Antony’s blog

Here’s a cool article about a guy who works remotely for iAnywhere and has a telepresence robot in the office that he can drive around to interact with coworkers:

http://news.therecord.com/Business/article/236315

It would be funny if his coworkers put a sign on it which read “Welcome your new robot overlord!”.

Trivia: I used to work for iAnywhere for a while after they acquired AvantGo, which I had been working at. We were moved into the offices of iAnywhere’s parent company Sybase, and unfortunately (as far as I know) there were no robots roaming the halls there. That would have made it much cooler.

In an article about the recent and already infamous outage at the 365 Main Colocation facility, I noticed a bit about them using UPS devices with a flywheel instead of a battery. There is an interesting wikipedia article on flywheel energy storage, which is really encouraging from an environmental standpoint. One of the obvious problems with solar and wind energy is how to capture and store it for use when it at night or the wind isn’t blowing. Having a flywheel to store energy seems like a greener alternative, although as the wikipedia article mentions one of the main dangers of the flywheel is that the wheel can shatter sending out shrapnel at high velocity as it releases the stored energy all at once. While this may rule out some applications, for homes and businesses it might not be too hard to bury or shield it.

Lately I’ve been listening to Phil Windley’s excellent Technometria podcast:

http://www.itconversations.com/series/technometria.html

He has had on some great guests and facilitates really interesting and informative discourse. Highly recommended.

Also, the entire ITConversations project is really great.

While on Christmas vacation, Amy and I were out shopping and I wandered into a technology store and spent a few minutes playing around with one of Microsoft’s new Zune media player devices. I was actually pretty impressed; the screen was large, bright and clear, and the user interface was decent. Lately I’ve been commuting on the train, and in addition to listening to podcasts on my iPod video, I’ve also been watching some video, and I think for that purpose I’d appreciate the larger screen of a Zune. Also the Zune seems to have built-in wireless - it’s not clear to me if you can do this, but it would be cool if you could use the wireless to sync it to your computer instead of having to use a USB cable.

For years it’s driven me crazy that you can’t simply drag and drop the tabs in the windows taskbar. I like to have my browser and email tabs first, then other programs. A common problem for me is doing something that requires a restart of one of these programs (say, installing a new firefox extension), and then having to go kill all my other programs so that I can start things up in the right order. It’s hard to believe this functionality wasn’t built in to windows from the start, but anyway I finally got fed up today and found this great utility called Taskbar Shuffle on the web which does just what I need:

http://www.freewebs.com/nerdcave/taskbarshufflev10.htm

It seems to do some tricks that raise the hackles of my anti-spyware software; the program itself claims to contain no malware and I did a little searching on the net to make sure no one was reporting otherwise, and didn’t see anything troubling. I’ve also submitted it to my security suite’s vendor for checking just in case, but I went ahead and installed it (trust, but verify).

I recently upgraded to the newest version of vmware workstation, and they seem to have fixed the problem that I described in this post. Ubuntu is now one tiny step closer to its goal of world domination, thanks to VMware!

[Update: the problem described below is now fixed]

Unfortunately installing vmware-tools inside of Ubuntu Dapper Drake does not by default give you the ability to resize your desktop - I was getting an error message during the tools config saying “No X install found”. I spent some time searching the web, reading the vmware forums, etc. and finally found some nice people who had come up with a solution. Even once you have installed it using these instructions, you need to use the Preferences->Screen resolution menu from inside Ubuntu to do it instead of just resizing the vmware menu. Anyhow, here are the instructions.

1. Start up a terminal window and do the following:

   sudo bash
   apt-get install build-essential
   apt-get install linux-headers-`uname -r`
   

2. Get the patch text from here and drop it into /tmp/patch.txt.

   [Update: changed the link to a locally cached copy, since the original source seems to be down]

3. Get the vmware-tools-any update by doing this:

   cd /tmp
   wget http://platan.vc.cvut.cz/ftp/pub/vmware/vmware-tools-any-update1.tar.gz
   tar xzf vmware-tools-any-update1.tar.gz
   

4. From vmware menu, choose vm->install vmware tools - you should see a mounted CD image show up on the desktop. Back in your terminal window, do the following:

   cd /tmp
   tar xzvf /cdrom/VMwareTools*.tar.gz
   cd vmware-tools-distrib/
   ./vmware-install.pl
   

   During vmware-install.pl, I chose the default answers to everything but at the end did not choose to launch vmware-config-tools.pl.

5. Then do this in your terminal:

   cd /tmp/vmware-tools-any-update1/
   ./runme.pl
   

   Again, choose to not run vmware-config-tools.pl yet

   cd /usr/bin
   patch vmware-config-tools.pl /tmp/patch.txt
   ./vmware-config-tools.pl
   

6. Lastly, you can edit your config to use the vmware mouse:

   perl -p -i.bak -e 's/\"mouse\"/\"vmmouse\"/' /etc/X11/xorg.conf
   

I don’t understand what’s up with the plans offered by the online storage gang. Here’s a sample of their pricing:

box.net: 15GB storage, 50GB/mo transfer, 9.99/mo
omnidrive: “approximately $70 per year for 10GB (or more)”
xdrive: 5GB, unlimited transfer?, $8.29/mo
strongspace: 4GB, unlimited transfer, $8/mo

For comparison purposes, here’s the storage you can get with a web hosting package from 3 popular hosting providers:

dreamhost: 20GB storage, 1TB/mo transfer, $7.99/mo
godaddy: 50GB storage, 500GB/mo transfer, $6.99/mo
1and1: 100GB storage, 1000GB/mo transfer, $9.99/mo

Finally, amazon.com’s S3 storage service is .15/GB/mo for storage and .20/GB/mo for bandwidth, so you could get:

amazon S3: 25GB storage, 25GB/mo transfer, $8.75/mo

I understand that the online storage providers are giving customers easier and more convenient ways to get at this storage than they get with a web host. But I think at this point it’s mostly tech savvy people who can understand even these simplified interfaces. My feeling is that since many of their potential users are also savvy enough to understand how to use [s]ftp/rsync/scp/webdav to access the storage that web hosts or amazon provides, they really need to compete more aggressively on GB per dollar to get more business.

I prefer to have a close button on the edge of each tab, and when I close a tab for focus to go to the previously selected tab, so these two are invaluable:

• tab x
• flst (turn off the tabflipping feature immediately though)

(I wonder if these actually have any code in them, or they just change some preferences somewhere)

Next, here are two extensions which help me to solve two web annoyances - pages with crazy annoying flash, and sites that are designed only for IE and don’t work right in firefox.

• flashblock
• ie tab

And depending on how much web development I happen to be doing, this one comes in handy:

• web developer

Both flashblock and web developer have useful buttons you can put on your toolbar. The button for flashblock lets you add the current site to your flash-allowed site list, and the button for web developer allows you to quickly show/hide the developer toolbar.

To get the buttons, you go to View->Toolbars->Customize and just drag them onto the navigation bar.

Finally, here’s another nice one to have:

• bugmenot

This one automates lookup to bugmenot.com for anonymous username/passwords for registration required sites like nytimes & friends, and autofills form fields.

There are times that I’m using remote desktop to connect to a machine running vmware, and I need to user of the virtual machines running inside vmware. The display refresh is often slow in this case, and the mouse emulation seems to get a little confused as well. It would be cool if vmware itself provided a vnc / remote desktop server you could connect to, instead of having to mess around with turning on remote access within the virtual machine itself (which, if your virtual machine’s networking is set to NAT or a host-only private network, is complicated or impossible to make work).