Having a weblog means I need to post something to it. Often I feel driven to post something; less often I feel content to not post anything. Even less often I wonder “why”. What’s the driving force behind this force? I’ve had the weblog for some years at a few places. Its been on drupal, wordpress.com, and now on my domain hosted by Ubuntu and my stellar ISP.
Today I don’t have any earth shattering revelations. I’ve been working on learning how to enlarge VMware guests and trying it also on VirtualBox in a slightly different form factor. I’ve managed to enlarge a VMware Server 2003 image from 10 to 40gb using a combination of command-line ninja and ntfsresize. I have not been so successful resizing a VirtualBox Vista guest. I’ll probably try it again this evening though.
Work seems okay enough these days. I’m plenty busy and have been living through that ancient Chinese curse of living in interesting times. I’m moving on past the Linux products as a primary management concern though and on to other company level things which need attention. I’m excited about that because I feel stretched and viable and able to do a lot more. I’ve also made the decision to just run Linux in a Windows shop for the most part. I still have an uneasy truce with Vista on my new Thinkpad T500. The latest foray is suddenly the ThinkVantage System Update tool just won’t. I tried for a day to make it work and it seems generally unwilling to do much of anything. Its a piece of crap tool.
So, after messing with it I just decided to get myself back to Ubuntu and run my GTD applications (OneNote 2007 and Outlook 2007) in VirtualBox seamless mode. I’ve been running Linux, working around open source, dealing with this stuff for almost 11 years now. When I first started there were just a few choices for sound and network cards. Seemed the rule was that you had to wait for at least 2 years to get Linux recognizing the things. Then I started working with this small Texas based OEM. People tend to think that the whole Dell and Linux thing is new; but back in 2000/2001, Dell was preloading 4 different versions of Linux on their Precision and Optiplex lines and even on a laptop line. I ended up managing the hardware certification arm at Linuxcare which helped Dell get this stuff working. The site above is an archive of the site that used to be but you get the general idea about what we were doing around open source adoption in the enterprise even back then. We also did a bunch of other stuff with IBM, APC, and even with Macmillan Books. I was involved then with all these deals and actually represented Linuxcare with Dell and got Dell to certify over 54 product lines on Linux. Very cool! So when you look at advances, its interesting to see things like the Dell Mini 9 but its also fun to call up those ancient memories of working with the good folks at Round Rock that were the “early adopters”.
After reading over this last paragraph, its dawned on me that this whole blog thing promotes radical representation. I can start with the best intentions of discussing Y but end up on X and may even dip my paddle in Z. And that’s okay. Blogs are great vehicles for this kind of rampant pontification 
