turned out to be a rather large 7-zip file) before attempting to modify anything that could render my development environment "un-bootable". (Yeah I talked to Webster and he said it was cool to make up words for blogs that no one reads)

Here's the actual documentation for the command line tool vmware-vdiskmanager

So the final command I had to run was:
vmware-vdiskmanager -x 60GB {path_to_vdisk}
(since all I needed was another 10GB on top of the already existing 50GB of storage there)

New Apple Keyboard

I went out today and bought what is probably the most expensive keyboard I've ever purchased to date.  I am going to be getting my MacBook Pro soon enough, so I figured while I was down in Oklahoma City (because I live in Stillwater now)  I might as well go ahead and get the full keyboard so I can develop a little faster at home.

Don't get me wrong, I love the keys on my dell, but it seems like I always get a lot more done when I don't have to backpeddle and find the right keys for home, insert, \, etc...  So I decided I would go ahead and get used to whatever quirks I would have to in order to jump right into the Apple scene.

I plugged this usb keyboard into my Win XP desktop and it required a reboot.  After that its been great.  It's not as touchy as my dell laptop or desktop's usb keyboard but I like it.  Maybe that whole new Apple kid feeling will wear off soon enough...  Who knows.

Talking with virtual box Ubuntu server vm

I'm having some problems connecting to a local Ubuntu server vm running on Sun's virtual box.  The vm has access to the internet (it can download and install packages via apt-get), but I cannot access the address that the ifconfig eth0 is putting out there.

The vm appears to be located on some subnet that is not reachable by my host machine.