Best start this blogging lark ...

It was a long time ago in a village far, far away ... or Reading (UK) and about 12 months ago to be precise ... when I was chatting to an account manager from good old Microsoft.

The essence of this conversation was ... do you blog?

Well, actually "No, I don't. Somehow I can never find the time, our company doesn't really support it, blah. blah. blah". There always seemed some excuse for not doing it; in reality I was probably not giving it the attention it deserves.

So, here I am blogging and I have some stuff to blog about which always helps.

I've spent the last 2 days building some virtual machines for my studies and a few other bits and bobs. My recent infatuation began about 2 weeks ago when I had a conversation with a colleague aboout "differencing disks". Until that point - never heard of them. Now I'm almost an expert of 2 weeks experience!

So, I did some reading and I found this artcle - "HOW TO: Use Virtual PC's differencing disks to your advantage". It's an excellent article but sadly uses Virtual PC. Now, this in itself isn't too bad but I have a nice Gentoo system at home which I really like. It generally does what I want (except when I install KDE 4.2 and really mess it up!) quickly and with minimal memory demands. I also have a nice knoppix USB stick to boot my laptop from so I don't touch the work's hard disk. So, what I get around to thinking is ... can I do this on Linux and Windows, sharing between the two depending on whether I am working at work (Windows XP) or at home (Linux)?

Looking at the options I see VMWare and VirtualBox. I've never managed to get VMWare working on my gentoo (not really put much effort in mind you) but it would have been nice since it works without much messing on Windows and Linux. It has a nice remote interface via HTTP and it generally works pretty well.

However, being a nice Open Source advocate - which I have been for many years - I thought this nice "VirtualBox OSE" edition must be good. It's free, it's open source and it's written by SUN.

So, the challenge I set was to reproduce the method described in the article above (not to be confused with METHODOLOGY - that is the study of methods and not the implementation of a method!!! - see Methodology - pet hate out of the way now!)

In the next few days I will document my findings. I used some intuitive hacking to determine how to do this because the documentation didn't really cover it. I will also be developing a nice little BPM app on K2. The reason for this - I was set a nice problem to solve in a 'meeting' recently and thought it would make a good end-to-end process for me to waffle on about and show my breadth of skills - which, after all, is what blogging is all about!!

I also have a few bits-n-bobs to add into the VirtualBox codebase if I get time, certainly I will be adding some feature requests after my experiences over the past 2 days. A chance to do some C++ coding for a change. Also probably write a nice little utility in C# using Mono (Linux) and VS 2008 (Windows XP) since it is difficult to move between the two systems without modifications to the various configuration files for VirtualBox.

So, enough for now, I'm Midnight Coding again and I have to be up for work tomorrow.