The logical progression of the thin-client cloud movement is that it comes to the masses. We’ve seen numerous advances in Virtualisation technology purchases from the Citrix mob with Xen, VMWare’s long pedigree, and the new entrant Sun’s VirtualBox. All these are great, but are missing the point of mainstream adoption outside the enterprise. This can only occur when virtualization is no longer about just server consolidation and cycle saving.

Apple is building a server-farm, can this be a prelude and foundation of what is to become the delivery mechanism for the VOS (Virtual OS) ? My prediction is that within 2 years, not only will there be a smaller device that you are able to take around in the form of a tablet, but more importantly is its integration with your persistent presence.

A simple scenario is you working on a document or watching a movie on your Mac at home, after which you must leave. Without turning anything off, you merely take your tablet/light-weight computing unit, and proceed on your trip. Once on a bus, you will be able to resume your document editing, movie watching experience exactly where you left off.

Current core strengths within Apple do not include OS abstraction and Virtualization (I’m not counting Rosetta, as that wasn’t developed inhouse), so Apple’s next purchase should be a player in Virtualization delivery, or at least see a partnership emerge – Citrix – wink*wink*nudge*

“FAILED: The object or item referred to could not be found” is the extremely helpful message that VMWare converter displays when it fails.

Digging deeper, within the logs we can see that there are multiple instances of

“Warning: failed to create directory” and “Warning: failed to clone directory tree”.

The simple work-around is to convert the vmdk disk to a monolithic-sparse.

You can do this by issuing:

$ vmware-vdiskmanager -r original.vmdk -t 0 destination.vmdk

This will clone the disk image as well as modify it from being composed of 2GB files for the entirety of your VM to a single vmdk referred to as a ‘monolithic-sparse’ (merely referring to the fact that it will increase in size automatically to encompass the the VM partition).

After completing the cloning process, you should have no problems in restarting the conversion process, and it should complete as advertised.

NOTE: iPhones Firmware update 2.1, seems to have gotten rid of the problem. If now only Apple would fix the damn calendar bug

Have you recently sent an email from your beloved iPhone and have it delivered – empty? Then when you look at the sent on your phone you get the lovely: “This message has no content”. Read more »

Going green? Or going neat? Get rid of that paper!

Think of all the bills, invoices, warranty cards, tax refunds and bank statements that you file away, day after day. The problem here is that paper is bulky, and takes up a lot of physical space, especially if you’re an owner of a filing cabinet.

My hope for this task was to achieve a state where I can be light on my feet, Read more »

To add to the ever increasing arsenal of gadgets to never leave at home, comes the BT-1000P GPS Logger.

Having recently purchased the unit, especially for the purpose tagging all the photos for an upcoming trip, I flew away extremely happy, Read more »