The Vaio install venture continues

Well in spite of the added virtual memory, the Sony recovery software continues crashing when installing on a VM. So forget about my previous post, my only excuse: doing three things at the same time.

Saturday, I registered my new Dyson vacuum cleaner. Instead, of sending the classical postcard I followed the indication in their manual and went to dyson.be. Nice site, built by graphical nuts for sure. Don't expect to see "register your product". After some search, I went to "profile". I did not know that I had a vacuum profile... I created one and finally there, I could register my serial number. These registration processes are really the poorest applications made on the internet... Companies should put much less mony on graphical stuff and much more (that is more than zero) on use-case scenarios


Sunday, I did a bit of homework for the school of my sons. A few parents are trying to setup a library. I already  helped, building a small Java program to print stickers with barcode (believe me or not, this was a pain). Currently the inventory is done by people encoding data in spreadsheets. This last sunday, I grouped all the files together and wanted to publish it on Goodle doc. Unfortunately I never suceeded importing the file.


These week-ends are definitively too short !

For this week, I need to finish a web service written in Java with Apache Axis, get back to a customer for an Open ERP project, read a full bunch of paper concerning another Open ERP project and finally may be a bit of Joomla -- I want to try migration from 1.0.xxto 1.5.xx.

7 - Virtual PC & XP Mode

Well I will not go further on the XP Mode for the Vaio. It does not install. In fact you need the Intel virtualization extension to install XP Mode. Strange. I understand that performance could be affected but not working at all...

My processor is a t6500 http://ark.intel.com/Product.aspx?id=39311&code=t6500. I must say I did not looked at that feature. It is basically in all recent desktop processor but not for in the notebook/laptop product line.

So before considering your migration, look at you processor with the utility provided by Intel
http://www.intel.com/support/processors/tools/piu/.

What's next for the Vaio? In spite of this XP Mode processor issue I will try the Virtual PC (which has the benefit of being free). And I will compare it with VMWARE workstation.

Windows 7

I re-installed again the new Vaio. This time with Windows Vista Ultimate. The install is very smooth and quick. Of course I lost the pre-installed application given with Vista. The most annoying being the CD burner. Why is this not bundled in a product called 'Ultimate' is a mystery.

The net result of installing a 64 bits OS is that I have now 2GB free on 4GB. So be happy that the half  RAM  of your new still idle, unused computer is free...

I must say that I was a bit confused about Microsoft OS naming. 95,XP,2000.. Vista and now 7...

May be, because, ideally you should have 7GB of RAM to get 4 free... or may be because I will have to wait 7 months to get drivers for my HP3550.

I must admit this HP printer was a bad choice, not because it is a bad printer but because some processing is off loaded to the host driver which is then more complicated and basically available much after anything... on board PCL and Postcript printers are much better supported. One remark, it now prints remarkably well from Linux.

Another  point: 7 seems to go on the hard disk for no reason every 20 seconds...strange...

So getting the right OS is still not easy. I prefer Windows to get Office - more used but also much more useful than Open-Office. It is good to remind that the common cut & paste is in most case not working between Linux apps.

I like Linux for the OpenERP and development in general. Vista is crap in average, XP becomes outdated and the XP64 bits support is problematic (drivers, apps) ,Windows 7 lacks some drivers.

Using VMWARE is of course an alternative. Although it  adds complexity on everything (cut & paste works even less in this case). My idea was to use Windows as a host for my VM. The reason was that I expected to carry this Vaio much more than the previous HP to replace my classical notebook. So the starting time of a session with Office is critical.

Summary for this sunny Sunday: getting it all at work is still not easy !

VMWARE acquired SpringSource

Strange but confirmed. VMWARE acquires SpringSource... I am on my hass !

The only understandable synergy at this stage is the Hyperic applications monitoring (that SpringSource acquired recently). VMWARE is eager to be a key player in vitual infrastructure - so called cloud. That makes sense. But what will do VMWARE with all this Java stuff?

I am a bit concerned about the future of the Spring container (and Groovy and Grails).

http://www.vmware.com/company/news/releases/springsource.html