Welcome to the virtual world

So the one thing that i have always been fascinated with more than Coding and Dev is Virtual Environments. I mean what is there not to like about them , you get to have a another machine within your machine that you can use to mess around with till it falls apart and start again with no consequences

While there are many providers out there that provide the applications to host your virtual machines , there are so many pros and cons its hard to choose a good provider.

If you willing to pay for the service then VMWare is by far the best, but if you use windows then you are in a bit of luck since Microsoft Provides a free Virtual PC that you can use. For Mac there is Parallels which works just as well.Recently Sun released xVM VirtualBox which is free for personal use, and man i must say that this is buy far the best option of all for the single user.

Some of the features that really caught my eye was the fact that you could assign each virtual machine a RDP port and basically leave the machine on which it is installed on to act as a server and then remote desktop to the virtual machines from your desktop. Another out of the box feature that i found interesting was the fact that it supports Intels and AMD’s virtualisation features which to me is a awesome leap forward.

The other good thing with them is that they have a release for any distribution under the sun :) .This helps with deep virtualisation testing as well as speed testing.

But as i stated in the start VMWare is the king when it comes to its multitude of products and the support of those products, i can only hope that Sun catches up with something similiar.

The market for these products is too big to be owned by one company only ,so here’s to new virtual applications for free.

Also if you have not yet tried Sun’s product yet i encourage you to do so since it is one great piece of software.

Fear not ubuntu fan

So after my nice post about Ubuntu the other day i had a small problem with a easy solution that i thought i should share.

Since the machine i only had a ntfs drive and i not wanting to do the whole re-format / re-partition went ahead and installed Ubuntu on the ntfs drive. The end result was brilliant , all the operating systems worked 100% and all was good in linux land .

But as fate would have it i was working in the windows partition and after a while had a blue screen of death.On the subsequent restart , not wanting to load up windows again and wait half and hour for it to load ,i decided to put my Ubuntu to the test.

But as Murphy’s law would have it , as the linux booted something went wrong and Ubuntu would not load .After some furious diagnostics i remembered what had happened, my windows had improperly shutdown. With ntfs this causes the drive to become unreadable by linux .There are to ways to fix this , run the ntfsfix application in linux if u can get that far , other wise restart back into windows and do a clean shutdown.This will sort out the problem on the next restart into linux.

They are watching always watching

The old ones are always watching over us :) .
XKCD

I

After this weekend i think i have to admit that i have yet to come across a better version of linux suited to the home user.

Everything from the install process to the actual operating system has been refined to such a point that it is a bliss to use.

Keep in mind that i have been using linux from the very dark days and have almost always dual booted every pc that i have had except my very recent one that i have (the reason for this is that is a primarily work pc). So i think i can safely say that i have seen most of the ups and downs that come with linux .Although in the past i was primarily a Red hat and Open Suse fan i think i have now been successfully converted to ubuntu.

With Hardy Heron the first thing that made the biggest impression on me is the fact that you can do the install from within windows with out the need to do a format or repartition of your current pc.While this is amazing ,you loose some functionality such as the ability to hibernate .To me this is a minor annoyance as i almost always use standby or shut the pc down altogether.

The next feature that struck me from the beginning was the amazing amount of updates that was available locally in South Africa .After the install i was able to get my ubuntu update within 3 minutes .The added advantage was that i was also able to download any other applications that i needed as long as it was available in the local cache.

Now to try and get VS to work and linux and then i can totally get rid of windows .

My Game Buddy 0.5

New Version released :

• Improved loading times.
• Permission Acquired to use site data
• Added better error handling for I.E. and Firefox
• Increased amount of data loaded from Zaps
• Misc other back end fixes

Keep the comments comming , thanks to those that commented already.

My Game Buddy 0.4

Ok finally updated the website to 0.4 , users can now search the respective sites live and data will be loaded.

Please note that data is only taken from the respective sites every 8 hours to prevent dos attacks. The rest of the time the data will be loaded from the database.

Also comments are now live and active , any comments sent will be sent to me.

Please leave a comment here if you have any other idea or such.

My Game Buddy Alpha 0.3

So the day has finally come , i have released the alpha version of My Game Buddy (name might change later).

At the moment i am just trying to get a feel for a decent lay out, all the code has been uploaded as well as the pages but unfortunately the interface to execute updates on the Ms SQL sucks so badly i cant insert the data i need .

So until i can write up a basic interface ,the page you see will only be a example of the layout.

So Head over to MGB and give me you opinion . Critics welcome

The Day has finally arrived

So i finally got my 2 books from Francois Wiid, now to just read them hoping to learn something from them. If anyone has any other recommendations please let me know.

Books i bought :

1. Beginning JavaScript (3rd edition by Wrox)
2. C# Via CLR

The second one is the one i am most excited about as its the one that Steve MCD recommended and it looks pretty advanced which is the stuff i like.

The First book is just there more to be a reference guide since i know some basic javascript but want a solid foundation so i am hoping this will do that for me.

Making your mark

So not to long ago (a few months back) i created a web application that would allow me to track my fuel usage. While the application was pretty much public i never really announced it or blogged about it either. The reason for this was that while it worked fine , the application lacked polish and i had not implemented all the feature’s that i had intended to implement .

So a funny thing happened yesterday, while browsing through my list of rss feeds i came across a feed on Web Worker Daily about an application that basically did the same thing as mine but with a lot less functionality .The difference was that they had a lot more polish for the product (fuelfrog) with all the nice colors and stuff attached .Thinking back if had polished the app a bit more who knows it might have got a bit more limelight (provided i could come up with a better name than fuletracker).

So does it come down to who releases there product first or is it more about  who has the best looking product. I know this is a 2 sided coin because a lot of the general public like i pretty product that is  less functional  more than a ugly more functional product.

So to all those that did not know i have a released a semi beta/alpha fuel tracking application that will allow you to track the mileage and a bunch of other stuff ,  so there i said it.

Now lets just hope my other ideas don’t get taken by other people.

Scraping The Surface

Needs and ease of use is the basis for a lot of developments in this world, so since i had a need and i needed to do it easily i decided to start a small project that will hopefully obtain both for me.

The need : To buy games (if possible at the cheapest price)

Ease Of Use : To do it from one common location.

Before going and creating the app and wasting my most valuable time i did some research. This did not turn out very promising as there was about 1 site(www.pricecheck.co.za) that was able to do what i wanted very basically ,but they did not cover games well and almost not at all at times.Also i needed a location that covered local distributors.

So after finding nothing at all i decided to start with the app and see how far i could go. Well as of now as i write this post i have managed to scrape 3 sites successfully ,kalahari and take 2 for new games and zaps for used games. I have tried to get data from BT Games Site but have been unsuccessful so far.

While there is still a lot to do i now have to power to compare results from 3 different sites at one location.When game hunting this is absolutely useful.

Also the only results that i return are xbox 360 games its not that much different if i needed to integrate other platforms.

If you have any idea please let me know and i will integrate them as i get the time.