Clearing up paravirtualisation
With a recent upgrade to ESX 3.5 I now have the option to enable “VMI Paravirtualisation” on the virtual guest machines. I was hoping to enable this specifically on our Windows guests.
I was not clear on what this meant and I had found a lot of confusing information on the Internets about it. Luckily it seems I was not the only one! I found this really cool summary of what does and what doesn’t support it. Check out Joyrex’s Blog for the full article, but here’s a snip:
Windows Guests:
- As of now, nothing supports it.
- Windows 2003 32-bit would boot with VMI turned on in VMware, but it refused to recognize the PCI Memory Controller properly, and couldn’t find a driver for it.
- Windows 2003 and 2008 64-bit wouldn’t boot with it enabled.
- They have “paravirtualized drivers”, that apparently give better performance when used in the Guest, but I’m not 100%. Whatever the case, “paravirtualized drivers” != full paravirtualization.
Wikipedia also has a nice article on what it is and how it came to be.
A bevy of Fry 
As previously mentioned Stephen Fry shares some of his love for geekery with me, and since he started to blog he has posted some lengthy but interesting thoughts on tech and particularly smart phones. This month he posts about, amongst other things, things he thinks are missing from the iPhone.
Some are the old usual things we all know are obviously missing from the phone; but he also mentions a couple others that are interesting (built-in projector ..?!).
“1. Cut and paste. I mean come on!!
2. iPhone version of Safari to be Flash capable.
3. Video recording: iPhone should be like a Flip
4. Upgrade of camera (xenon flash, higher res)
5. Front facing video camera for 3G video calls
6. MMS
7. User file management capabilities
8. Bluetooth that is worthy of the name. File transfers between different phones and platforms is a minimum requirement.
9. A memory card slot.
10. AM/FM radio. (Mobile TV too, why not?)
11. Better (and removable) battery.
12. Built in projector (this prolly won’t come till V4, but you never know)
13. Customisable glossary for Apple’s predictive text input system. BlackBerry has a superb autotext that allows BB units still to outperform iPhone when it comes to input.
14. Email to be widescreen capable.
15. Attachable proprietary or third party peripherals: keyboard, projector (if not built in see wish 12), printer etc. Maybe not necessary if iPhone implementation of Bluetooth gets the kick up the arse it needs.”
Read the full article though, it’s a humorous but interesting read.
Flash player for Linux 64-bit
Thank you Adobe, thank you!
Works like a charm.
iTunes libraries and SSD’s
My now obsolete Macbook Pro (Thanks Steve) currently has a 50GB iTunes library on it - most of this seems to be taken up by the HD podcasts I subscribe to. This model came with a measly 120GB drive and I’m starting to feel rather cramped by the lack of disk space.
I use my Macbook as the central hub of all entertainment in our house, so it’s vital that I have the music and movies on the local disk for easy access. Now, in order to try resolve this problem and keep the music and movies in/on the Macbook I was considering my options.
1. Buy a larger HDD and upgrade (hack).
2. Use some form of NAS (Time Capsule - £329) and force my wireless to 802.11n, thereby excluding my spouse form any wifi access from her uhhhgly Dell D830. (nope….don’t think so - also, can you store your iTunes library on a Time Capsule? {yes! and yes!})
3. Buy an AppleTV and stream from there. (At £269 for 160GB, that’s a pretty pricey solution)
4. Use the onboard Expresscard slot and insert a SSD. The largest I can find is a 32GB model from Transcend at the moment though.
Am I being daft and overlooking the obvious? Advice, thoughts. Anyone. Bueller?!
