SKFox

Windows Server 2008 shows this little dialog when you click on the time. The DST info is a nice touch.

Is Microsoft sending mixed signals by showing Office 2007(2008) on (what I assume) is a MacBook on Office.Microsoft.com? There is just so many things wrong with that, I’m not sure where to start.

Some possible messages from this:

• Macs are better for students.
• Office 2008 is prettier on a Mac.
• Current PC laptops are ugly.
• We really do care about Apple and the Apple user base!
• …add your own (possibly conflicting) message in the comments.

Not that there is anything wrong with these conclusions individually. Taken together though, from Microsoft, just seems strange.

Hat tip to Scott Hanselman for the find

I installed WIndows XP SP3 onto a PC over the weekend through Windows Updates. Everything went smoothly with no problems. That has not been the case for every one, but you come to expect that with service packs. I’ll be testing the redistributable and ISO installs soon to see how they work. Although the release is tagged as final, make sure you backup critical data before installing.

This PC also happens to be the first one I’ve ever had to replace the CMOS battery on. Let me be the first to tell you what kind of crazy errors a system gets when it thinks it is the year 22098. iTunes and Firefox both crash hard.

I got my first taste of virtualized Operating Systems.

I am running Windows XP Pro SP2 as a host environment. I wanted to be able to run IE7 as we are going to need to support it soon, while still having access to IE6. Other environments like Ubuntu were needed also. I stumbled upon VirtualBox from innotek. Using version 1.5.4 (released 27 December 2007) I was able to quickly get Windows XP Pro up and running. I used a fixed size virtual HDD (10GB) and dedicated 256MB of my system RAM to the environment. Installation from CD was straight forward, but mounting an ISO to boot from never worked for me. I’m still not sure if I was doing something wrong or if their is a bug.

Once I had XP up and running, I took a shot at Ubuntu 7.10. Again, booting from an ISO didn’t work. I put the CD in and ran the Live CD features in the virtual environment. When it came time to install, an error was generated during both the automatic partitioning and manual partitioning. The ext3 root was created quickly, but the swap refused to mount. After reading through the Ubuntu forums, I couldn’t find a solution on the VirtualBox site, I found that I had to use a dynamic sized virtual HDD, not a fixed size. Once that change was made, I got back into the live CD environment and had no problems getting the system installed. When I left work tonight, I was updating the 185 packages as prompted by the built-in updater.

Installing the “Guest Additions” software in both the XP and Ubuntu virtuals made the host user experience just that much better. I could easily move my mouse between windows without hitting the right control button first, mesh all of the desktops together, use windows remote desktop connections, etc. The additions ISO is included in the download and can be easily mounted to run from the command line or terminal as appropriate.

The benefits to my employer could be significant if we move to a virtualized environment. We have several desktops acting as single purpose servers that could easily be consolidated onto one server acting as a virtuals host. VirtualBox made the whole experience pleasant, fun, and exciting to see that many operating systems going at once.

My hardware consists of a Core 2 Duo E6660, 2GB 800Mhz RAM, dual 160GB WD hard drives, and a 256MB 7600GS PCI-E graphics card pumping bytes to a 20in Acer Widescreen LCD monitor. Having the host OS and the two virtuals running wasn’t a problem in any of the environments. Everything was smooth, I didn’t have any problems.

Time will tell if VirtualBox is ready for the enterprise primetime. I’ll need to look closer at the license options, stability over time, and ease of use.

For now, I’m just having fun running virtually.

<rave>

The conference

Sarah and I have returned safely from the West Wind Web Connection conference. It was really awesome to finally meet so many of the people that I hang out with on the Web Connect forums in person. Web Connection 5.30 is awesome. The wwBusiness Objects and JSON handling is very powerful and something that will take me awhile to learn, but will totally be worth the time.

I gave a short show and tell about my work with jQuery and Visual Foxpro/WC. There were a lot of questions and I think people were very interested in what I was doing. I’ll try to resurrect my examples page here soon to share with everyone. jQuery got a lot of attention too. I brought the books that Packt Publishing sent me with me. They were passed around most of the afternoon and several people took note of their ISBN numbers to order them from Amazon. jQuery may well soon be part of Web Connection. The excellent Date Picker from Marc Garbanski has already been added and I’m sure there is more to come.
</rave>

<rant>

The hotel

The Arizona golf resort and conference center is a very beautiful place, but for us that was about the only thing going for it. They managed to leave my wife at the mall for almost two hours because somebody at the front desk repeatedly dropped the ball on calling the driver to come pick her up. We were without power for the better part of a day because an underground line got cut. Room service likes to barge in without knocking. Wi-Fi is $9.95 per day and connections are inconsistent. The front desk staff like to use foul language. I’ll define our experience with simply, They Suck!

Update!: Rick Strahl has blogged about his experience and made some very good points about the two way street that is customer service as has my latest addition, Eric.Weblog() , to Google Reader.

</rant>