Running Chrome OS in VMWare Workstation – Step By Step

I wanted to have a play with Chrome OS, but didn’t fancy compiling the code etc…

Fortunately, GdGt provide a VMDK that you can download, and be up and running in no time using VMWare workstation (or player for that matter)

Step 1 – Download Chrome OS VMDK

I downloaded a Chrome OS VMDK from GdGt – you can get it here:
http://gdgt.com/google/chrome-os/download/

Step 2 – Create a new VMWare machine

Select “I will install the operating system later”

As the guest operating system, select Linux, then Ubuntu
Others may work, but this is the one that worked for me.

You can choose whatever size to make the disk, since you will be replacing this anyway!

Click finish.

Step 3 – Edit the newly created machines settings

One the machine is created, click Edit virtual machine settings (before you power it on)

Select the Hard Disk, and click Remove

Then, press Add.

Select Hard Disk, and press next.

Select “Use an existing virtual disk”

Note:

At this stage, it would be sensible to unzip the downloaded file from gdgt to your ChromeOS VM Directory (in my case C:\VM\Chrome OS (if you haven’t done so already)

Then, click next in the above screen

Select the chrome-os-0.4.22.8-gdgt.vmdk file, and click Finish.

If it asks you to convert the existing virtual disk to a newer format, just select “Keep Existing Format” and press Ok.

The new hard drive will be added.

Click Ok.

Step 4 – Power on the virtual machine

Power on the Virtual Machine, and after a few seconds, the login screen appears:

Enter your Google account username and password, and press enter
(note: you must be connected to the internet for this to work)

Ta Da!

Dell E6400 Screen Flicker – Caused by display cable?

Last week, I started having trouble with my Dell E6400 Notebook.

There is an intermittent "flashing" on the screen – kind of a “solarising” of the colours, and flickering – it also displayed as “split screen” – split horizontally, displaying the same image top and bottom, but at very low resolution.

See flickering / solarising:
[video]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mS7pOjiEgKE[/video]

Sometimes, the screen would turn off, flash black, and then display “Display driver stopped responding and has recovered” – see image below:

I can reproduce the problem by holding the laptop by the left hand side, towards the top of the base, and sort of pressing the base cover.

Removing the base cover, I traced the problem to be with or around the LED cable (highlighted red in the image to the left)

If i pressed the cable or where it was connecting to the main board, the flickering problem could be reproduced.

I removed the cable, cleaned it, removed all dust from around it and replaced.

This problem is not totally fixed – but it happens far less now than it did before.

I suspect very strongly, I will require a new cable.

I generally (through bad habit) tend to pick the laptop up on that side of the base – so I think the cable may of worn out.

Fingers crossed a new cable is all that is required, not a whole new motherboard!

For reference, the cable I have is pictured below:

Part Number: DC202000HZ0L

reCaptcha enabled on comments

I’ve recently noticed a lot of blog comment spam on my blog.

Where  some-one kisses-bum in order to “trick” me into accepting  their comment.
For example:

Howdy there,this is Everett Krajcer,just discovered your web-site on google and i must say this blog is great.may I share some of the Post found in this website to my local friends?i’m not sure and what you think?anyway,Many thanks!

Complete with a nice back link to his crappy website about “low rate loans”

This black hat SEO tactic is become very widespread.

Simply google a few phrases from that comment

Whilst you will not see any exact matches, they’re all along the same sort of lines, and on blogs…

The software posting these comments alters it very slightly for each blog posting, to fool search engines. 

To combat this, I’ve installed the reCaptcha plugin onto WordPress

Installation took literally two minutes, and is now up and running. 

Apologies to any genuine comment posters, but the spam was becoming too much!

You can get the plugin here:

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-recaptcha

Amazing Etch-A-Sketch work

Just thought I’d share some of these amazing Etch A Sketch artworks…

Some people truly are talented. And have far too much time on their hands….

Some more to check out:

http://www.gvetchedintime.com/gvetchedintime/gallery.php

100 new followers on twitter, bought for a Fiverr

After signing up to Fiverr, I decided to give it a try.

Someone with a somewhat copyright infringing username of Twitter offers:

Twitter: I will sell you 100 real Twitter Followers for $5
(http://www.fiverr.com/users/Twitter/gigs/sell-you-100-real-twitter-followers)

There were plenty of others offering the same, if not more followers, but they required your username and password, and would just follow hundreds of people, in the hope of a reciprocal follow.

However, this one seemed different.
Just over £3.30 for 100 new followers? Great feedback? It seemed too good to be true, so I thought I’d lay my $5 on the line, and give it a go.

