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.

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.

Anyone notice anything odd? Click for bigger.

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

Normally this stuff comes in bottles so I was quite curious when I got these:

Click for bigger

I’m half way through the one with the pink flowers and it’s bloody lovely. I’m going to save the other two for another time though

Anyway I chose a name for my potential business but it was going to be dependent on the availablility of the domain name. Much to my surprise the domain was available so I snapped it up straight away.(via the ever efficient and affordable Blacknight of course.)

But there is a downside. The domain name had belonged to a previous business and the amount of spam being targeted to the domain name is quite significant. Fortunately 99.9% of it is being filtered by my mail gateway.

Another interesting and curious side effect is that the previous owners of the domain had also registered a shortened version of it which they still own. Unfortunately for them they configured it as a CNAME (alias) to the domain that I now control and subsequently my servers are busy rejecting mail and web requests for this second domain.

I still haven’t decided whether or not my business plan will make it off the drawing board. I hope to reach that decision in the next few weeks as I’m currently in negotiations with a potential client so watch this space.

The fossils themselves are of a marine animal that still lives in the oceans of the world today called Crinoids. Click for bigger.

If anyone is interested, the KML file is available here.

As you can see from the photo below us part time soldiers weren’t the only ones brought over by fishing boat!

In 1994 one of the proper ferries sank with a council truck on board. Searching the net doesn’t seem to bring up much about that sinking but I’m sure that after the sinking the scenario in the photo below is more than likely forbidden!

Click the picture for slightly bigger. Also notice the beer kegs under the planks supporting the weight. Ingenuity at it’s best if not most debatable.

Absolutely awesome! be sure to check out some of the others here.