So I’ve been battling getting VMWare running on CentOS and Ubuntu for the past 2 weeks (and the rest).
Last week enough was enough, I’d spent too much time trying to get the modules re-compiled and working with some sort of stability. In that amount of time I could have paid for the Windows license in the wasted time I’d spent trying to get it working. I’d followed all the guides to the letter, and trying following them with some imagination, but nothing seemed to work

I’m now running Server 2008 R2 Core as the VMWare host, it runs a slightly higher load than Linux, but with most services not installed as a default it’s much better than your average Server installation.

So if you’ve spent more than your fair share of time on VMWare, just take the bullet and go for a Windows VMWare host.

I can’t say it has much better performance or, I no benchmarks to prove it, but it does *just work*.

If anyone reading this blog uses Thunderbird 3 and is Welsh then you might be interested to know that Russ Taylor has change both the British and Welsh dictionaries to be compatible with Thunderbird 3.

I finally found a nice simple way to update Ruby Gems when you’re behind a proxy thanks to Nigel Thorne (blog now dead).

set HTTP_PROXY=http://[username]:[password]@[proxyserver]:[port]

or if your proxy doesn’t use authentication

set HTTP_PROXY=http://[proxyserver]:[port]

Since the Gem software looks for the upper case HTTP_PROXY variable when executing it’ll take this from the environment variable and work it’s magic. This makes everything a lot simpler and gives me one less reason to use NetBeans, as I never liked it inability to choose from gem updates.

Looks like I just couldn’t stay away from Aberystwyth. I’ve landed a job in Information Services up at the University doing “systems development & support” on web based services at the Uni. At the moment I’ve been playing around with my own SharePoint site for the last 2 hours.

Being my birthday today the weather’s great and I’m off out for a drink tonight. Cheers!

Well I’m there at last, and I managed to pull a 2:1 out of the hat. My dissertation result of 65% must have pulled my grade up a fair few marks, which I’m really glad about. I spent many a sleepless night on it and without a few key people (who know who they are) I definitely wouldn’t have gotten as far as I did.

I’ve just landed a job at the NHS doing 3rd line technical support, or more precisely phone support for near on 1,000. It’s only temporary for now as I’m still thinking of moving to Bristol at the end of summer

There are a few projects in the pipeline, such as “The Magazine” which is primarily a web based venture covering topics from the arts to psycho-geography. If you don’t know what psycho-geography is head on over for an explanation from Luke. There is another project in the pipeline which is advertising based, however that’s all I’ve been told so far about the job specification so it’s anyone’s guess at this point that the system will do.

Finally, my passing out ceremony is on the 18th of July and is broadcast live from the University which you can get to from <this link> if you’re bored and fancy watching people look silly in gowns.

Dan