Things n' Stuff Thoughts about the universe in general

This is another “how to” tech article, anyone who is not interested in such things may stop reading now.

VirtualBox is a great virtualization software (hypervisor as the lingo currently goes) – I believe it matches up nicely against the current VMWare Workstation line and they offer both an open source version which is free for any use as well as a commercial version (with some added features such as SATA support) that is free for personal use.

VirtualBox allows you to take snapshots of the current VM state so that you can safely return to a previous state of your VM if you messed something up (for example – installed too much software on your Windows XP VM). Unfortunately, unlike what the VirtualBox UI will have you think, the snapshot features allows you to take progressive snapshots but you can’t fork your snapshot tree – you can’t create branches off old snapshots. Snapshots which are not current can be either discarded (have their state merged into another state) or reverted too (discard all the newest data and return to the old state).

Additionally, you can’t copy (clone) VMs with snapshots except copying the oldest state¹.

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1. which is most often not what you want. If you don’t mind discarding all of the old snapshots, you can clone the current VMs state using the method described in this VirtualBox forum thread [↩]

ושוב עברו עוד 4 שנים… אהם… 3 שנים… אהם שתיים וקצת.. ושוב מערכת בחירות לא ברורה. והפעם, אני מצביע בצבא מה שמונע את הדילמה הנוראית של מה לעשות בשאר יום החופש שקיבלתי אחרי ההצבעה – בצבא אין חופש, אז אני אתרוצץ בין טנקים.

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Running any search on Google.com, at the moment, including searching for “google” may come up with all results marked This site may harm your computer:

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I’ve started uploading the pictures from the Ireland trip Karen and me took on October (after I gave up on getting all the pictures arranged and labeled with Karen’s help). Look for them in the “October, 2008” album (you can access the gallery quickly using the big “Pictures” tab at the top).

Not everything has yet uploaded (less then half at this time) and what has went up may be out of order so take care when navigating through the photos. One reason to upload it now is that I’m going on reserves duty on Sunday and that is sure to generate a lot more new photographs – it seems that I only practice photography these days on two occasions: either when I’m abroad or in the army (which for some reason at least one of my coworkers keep confusing the two 🙂 ).

Updated: all the pictures were uploaded – a bit less then what I expected: after initial pruning we are at about 1400 pictures, and possibly there are still some redundant pictures that I need to remove. The pictures should be mostly in the correct order, except for the problem that we were using two cameras whose timestamps are a few hours off – so the Powershot pictures should always be after all of the Nikon pictures.

In continuation to my on-off love affair with smart phones (and after another one of my office coworkers fell prey to the dangers of the iPhone¹ ), after I finally got my Nokia E90 charged – after it has been mostly off for the last two months or so, during which I found that the Ericsson P1i does about everything better then the E90, except SSH as I just can’t get the UIQ Putty to work and it doesn’t look like anyone is developing it anymore², the P1i even comes with games installed (at least one anyway) unlike the E90 – I actually used Fring on the E90 today for its almost intended purpose, as I was sitting in a cafe, after purposefully leaving the computer in the car, and chatting on Google Talk with both a friend and my fiancé (who was – interestingly enough – far away on the other side of table 😉 ), and its actually quite cool even if incredibly battery draining: in 2 hours of really not intensive chatting I went through almost half of the Nokia’s rather large battery.

Anyway, sorry for the eclectic post – I’ve moved the blog to Amazon EC2 service and I’m going on a 3 week army reserve duty on Sunday. It might take a while until you see this new post as I’ve just changed the DNS entries a couple of hours ago (I really missed SSH on the E90 🙂 ) but once the update runs through you should have access to the new and improved (virtual) server that would hopefully be much faster.

1. What danger? oooh – another silly app that just shows a different picture when you shake the phone. Seriously – it looks like the company only operates at 50% efficiency now. [↩]
2. Also – initially I though that I’m lacking a TAB key, but apparently its very easy to graffiti any char you’re missing on the keyboard, and surprisingly enough – also TAB [↩]

Or so the article on The Register goes. Aside from populist titling, this story actually demonstrates what hurdles Linux has to go through in order to be accepted as a Desktop Operating System, and considering the size of the task I might as well retract my stand on the subject – yes, Linux is not yet ready as a Desktop OS for the general populace.

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סתם התחשק לי מרק הערב, ואין שום קשר לכך שחורף. בד”כ אני עושה משהו על בסיס אבקת מרק מוכן אבל הפעם לא התחשק לי, אז הנה משהו שהמצאתי:
למה ? כי היה לי סלרי וקולוראבי במקרר ואם לא הייתי עושה איתם משהו הם היו נזרקים לפח בקרוב. שימו לב שההכנה יכולה לקחת הרבה זמן – אפילו שעתיים.

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As the title specifies, I just got back from a diving trip in Sinai – which included 4 days of scuba diving from a boat, with Assi and several great people that we met on the trip (guys – lets keep in touch, you all have my email 😉 ).

Pictures from the trip are, as always, in my gallery – here is a direct link to the album. You can also see it in the “Latest Album” link in the sidebar below – its the one with the underwater motorcycle.¹

And in meta-posting, I’ve just noticed that the “Random Picture” widget (at the top of the sidebar) most often prefers to show more recent pictures – I need to check why is that, but in the mean time you can probably see underwater pictures from the Sinai dives there 🙂 .

Update:

because my pictures from inside the Thislegorm could really would have been better, and so that you can see what you are missing by not diving in the Red Sea, here is a short video I stole from youTube with all kinds of stuff you can see on the most famous sunken ship in the Red Sea – the SS Thislegorm:

1. Also – checkout the slideshow – if you have PicLens installed you can view it in 3D… [↩]

Quite the contrary it seams: Adobe to release Flash 64bit first on Linux. True it is only the beta version, and the MS-Windows and Mac OS-X 64bit versions will follow shortly¹, but still this demonstrates some serious commitment to Linux as an equal player in the desktop operating system market!

All we need now is Photoshop for Linux and we’re set 🙂

Installing the 64Bit flash plugin for Linux is painless although requires some command line experience:
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1. i.e. its been almost two weeks since the Linux release and there is no Windows version yet [↩]

[פוסט מתוארך אחורנית, כי אני חמור – חזרתי מאירלנד ומאז לא כתבתי כלום]

אז זהו סוף הטיול שלנו באירלנד – נכון שקצת anti-climatic, אבל זה מה יש 🙂 הנה מה שקרה:

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