Virtualization, Cloud, Infrastructure and all that stuff in-between
My ramblings on the stuff that holds it all together
Category Archives: weird
Apologies for the radio silence
Posted by on August 12, 2011
Apologies to my regular readers for the lack of content recently, this is going to be one of those “I’ve been really busy so not had time to blog” type of posts I’m afraid.
Since leaving VMware’s cloud practice earlier this year my freelance career has taken off nicely and I’m currently engaged with a large service provider on some large-scale transformation projects so that’s currently taking a lot of my time.
But, not to fear… there will be plenty coming in a few months
- vTARDIS.next – more technical details following on from the initial post once I get GA code
- Hopefully vTARDIS.next and the iTARDIS will be making an appearance at an upcoming UK VMUG
- Secret Project No.2 – suffice to say it’s very cloudy and is taking a lot of my blogging time at the moment – expect more detailed news about this towards the end of 2011 as it’s a slow, but full-on process!
- I will be at VMworld 2011 in Las Vegas, I’ll try to blog as much as I can whilst I’m there
Are Social Networks are Manipulating the Future?
Posted by on February 18, 2011
I’ve noticed a growing trend recently, I use LinkedIn to keep track of people I meet via work and it’s quite handy (and my organic memory is pretty useless at this) I also use Twitter to keep an eye out on what’s going on in my professional world as a lot of people use it and I use Facebook in a similar manner to stay in touch with friends and family in a slightly more closed way.
Several times in the last couple of months I’ve met people at work or out at customers, events and social occasions and have recognised their names (and maybe even their faces if I squinted enough) although I had never met them in-person or worked with their organisation before in my life.
I think I’ve just realised why – Most social networks have a “people you may know” feature and I think a lot of them have probably popped up on it at some point recently or been re-tweeted on Twitter, I’ve tracked 2 or 3 of these occurrences in the last couple of weeks.
LinkedIn obviously has some uber algorithm that looks at your networks and consults some kind of magic 8-ball to predict your future and who you are most likely to bump into – or, more sinisterly – are social networks really Skynet in the cloud and are they manipulating society to it’s own evil ends via a “social” network? engineering business and social relationships with people it deems suitable or beneficial to helping you achieve its own goals?
So, there you have it – Social Networks know the future, or they are all a giant cloud robot that will kill us all in the end, or maybe even there is a single Dr.Evil behind it all
..nurse, where are my tablets… /EOF
[normal scheduled programming will resume next week]
Nothing happens when I try to run Starwind software Manager on Windows 2008 R2
Posted by on January 24, 2010
I am doing some work with a FusionIO solid state flash storage card at the moment (more on this in a future post) as part of this I need a windows based iSCSI target for my testing, and rather handily you can download an evaluation copy of the Starwind Enterprise Edition from here
I usually use OpenFiler for this sort of thing, but not being a particular Linux wizz (ok, and being a bit lazy and in a hurry) I wanted to try out the Fusion IO Duo card I have been loaned, and the Linux drivers are an .RPM or .deb package for which OpenFiler doesn’t have the required package management software – so I have installed it in a Windows 2008 machine and will use the Starwind software as an iSCSI target.
(In terms of disclosure, whilst i was writing this post up last week VMware vExperts were offered an NFR license for the product, this test was done with the freely downloadable eval version rather than the NFR license we have been offered – but I urge you to check it out, it’s pretty cool.
Anyway – when you first install the software on Windows 2008 , there is a Starwind icon on the desktop
When you double-click on it (or any of the start menu entries nothing happens, you don’t get a UI or anything. this confused me for a while until I discovered that it places a system tray icon on boot, which you use to configure the software.
by default on my Windows 2008 R2 machine this icon is hidden, and set to only show notifications – of which there were none yet.
A quick trip to the customize button on the Notification area menu options on the properties of the task bar shows the default setting which is hiding it
Setting this to show icon and notifications made it re-appear on the taskbar/notification area
You can now right-click and launch the management console 
The management console
It’s a bit strange that the desktop or start-menu icon doesn’t launch the manager ‘out of the box’ with Windows 2008 – but this is how to resolve it, the hint eventually came from the online help, which said to go via the system tray icon, so it just goes to show – maybe sometimes you should look at the help files!
Hopefully that will save you some time with your eval!
Virtualization, Cloud, Infrastructure and all that stuff in-between 