VirtualBox

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VirtualBoxI have been using VirtialBox as an alternative to WMware Workstation for the last few months and it has proved to be a great success. My use of virtual machines is mainly for development and testing purposes so my evaluation is with that in mind. I have been using Windows XP and Mac OS X as the host operating system with Windows XP, CentOS and Ubuntu as guests.

There have been several releases of VirtualBox in the last year which have including enhanced support for VMware .vmdk virtual disk files. With support for .vmdk disks moving from VMware to VirtualBox on either Windows or OS X is as simple as:

  • Mount the .vmdk disk using the “Virtual Media Manager”
  • Create a new Virtual Machine with the approprtate settings using the disk

While VMware Workstation is an excellent product needing to buy a Windows version and a Mac version doubles the cost and using it on additional machines needs additional licenses.

VirtualBox is available in two editions:

  • VirtualBox Open Source Edition (OSE) – This addition is available as source code you can build yourself under the GPL licence.
  • VirtualBox – This edition adds RDP and USB support to the OSE version and is available as a easy to install binary distribution. This is released under a Personal Use and Evaluation License (PUEL). The license is explained here and includes:

“It doesn’t matter whether you just use it for fun or run your multi-million euro business with it. Also, if you install it on your work PC at some large company, this is still personal use. However, if you are an administrator and want to deploy it to the 500 desktops in your company, this would no longer qualify as personal use.”

Summary:

  • VirtualBox is a good alternative to VMware workstation with similar functionality.
  • Moving an existing virtual machine from VMware to VirtialBox is a simple process.
  • The PUEL license covers most development and testing scenarios for multiple users in an organisation at no cost.

Business Camp Dublin

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A few short notes on some of the talks at Business Camp Dublin held at Trinity College on December 5th.  Some of these presentations are available to download here.
  • Patents and Trademarks (Marie Walsh) – Overview of what you should know about patents, trademarks an ownership of Intellectual Property (IP).
  • Raising Funds from Angel Investors (Liz Fleming) – The Halo Business Angel Network is a joint initiative between Intertrade Ireland and Enterprise Ireland. It is a business angels network targeted at investors looking to meet and invest in high potential, early stage enterprises.
  • 5 Things Any Startup Should Know (Sabrina Dent) – In short: 1) If you build it, they won’t come 2) Looks count 3) Beware of over capitalisation 4) talk is cheap 5) Don’t forget the customers, stupid
  • Getting Stuff out of Universities (John Whelan) – What a University Technology Transfer Office (TTO)  does and how university research can be accessed by outside companies.
  • Starting a Business in a Crisis (Mark Little) -  RTE’s Prime Time presenter who recently announced that he will be leaving RTE to start a new business in 2010 combining digital media and global journalism.

Vodafone Mobile Broadband Tuning

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I have been using the Vodafone Mobile Broadband Stick (Huawei K3765) and noticed differences in performance (high disk and processor use) on my laptop when I was using it compared to being attached to a local network. Turning down the logging level and preventing the Mobile Connect software from starting at logon significantly improved the performance.

1. Turn down logging

Logging can be turned down by editing MobileConnect.exe.config and Settings.xml in C:\Program Files\Vodafone\Vodafone Mobile Connect\Bin\ as follows.

MobileConnect.exe.config

Settings.xml

2.  Don’t start the Mobile Connect software at logon

Use Autoruns to prevent Mobile Connect from starting at logon. It will start from the menu when you want to use the modem.

BarCamp Cork III

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Barcamp was at the Cork International Airport Hotel on Saturday. It was a great event with lots of interesting talks and informal discussion. Congratulations on the organisation to Ciara Feely, Gordon Murray and Ciara Crossan and all those who gave talks on the day. Here are a few  short notes on the talks I attended.

