Having had my new PC up and running for a month now I recently treated myself to an 8GB RAM upgrade to bring me the the insane amount of 12 GB total. I did this with a plan in mind. The plan was to use some of the RAM as a RAM disk for use with VMware workstation. The idea being to create a RAM disk and install Windows XP or Linux in to the RAM disk.

Now a RAM disk isn’t all that much good because the moment you shutdown your PC or it crashes or the power fails then you will lose everything. But this wasn’t bothering me that much. What I did was setup my VM using a 6GB RAM disk for storage. Once I had it all setup and up to date I shutdown the VM and simply copied the directory over to the hard disk. Now I had my backup I fired it up once more and played around a bit.

In addition to this I added a second virtual disk on the VM which is always on the hard disk so applications and permanent data is to be saved either there or on my NAS.

So what’s it like? First off I tried it on Windows 7 and didn’t have much success. There are several free RAM disk solutions available but when I got my VM up and running I started seeing a lot of “fragmented disk” errors and after rebooting I had files missing and it wouldn’t boot fully. All the hallmarks of disk corruption or in this case RAM disk corruption. Pondering about it for a bit I figured that maybe this would only work with Error Correcting memory (ECC). I was about to give up but I decided to boot into Ubuntu and try from there.

This was a resounding success! No errors of any kind. XP installed from an ISO in less that 7 minutes using an automated install. XP boots up in approximately 8 seconds from end of BIOS to desktop and the performance is absolutely incredible. Installing Office 2007 took about 5 minutes and  clicking on Firefox has it opening in about 1 second!

What makes this all the more interesting is that VMware workstation has a feature called “Unity” which runs the VM in the back ground and provided a start menu on Gnome. This makes for a very interesting way to seamlessly integrate Windows appications into Linux.

I think that in the not to distant future this blog might be subjected to the mighty powers of “rm -r -f /home/blog*”

In the meantime I’ll leave this here:

Many many years ago the communist journalist Claud Cockburn described Youghal as “standing at a slight angle to the universe.” I’m beginning to understand what he means now.

Anyone with any experience in a workplace will know it as a management buzzword that smacks of horseshit. When asked to define what synergy is you would invariably get the reply “1 + 1 = 3″

Not very helpful is it?

Synergy always annoyed me probably because like most people I didn’t understand or want to know the concept but it hit me like a ton of bricks over in the pub last night. Let me explain:

As it’s near christmas time, drink flows freely and occassionally a sing song might start up. Well last night one of three brothers started a song. When he was finished the second brother sang a song. This put the third brother under a bit of pressure to sing a song so he felt he has no choice so he eventually sang a song too.

There you go, Synergy!

1 brother singing + 1 brother singing = 3 brothers singing. 1 + 1 =3!

Now how to apply that to the business world without resorting to blackmail is anyones guess.

Originally came via an email but I Photoshopped™®  it slightly.

I haven’t left the house in that length of time either. I wonder if much has changed?

Anyway back to the flu. I have no idea if it was swine flu or not as I didn’t bother with any doctors or health professionals because I simply cannot afford them. A visit to the G.P. and a prescription would cost me in and around €100 which is half what I have to spend per week. Ironically of course I haven’t spent anything in the past week anyway other than getting someone to buy me the odd packet of cigarettes so I might have as well got myself checked out.

I’ve already mentioned alternating between being roasting hot and freezing cold, so what else can you expect? Absolutely aching bones and joints for a start. My hips were so sore I could barely walk at times. This started to fade after about the fourth day. Another thing is the dizziness. At times while sitting it was like the whole room was spinning around. Close your eyes and it felt like being in a washing machine. A week later and I’m still having dizzy spells and pounding headaches although not as frequently thankfully. I’ve discovered that lying down on my right hand side seems to stop the dizziness for some reason. It doesn’t work if you lie on your left

Oddly one thing that hasn’t been affected is my appetite. On the contrary I have been constantly hungry and no amount of food is satisfying. There must be some truth in that “feed a cold, starve a fever” adage.

The worst thing (apart from the suffering of course) is the boredom. Any of you following me on twitter may have read recently about the television falling off the wall, well the second T.V. is constantly tied up by my mother recording bloody soap operas so that ruled that out. Staring too long at a computer screen resulted in a few dizzy spells so that ruled that out as too it ruled out reading for the same reason. Still I’m on the mend at last so time to get through some of the bills and other letters that have been piling up while I’ve been laid up.

I see from a cursory glance that college are looking for €1,500 that I don’t have for a registration fee so I guess I will be finishing up there next week and my NCT is due as well.  I guess I should have stayed in bed.

Someone in Brazil changed their theme on blogspot and very nice it is too I have to say. His design is excellent but for one thing. He is hotlinking to an image on my server. I’m getting hundred of hits for it so I figured I might goatse him.

Here’s what his site looked like:

Before

I decided not to go for the full on goatse and instead substituted in a picture of an erect penis I got on wikipedia. I have a screenshot but obviously it is not safe for work so you need to click below to see what it looked like after I made the switch:

After

It claims to recognise any music that is playing after a few seconds and will let you know what it is. With links to download that song from iTunes naturally. A few seconds later it was installed and I tested it out by playing a song on my Macbook’s tinny speakers and sure enough Shazam correctly identified it. Top Gear was on T.V. so I waited until they played some music and held the phone close to the television and it buzzed to say that it had correctly identified the song.

I was duly impressed. Even more so because the app is free. However it would be preferable to have wireless internet access to avoid being raped by O2 for the privilege of sending a few kb of data over their network.

Oh, if you have an iPod touch or a phone with Android it works on those too.

I have four different networks, three wireless access points, and an unearthly amount of machines. To give you an idea of the chaos I made up a lovely diagram which is below. (There will be a fourth wireless access point in place soon but that is for a particular plan that I’m up to. More on that sometime in the future.)

The Sun Sparcs and the HP-UX machine are only powered up occasionally. I use a Dell TFT monitor which is the only display in regular use. Other than that I have a 19in Mitsubishi CRT that I use only when setting up or repairing other machines. I’ve probably mentioned this before but the room is on it’s own electrical circuit which actually has it’s own meter on it and the room is currently consuming between €1.50 and €2 of electricity per day.

I bet you thought it might be more! Most of them are desktops and spent quite a lot of time idling away consuming between 90 and 120 watts of electricity.

If you look at the diagram and are wondering about the External WLAN limited to 1Mb, this is the access point and network that I use whenever I have a nasty virus and or spyware infected PC or laptop for repair.

Anyway, Click on the diagram for a bigger version:

As it happens, while tidying up I found an old spare disk and I decided to give it a new lease of life. Again as it happens I needed another machine for a while for a particular task that this machine would be quite suited to. So now it is alive once more and is happily pushing packets across the internet.

I was quite pleased with the results so much so that I decided that it could run it’s very own web server.  There is just a single html page with it’s story about how an open source operating system (FreeBSD in this case) gave it a new lease of life.

Have a look over here.

Things must be bad when my imagination starts assigning personalities to computers!

The keen eyed among you may have noticed from the phpsysinfo page that it is on a different network to my other web servers. This is a clue as to it’s purpose but unfortunately I can’t divulge it’s purpose here yet!