I placed my order, and around an hour or so later, had confirmation he had begun.

Within a few minutes, I started to get email notifications of new people following me.
It seemed to be working!

25 minutes later, the emails dried up, and I assumed it was completed.
I checked my followers, and, to my amazement, I had 135 new followers!

Some were particularly random, no tweets, following loads of people etc (suspect- FAKE) but there were a few active tweeters in there.

I @ replied some of them, asking how they heard about me / why they started following me, however have not got any response

All in all, did what was said on the tin. I got over 100 followers. Using who.unfollowed.me I saw that about 15 of these unfollowed me within a week.

What can you get for a Fiverr? – A quick review on Fiverr Marketplace

New marketplace Fiverr allows you to outsource those small tasks you may have, for a fixed fee of $5 (aprox. £3.30 depending on how the exchange rate is behaving)

Fiverr allows people to list things they would do, for $5.
In return, Fiverr takes $1 from the value of the order, leaving the person providing the service with $4.
This can be withdrawn from the account, once they have accumulated $40 or more.

As you would imagine, there are plenty of weird and wacky offerings, or “Gigs” as they are called by Fiverr.

However, there are hundreds of potentially really useful things available.

For example:

genelors: I will setup a WordPress blog and configure your domain to it for $5

landee: I will be your personal assistant for 1 hour for $5

mzzedithandlucy: I will give you a 1/2 hour Juggling Lesson over Skype for $5

Payment is handled through PayPal, making it nice and easy to use.

When you place an order, you have to pay upfront, and then the order is fulfilled.
Just in case, there is a dispute procedure – but it’s unlikely you’ll ever need to use it!

So you can be sure of a timely delivery, there is a handy “number of orders in queue” displayed below the order button.

You can also contact the seller to clarify things before you part with your $5.

I for one, will be outsourcing some of those niggly little tasks to Fiverr.
Such tasks as resizing photos, installing WordPess etc… are perfectly suited!

Deploying .NET 4 Project – Error 1001 (System.BadImageFormatException)

After attending the UK Tech Days events last week in London, I was keen to jump on the Visual Studio 2010 and .net 4.0 bandwagon.

I converted some of our projects here at Crocus to the .net 4 framework (which was incredibly easy – nothing broke!)
I even took advantage of some of the quick to implement features in .net 4, and converted some of our massively over-ridden methods to use optional parameters.

One project in particular is a Windows Service, that sends out purchase orders on a schedule.
(I recently wrote about how this broke due to Quartz.net expecting a UTC start time)

This has a Visual Studio deployment project associated with it.

After building the newly upgraded .net 4 version of the project, and deploying the .msi file to our target server, I got the following error:

Error 1001 Exception occurred while initializing the installation. System.BadImageFormatException: Could not load file or assembly or one of its dependencies. This assembly is built by a runtime newer than the currently loaded runtime and cannot be loaded.

Now, I had definitely upgraded said server to .net 4 (twice, as a matter of fact – after the first time i received this error!)

After some Googling, some people were saying to change the platform target on my assemblies, which i did, to no avail. 

I eventually discovered the problem.

You need to set the .NET Framework Launch Condition

Here’s how to do it:

Right click on your deployment project in solution explorer

Under “Version” Choose .NET Framework 4

After rebuilding and deploying my setup file, everything worked fine.

C# 4.0 – Optional Parameters

I know, I know, VB has had them for ages.

But I don’t care… Now C# has them too!

This will greatly reduce method overloads!
Check this bit of code (sorry it’s not a “real world” example)

public class TestClass
{
    public void DoSomething(string parameterOne, string parameterTwo, string parameterThree)
    {
        DoSomething(parameterOne, parameterTwo, parameterThree, null);
    }

    public void DoSomething(string parameterOne, string parameterTwo, string parameterThree, string parameterFour)
    {
        if (parameterFour != null)
        {
            //doing somthing with the parameters.
        }
    }
}

The DoSomething method has an overload on it that takes a fourth parameter (in this case parameterFour)

When we use the above code, our intellisense looks like this:

…and the second overload

As we can see, the method has 2 overloads. One taking parameterFour, one not.

New in C# 4.0, we can use something called optional parameters.

This allows us to change our method to:

public class TestClass
{
    public void DoSomething(string parameterOne, string parameterTwo, string parameterThree, string parameterFour = null)
    {
        if (parameterFour != null)
        {
            //doing something with the parameters.
        }
    }
}

As you can see, we’ve removed the overloaded method – I’m sure you can appreciate, if we had a method with many overloads, this results in much cleaner code

Now, our intellisense looks like this:

In my opinion, this looks a bit confusing.