  • Erlang for Five Nines (Tamas Nagy) - Erlang is a general-purpose concurrent programming language and runtime originally designed by Ericsson to support distributed, fault-tolerant applications. It was released as open source in 1998 but is getting more mainstream attention as CouchDB and Amazon SimpleDB are written with it.
  • Marketing Strategies for Start-ups and Entrepreneurs (Una Coleman) – Social media tools i.e. Blog, Twitter, Linkedin etc.
  • Open Street Map (Conor O’Neill) – OpenStreeyMap is Wikipedia for maps. Conor demonstrated how data can be gathered with a GPS enabled phone and uploaded to the OpenStreetMap.
  • How (and why) KildareStreet is porting a million-row-DB app to Django without changing the existing DB *at all* (John Handelaar) – KildareStreet.com aims to make it easy for people to keep tabs on their elected representatives in the Houses of the Oireachtas. It is based on the code for TheyWorkForYou.com which keeps track of the UK’s parliaments and assemblies and has been modified to handle Irish data.
  • Seeing an iPhone application idea through to the Apple app store (Mike Butler) – Apps.ie is a site to showcase iPhone and mobile apps developed in Ireland or with an Irish context. Xcake is the Irish and Northern Irish mobile developers group.
  • The Creation, Protection and Exploitation of Software – A Practical Approach (David Reilly) – Consider IP ownership including brand names up front rather than having problems later.
  • Multi Touch User Interfaces (Martha Rotter)  - Multi Touch allows applications to have some great interactive features but the hardware will need to get more widely available, see the Slides from the presentation.

PINGTEST.NET

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Ookla Net Metrics have added a beta qualitative test for Internet connections called PINGTEST.NET to their existing SPEEDTEST.NET service.

Understanding Your Line Quality gives a good simple explanation of the terms: Packet loss, Ping and Jitter and how they effect services such as VoIP and on-line games.

Example SPEEDTEST.NET Results:

speed_test

Example PINGTEST.NET Results:

ping_test

ping_test_summary

Example

Google Apps Email for your Domain

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Google Apps has been around for some time but I have only recently used it to set-up email from a domain i.e. user@mydomain.com . It is straight forward to configure and you get allot for free using Standard Edition with up to 50 users with 7GB per user of email storage.

There are only two step required:

  • Register for Google Apps Standard Edition
  • Change your domains DNS MX record to point to the Google mail servers

How you change the MX record will depend on how your domain is managed but there are good instructions on this for the uninitiated.

For $50 per user per year you can upgrade to the Premium Edition which adds additional storage,  phone and email support and an  SLA. There is also information available on how to migrating from Microsoft Exchange.

Gmail on Windows Mobile

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I have been using a phone running Windows Mobile 6 for some time using a POP email client and  Microsoft ActiveSync running on my PC to backup contacts and calendar. While this solution worked it had several limitations:

  • Email relied on the POP client polling the server
  • Sent items remained in the phones sent items (unless you cc yourself)
  • Calendar and contact backup relied on phone being connected to the PC

In September Google added push Gmail suport to Google Sync which allows email, contact and calender to be syncronised between Gmail and Windows Mobile using the Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync protocol.

The set-up was straight forward:

  • Make sure you have a backup of contacts,  calendar and email on the phone as the initial synch will delete from the phone.
  • Followed the step by step instructions Set Up Your Windows Mobile Phone
  • Exported contacts from Outlook to CSV and used the import feature for Gmail contacts (if they are not already in Gmail).

This has been running for a few weeks now and I have only had a couple of issues:

  • When contact are synchronised they appear as “Last Name, First Name” on the phone even though the full name is in a single field on the Gmail contact i.e. “First Name Last Name”. This is OK for actual peoples names but it also does it for any name with a space e.g. “ACME Ltd” appears on the phone as “Ltd, ACME”.
  • It worked away for a few days and then the email stopped synchronising. Having checked the forum I found that others had the same problem when the “Message format” on the phones ActiveSync settings was set to “HTML”. By setting this to “Plain Text” it has been working OK since.  It is only the occasional email that is only in HTML format and cannot be read and this is usually ezines.
  • By default only the Inbox is synchronised so if you want to see any other folders on the phone (including sent items) you need to set it up on the the phones Outlook (Folders > Manage Folders).
  • You may also need to set the “Download the past” on the phones ActiveSync settings to e.g. “1 month”. The default on my phone was “3 days”.

Overall this has proved to be a good solution where the phone and mail, calendar and contact have stayed in synchronised. It also opens up the possibility of a simple upgrade to a new phone in the future that Google will synchronise with but only time will tell.

Gaoogle Sync: Set Up Your Windows Mobile Phone