Matt's Blog

Download  http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1526979/vmblock.tar and copy into  /usr/lib/vmware/modules/source/. This tar file has been updated with the instructions form  http://weltall.heliohost.org/wordpress/2012/04/01/vmware-workstation-8-0-2player-4-0-2-and-7-1-x3-1-x-fix-for-linux-kernel-3-4-0/ . You may also want to fix the vmnet.tar file as well with the instructions here .

I have owned a tablet for quite some time now. And it does everything that a tablet should be able to do: play games that can be picked up and put down in 5 to 10 minutes, check email, watch videos, browse the web, and consume news and social feeds. I even tried to do some useful work on a tablet once or twice, and never attempted it again. Every attempt to use an (Android) tablet app for simple word processing was a painful demonstration that not even the people developing the apps were using them seriously. Text would get lost behind an on screen keyboard that would pop up and disappear at the most inconvenient of times. Key strokes would fail to be registered as the tablet froze while processing some background operation. There was no such thing as a spell checker. Trying to insert or edit text in previous paragraphs required a divine level of patience trying to place the cursor at the correct position. It occurred to me that the reimagination o...

Realising that I wanted to dig up a search query that I had done that morning, I opened up my history and began searching. The list of sites I had visited in just one day was quite astounding. Most of the sites were either Google searches or the sites found from those searches. As an information worker this is actually a fairly common browsing pattern. I spend a lot of time researching and problem solving, and taking little snippets of information from various sources. Lately I have found myself wishing that I had a better way to track those sites and pages that I have found useful. The Google plus one extension in Chrome does provide a rudimentary way to identify sites that have been useful, but those results are then buried. Subsequent searches don't put sites that I have plused one at the top of  any new search (although "Search Your World" was apparently supposed to do that), and I have found no convenient way to search through the list of sites that I have previous...

Download  http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1526979/vmnet.tar into /usr/lib/vmware/modules/source/ This updated vmnet.tar file comes from the patch that was posted for VMWare 8.02 at  http://weltall.heliohost.org/wordpress/2012/01/26/vmware-workstation-8-0-2-player-4-0-2-fix-for-linux-kernel-3-2-and-3-3/ .

There was a time, not so long ago, when I was a prolific blogger. I even considering trying to make a living from it. I made some serious strides in that direction, having created a reasonable reader base on Brighthub and publishing a book. I really quite enjoyed tinkering with open source multimedia libraries and sharing my experiences. The best thing about blogging on these technologies is that you got to enjoy the "ah-hah" moment of getting something to work without having to deal with the last 95% of work which usually involves tweaking, refining, marketing, supporting and publishing a product. Unfortunately, neither venture really worked out on a financial level. Brighthub ended up taking all contributions made to the main web site and stopped paying any revenue to the writers, and my book is now making only a handful of sales. So while I consider both experiences to have been valuable, I can't consider either of them to have been financially rewarding. Which is ...

I run Fedora 16 in a VMWare VM, making use of the Unity feature to run my Linux applications on my regular desktop. After a kernel update I found that I couldn't enter Unity mode. I tried reinstalling the VMWare tools, but that didn't help. In the end running the vmware-config-tools.pl  command and then running  /usr/bin/vmware-user once the installation was complete allowed me to enter into Unity mode. I have no idea why running the  vmware-config-tools.pl  command on its own would make any difference, but it does.

I really like the idea of being able to work on the go. For those of us whose jobs can be performed entirely through a computer, it seems only logical with the advances in mobile computing and networking that we should be able to do that work wherever there is a half decent network connection and a tablet, ultrabook or even a smartphone. This dream has yet to become a reality. Despite their popularity and obvious potential as work devices, tablet operating systems just don't support the apps most businesses need. And even with all the remote desktop solutions out there, it is still not easy to get a decent remote solution for all of your devices. Remote desktops were fine when you were connecting from one single monitor system to another, but the concept of a desktop in a window really breaks down when you start mixing the number of monitors available on a system, or try to display a PC desktop on a touch screen. There are surprisingly few ways to deliver single applicat...