Too much too fast

Do you know that you can purchase a Quad-core machine with 4GB of RAM for about $500? As we all know, computers always get cheaper, but I am somewhat amazed at how fast these multicore machines are hitting the market. This could be seen as a good thing, because users have access to so much computing power, but it can also be a waste of resources. With the availability of this powerful machines, application developers have gotten careless. Applications are now full with bells and wistles, with not enough real functionality. The worst part about the whole thing is that if you are running an old PC (let's say a single core 2.2 GHz with 512MB, you can do very little with that nowadays). I can barely browse the web anymore. My girlfriend has a 3GB RAM machine and at one point Internet Explorer was using almost 500MB, it's not just IE's fault, there's also javascript and flash to blame as well. I guess I'm just frustrated that I can barely use my PC with 512 MB running Windows. So all in all, because everyone have these powerful machines, application developers are not really too concerned about the little guy who wants to keep enjoying his 6-year old PC. Maybe I should just boycott Windows, Flash, and Javascript altogether and find smarter ways to obtain retreive the information that I need from the web through Minix and Lynx. I may be fed up enough to do that. Until next time, Internet Land.

The fastest way to create host-only network with VirtualBox

Hello Internetland,

This took me a while to figure out, so I decided to write this post to share it with the world.

Since VirtualBox gives you the ability to attach a virtual ethernet adapter on Host to one of the ethernet adapters on the guest machine, it means that these two interfaces have a direct connection to each other. In other words, it's like plugging a crossover ethernet cable between 2 computers. All you have to do is statically assign IP address to each machine and it will work.

In summary, in your guest settings, create a new adapter and attached it to "Host Interface", then select the host interface you want to attach to. If you do not have any, you can add one through the interface. So it should look like the image below



Then start the virtual machine, if running Linux use

ifconfig eth1 192.168.1.2 netmask 255.255.255.0 up

for Windows use

netsh interface ip set address name="VirtualBox Host Interface 1" static 192.168.0.1 255.255.255.0 

Once you have set static for both machines, you should be able to connect to your guest machine. Hope this helps.

Staying connected

We all know how popular Facebook and MySpace have been in the past few years. In the past, people mainly stayed connected through email. But now, with social networking site, you can know a whole person's history from the classes that they are taking to what parties they plan to attend (if they let you). These social networking sites, realizing each other's need to constantly stay connected, began providing frameworks that allow application developers access to that connection link between peers. Developers can use that information to create applications that connect friends in unprecedented ways.  Some applications automatically update user profile's based on some criteria. For example, smartphones that can automatically upload pictures to Flickr or Facebook. With this connection information, applications can be much starter about who, when, how, and where to connect to each other.

• Imagine a peer-to-peer file sharing application that only connects to your facebook friends and allows you to share only with the people you want.


• Imagine being able to run your own website privately and allow only your friends access to it and not have its content show up on Google.


• Imagine graduate students at different universities connected together and allow their spare CPU cycles to be shared when their CPU is idle.


• Imagine friends being able to share their files with using email.


• Imagine friends being able to stream their video files to each other without having to download the entire file.


• Imagine being able to do all of this in 5 minutes or less.

Well, if you can dream it, then you can acheive it. Check out this link below, it may not be the answer to all of these dreams, but it's a start.

http://socialvpn.wordpress.com

How to turn your Windows PC lab into a Linux-based Condor Pool

How can you get the most use out of a Windows PC lab?

Most Windows PC labs around the country are severely underutilized. Despite the high cost of power consumption and management, average PC labs only uses about 10% of their total CPU utilization in a particular day. Meaning that 90% of the time, the CPU is just waiting and running some idle process that does nothing. Well, there is a solution at

http://www.grid-appliance.org

This Grid Appliance project you to turn a Windows PC lab into a Condor pool without interfering with normal lab use. Through the use of virtualization, this can be acheived without requiring any change to the infrastructure of the lab. And all this can be done effortlessly. Here is a list of projects/software that have made this possible.

• 
  
  VMware (www.vmware.com)
  
  


• 
  
  Condor (www.cs.wisc.edu/condor)
  
  


• 
  
  IP-over P2P (www.ipop-project.org)
  
  

If any of the links above are not clear enough on how this is possible, simple reply to this post and I will be glad to provide more details.

 Enjoy