Sure, I’ll get used to it, but in my opinion, the method is still sort of overloaded… just with optional parameters!

Quartz.net trigger not firing

I’ve used Quartz.net for a little while – more specifically, around 6 months. I started working with it around the end of October 2009. Irrelevant, you may think, but the important thing here is the time. During winter months, the UK runs on GMT (or UTC+0)

During these months, (up until 28th March 2010) my application functioned as expected – however, when the clocks went forward for British Summer Time, the trigger stopped firing.

The problem?

I’d specified my triggers start time like this:

trigger.StartTimeUtc = DateTime.Now;

Which was fine, when, before the clocks go forward for summer.

After the clocks go forward (and we start enjoying lighter evenings etc…) the UK is on UTC+01 (British Summer Time)

This means, at the time of writing (circa 14:45pm, April 12th 2010) the values of DateTime.Now and DateTime.UtcNow are as follows:

DateTime.Now

12/04/2010 14:47:39

DateTime.UtcNow

12/04/2010 13:46:58

… a whole hour and a few seconds difference.

By using DateTime.Now to set the start time (which expects the time as UTC) – I was in fact, telling Quartz.net to start the trigger at 14:47 – an hour later than I wanted.

Summary

Always use DateTime.UtcNow to set the Triggers StartTimeUtc

Another Domain Name Appraisal Scam – thedomaininvestors.com

Back in October, I wrote about a domain name appraisal scam. It appears this is still doing the rounds, but has changed wording slightly.

Below is the transcript of messages:

Make no mistake, THIS IS A SCAM

From: coddington@thedomaininvestors.com
Sent: 18 March 2010 07:54
To: Alex James Brown
Subject: ukcabs.net (sent 03/18/10)

 

Hello,

We buy and sell domains and web pr®jects. What is your price for the domain?
If you have other domains for sale feel free to send your list.

Looking forward to do business with you.
Regards,

Maria Coddington
Vice President
Internet Investment Startegies LLC

========================================================
NOTICE – This communication may contain confidential and privileged
information that is for the sole use of the intended recipient. Any
viewing, copying or distribution of, or reliance on this message by
unintended recipients is strictly prohibited. If you have received this
message in error, please notify us immediately by replying to the message
and deleting it from your computer.
========================================================

My reply, short and sweet:

From: Alex James Brown
Sent: 18 March 2010 07:54
To: coddington@thedomaininvestors.com
Subject: Re: ukcabs.net (sent 03/18/10)

 

Looking to sell it for $40,000

Thanks

Alex

 

Now, make no mistake, I know this domain isn’t worth anywhere near $40k, but, to my amazement, a reply!

From: coddington@thedomaininvestors.com
Sent: 18 March 2010 09:31
To: Alex James Brown
Subject: Re: ukcabs.net (sent 03/18/10)

 

Alex,

Can you accept 39,000 USD?

Do you sell domain with a web site or just the name?

Domain without content is ok with me. Web site is not necessary.

Have you had your domain names evaluated in the past? I mean domain
appraisals. Without valuation we cannot be sure in the sale price. It’s very
important for me in terms of reselling too. But we must engage a valuation
company with REAL manual service. So I will only accept valuations from
independent sources I and my partners trust.

To avoid mistakes I asked domain experts about reputable appraisal
companies.

Please check this blog with suggestions from other sellers and buyers:
http://www.domainexplorer.org/Archive/86132905.htm

If, for example, the valuation comes higher you can adjust your asking price
accordingly.  It will be fair. I also hope you can give me 12% – 15%
discount.

After you send me the valuation via email (usually it takes 1-2 days to
obtain it) we’ll continue our negotiations.

What is your preferred payment method:  Escrow.com, International wire
transfer, PayPal.com or something else?

Hope we can come to an agreement fast.

Looking forward to your reply.

Haggled me out of $1000 dollars. Damn.

My reply (sorry for the bad language, but I really do hate scammers)

From: Alex James Brown
Sent: 18 March 2010 09:51
To: coddington@thedomaininvestors.com
Subject: Re: ukcabs.net (sent 03/18/10)

 

yeah, absolutely,

sorry, I meant to say $40, but $39,000 is great! thanks.

yeah, I’ll sure do the appraisal now.

oh wait…

http://www.alexjamesbrown.com/scams/domain-name-appraisal-scam/

Kindly,

Go fuck yourself.