Dugie’s Pensieve

They say a picture is worth a thousand words:

‘nuff said - *rolls up sleeves and presses the power button*

Here’s a snippet of Virtualization history for you:  10 years ago Scott Devine, Edouard Bugnion and Mendel Rosenblum filed patent #6397242, “Virtualization system including a virtual machine monitor for a Computer with segmented Architecture”

Ok so it was October 26 1998, and I’m a few days early, but you can grill me about it later =)

Anyway, enough of that go check out patent #6397242, and a snippet is below:

 Abstract
In a computer that has hardware processor, and a memory, the invention provides a virtual machine monitor (VMM) and a virtual machine (VM) that has at least one virtual processor and is operatively connected to the VMM for running a sequence of VM instructions, which are either directly executable or non-directly executable. The VMM includes both a binary translation sub-system and a direct execution sub-system, as well as a sub-system that determines if VM instructions must be executed using binary translation, or if they can be executed using direct execution. Shadow descriptor tables in the VMM, corresponding to VM descriptor tables, segment tracking and memory tracing are used as factors in the decision of which execution mode to activate. The invention is particularly well-adapted for virtualizing computers in which the hardware processor has an Intel x86 architecture.

Patent number: 6397242
Filing date: Oct 26, 1998
Issue date: May 28, 2002
Inventors: Scott W. Devine, Edouard Bugnion, Mendel Rosenblum
Assignees: VMWare, Inc.
Primary Examiner: Majid Banankhah
Attorney: Jeffrey Slusher
Application number: 9/179,137

Yes, I went camping [again] and it rained [again] – but I refused to admit defeat, and managed to keep a campfire burning; even when it was surrounded by a 2ft moat of water:

…and continuing with my camping tradition, I also cooked a mighty fine shepherds pie; even if I do say so myself.   And yes there much much drinking of good scotch, and lazing around reading a good old fashioned novel or two.

Ahhh camping.  Lovely.  I’m already looking forward to the next trip.

Isn’t it funny when odd things happen.  Well it’s not really funny, it’s quite unfortunately really.  Not all power meters are created even.  The more research we (Paul and I) do, the more strangeness there is.

Anyway, rather than say what has already been said, check out Paul’s notes on “Lies, Damn Lies and Cheap Power Meters” and a snippet is below:

I have had and used an Electus power meter for about 12mths since they became available in Australia. I figured it was just like the american Kill-a-watt. Diligently collecting and comparing devices to see what they used and how much I was wasting with standby power. Dan did an early review on DansData.

ATA reported some accuracy concerns early on, and stopped selling them. The indication was this was only minor, and at low power settings.

I recently purchased the newer Solarinverters (SI) replacement from ATA and found some VERY large discrepancies between what I had seen before. Unsure as to which one to trust, I fired up the clamp meter to validate the results. The results [were not pretty].

Here’s a something from my VM toolkit.  It’s a homebake tool I wrote in VB6, and I’ve been using for quite a few years now. 

Quite simply, the tool reads a list of configurational changes [registry changes/ scripts/ software/ installables], then you choose which ones to apply, and it goes ahead and does it.  It’s run locally on the target machine, and doesn’t require or care anything about domain membership [although you can use PSexec to invoke it remotely]. 

I’ve used this little baby to automate the build of SQL, Exchange, Web servers, Terminal Servers and more desktops than I care to remember.

These days I find I use it mostly when authoring new VMs, and rebuilding physical hosts.  It’s been a faithful way to reproduce, automate and reduce the time it takes to do all sorts of tasks — oh and it writes basic doco too!

Anyway, I’m not sure how much life is left in a tool like this, so I’ve been thinking of releasing into sourceforge/web/something.

Thoughts or comments?  Ping me directly.

I’m posting this as a result of a conversation I had earlier this week about “dude-where-is-my-stuff-in-process-explorer“- I had always assumed this was just something everyone knew.  (Like Ctrl+C in a msgbox)

Anyway, so now I thought I’d share this snippet of trivia with you.  when you use process explorer (and you should be), under Vista you will notice [by default] that “some of your stuff” is missing.  See the screen shots below.

So if this happens to you:  Hold Shift+right click, and select “Run as administrator“, and things will be as they should be.

ProcExp run as a ‘regular user’

ProcExp using ‘run as Administrator’:

Tada!