VirtualBox

Virtual Machine systems have been popular for servers for a few years now. They save big time $$ when setting up server rooms since most of the server systems in an IT shop aren’t that busy. But recently VM has become popular for desktop users. Many of the reasons we used to use “Dual-Boot” systems are much better served using VM. There are several reasons why you might want to run VM on your system:

• You have a windows system and want to run Ubuntu.
• You have a Mac and want to run Windows occasionally.
• You have Windows, or a Mac, and want to have a system where you can surf safely, for example to do your online banking.
• You are doing development and want to have a “clean” system for testing.

One of the most functional, and easiest to deploy, VM systems is VirtualBox. Now inside Oracle, this system was originally developed at Sun and is Open Source, and free. Microsoft has Windows Virtual PC,  and you can run Windows XP or Ubuntu on your Vista or Windows 7 system. But of course, it has no support for Ubuntu or OS/X as a host, so why learn more than one system? I’m going to use Windows and Ubuntu systems as hosts, so I’ve chosen VirtualBox.

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I’ve written a photo resizer program, which can be found here on Source Forge.

I’m now porting the program to Linux, which is no issue except when it comes to getting it to run on a system where the development environment is not installed. I’ve installed the following packages: libqtcore4, libqtgui4. The program runs fine, except that JPG support does not work. PNG works fine.

The image plugins are there in both usr/lib/qt/plugins and usr/lib32/qt/plugins. Although the list is not the same which is strange.

usr_lib_qt4_plugins_imageformats

usr_lib32_qt4_plugins_imageformats

Report Lib Paths And Image Formats

So why won’t JPG images load into my program?

- Windy

Update: Update: Program fixed now. The problem was some plug-ins that process images. These DLLs were not supplied since the program finds them with a non-standard way if you have the Qt toolkit installed. The program and the installer is now fixed to install those plug-ins too.

Update: This program fails on Win XP Sp3. I’m investigating why this is, but it appears to be a bug in the QPixmap class of the Qt Library. I’ll fix the program as soon as possible. You can follow the discussion in this post.

Friends of mine have their digital cameras and need to resize their photos to send over email. All the programs I’ve found on the web are either too complicated with way too many options for a novice computer user or strange to use like the program that you rename to change the size of the photo and then drag and drop photos onto it to resize the photos. I have designed a very simple program to resize either one or several photos.

Resize a Photo

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I recently wrote a program to test my new computer. I wanted to test the wattage range and cooling of the new processor so needed a program that would keep all the cores of the processor busy. The Core i7-950 is a 4 core processor with Hyper-Threading which means that there are a max of 8 threads. Since AMD provides server processors with up to 12 threads so the program has a maximum number threads of 32. I use the HWMonitor program to monitor temperatures and wattage if your processor supports it.

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I’ve been looking for a source control solution for some time. I used to use QVCS, but it costs money and you have to get the Enterprise version to get client/ server. At this point I have three, or four, development systems and they include both Windows and Linux.

I considered Bazaar, but after a couple of days I came up with more questions than I had answers. My reasons for not using Bazaar are here.

While there were a few glitches I was able to get going with Surround SCM in a single day. Surround SCM is easy to use, and supports client / server across Windows, Mac and Linux.

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I need a personal source control system for my development.

As a big believer in Open Source solutions I took a careful look at Bazaar. But alas, I could not get started with Bazaar.

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These are the things I want to do with Bazaar. I have a network of Win Vista, Win 7 and Ubuntu systems. Click on any picture for a larger view.

1 – Create a project with collocated repository.
Must do this manually due to the bug in creating collocated repositories but it seems to work by using the All command dialog and colo-init.

Creating repository

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Update: This is a known bug. The work around is to use the manual method of doing the commands as follows:

All Commands Dialog

Note that I tried the command before deleting the .brz folder. Once I deleted it, it worked fine. The fix is known and will be available in the next release.

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