When Intel and AMD added hardware virtualization support to their CPUs it was a boon to those of us trying to virtualize Operating Systems that don't know they're being virtualized. KVM the somewhat native Linux virtualizer built into the kernel only operates in this mode so you need a CPU with Intel VT-x or AMD-V support built into it and the ability to turn it on in the BIOS. This seems like a really great thing but in reality anyone wanting to extract the maximum performance out of their Virtualization machine is going to be using paravirtualization anyway (sorry KVM). Everyone is working on paravirtuaization including the KVM folks. So the addition to VT extensions in the CPU are really not getting used much besides those that don't have a choice (ahem, KVM). A year from now people using KVM will be using paravirtualized drivers because they're just plain faster. VirtualBox uses a mix of software emulation and virtualization depending on what's fastest. Xen will run in both Full Virtualization (HVM) or paravirtualization (PV) modes depending on how you set it up. There are limitations to PV mode though becuase it's using the same QEMU code that KVM uses. They will reach parity in installation modes between PV and HVM soon though. The cool thing about everyone using QEMU (KVM, Xen, VirtualBox etc..) is that if you change the code once the rest get the updates. Isn't that the way it's supposed to work in the Open Source world?

Anyway the point of this article is not to talk about VT but IOMMU. The problem with Virtualization systems like Parallels and Xen are that they're passing PCI devices through to guest operating systems which is a good thing but because they haven't had support in the CPUs it's been a bit hacked up. There's been a number of security vulnerabilities with pci passthrough in Xen. All of this is changing because Intel and AMD are adding device virtualization to their kernels. Intel announced it in 2006 and has a number of chipsets that support it and AMD will have their first out next year.

If you're moving from a real server installation to a VirtualBox virtualized configuration you may want to take your real physical disk and just turn it into a virtual disk. There are advantages to creating a new disk and rsyncing your OS into it but this tutorial will show you how to make an exact copy of it. Note the exact copy will be the same size as the real physical disk so make sure you have enough drive space. This is most useful for Operating System images with shared storage for data. I wouldn't advise anyone to make a 1TB copy of their new drive and turn it into a VDI file!

To get the image from the disk use the dd command.

1. dd if=/dev/hda of=./hda.img
2. VBoxManage convertdd hda.img hda.vdi

grant@workstation:~$ dd if=/dev/hda of=./hda.img

grant@workstation:~$ VBoxManage convertdd hda.img hda.vdi
VirtualBox Command Line Management Interface Version 1.6.0
(C) 2005-2008 Sun Microsystems, Inc.
All rights reserved.

Converting VDI: from DD image file="hda.img" to file="hda.vdi"...
Creating fixed image with size 1024966656 bytes (978MB)...

This will make an exact copy of /dev/hda to the raw image file hda.img. Then VBoxManage will convert the raw disk hda.img to hda.vdi for use with VirtualBox.

Here's an interesting idea. I don't know how much power is sent through headjack plugs but this device from Inflight Power Recharger Cables will allow you to recharge USB devices by plugging into the audio jack. It has one cable that plugs into the audio jack and on the other side it's a standard USB outlet so with the appropriate adapter you can charge about anything. I imagine it doesn't charge very fast but if you're on an airplane asleep you might as well be charging your phone, ipod, Nokia web tablet or whatever. Price is $35 for the basic one with no adapters and then add about another $10 for each adapter. Or you could just go online and buy the adapters for abotu $5 ea. It also has 2 AAA batteries in it so I'm guessing it can double as additional battery power for your gadget if it's not plugged in.

I contacted them about the methods of charging the batteries and here's what they said.

"You can only power via audio input or battery input, the unit can use
any form of AAA battery. The max output is 250mA at 5v."

The only real problem I see is you can't charge your device while watching a movie on the plane, and any other time you'd have to look around for a radio or laptop in order to charge it up. It seems like the standard Wall outlet to USB backup may be more versatile everywhere except the plane. I guess if you normally charge things with you laptops USB port you could charge this and a USB device at the same time. Makes me wonder if someone makes a USB to audio jack adpater so I could charge this from a USB wall converter. Maybe I'm getting a bit carried away but I bet one could hack a USB to audio jack adapter pretty easy.

I might buy one anyway and review it just beause I'm curious.

 

 

My Personal Nokia Apps

 

Apps I can't live without

1. Canola2
2. Canola Tuning
3. Canola2-youtube-plugin
4. Maemopadplus
5. gpe-calender
6. gpe-todo
7. gpesummary
8. erminig
9. mplayer
10. openssh
11. openssh-client
12. openssh-server
13. osso-xterm
14. personal-menu
15. skype
16. wizard-mounter
17. wifiinfo
18. flashblock-webaddon
19. load-applet

Apps that I have installed and that I use on occasion

Internet Tablet School has put up a new tutorial on how to connect USB devices to the Nokia web tablets. The tablets put out very little power so it seems flash drives will work as long as they don't have a larget LED on them. Makes me wonder if I took mine apart and unsoldered the LED it would work. USB hard drives will work but they need to be powered by an external source. USB keyboards will work but USB mice won't because the tablet doesn't have a mouse driver. Seems that a module could be compiled and installed like how we handle ext3 filesystems.

I think the application for having external storage is great because when I'm on vacation I could backup my photos to an external drive and the uses for a USB keyboard are great. I currently have an iGO bluetooth keyboard (if you look around you can get it for about $40) but I've noticed that if I'm running off battery power the bluetooth drains the n800 very fast. A USB keyboard I presume would lengthen battery life. Although it wouldn't be as compact with the cords etc.. The thing that really comes to my mind is if I have an external storage system, a keyboard and a mouse what I really need now is the ability to edit photos. I'm not talking running the gimp here I just want to do some simple contrast adjustments, sharpening, rotate image, scale, crop etc.. Basically imagemagick stuff but grapically. If I could do this and I could get a local blogging client for Joomla I'd not even bring a laptop on vacation with me. Of course if I have the n800, external drive, keyboard, mouse, external battery and bluetooth headset for Skype I've probably packed about as much as just carrying a 2lb laptop!

Anyway the tutorial at Internet Tablet School has a video and text howto both so check it out.

Welcome to my travel pages. We travel quite a bit and always have people back home who want to follow our journys around the world so I've put up photo galleries and journals about our trips. Usually I update them as we travel although sometimes I can get a few days behind if I don't have reliable internet access.

So in this section you'll find

1. Travel Blog
2. Trip Journals
3. Travel Photos
4. Travel Resources
5. Seattle Travel Events

You might be wondering what is the difference between the travel journals and the travel blog. Let me explain. For every trip we take I keep a daily journal of what we do and my thoughts. I also spend a good deal of my time throughout the year when I'm at home thinking about traveling. I've created the Travel Blog so I can put my thoughts down. I'll also post about really good deals that I'm aware of, tricks about getting frequent flyer miles etc...

 

I don't currently have a problem with one of my flash cards but I thought I'd throw this out there anyway because I ran across magicrescue which is a Linux program for recovering data from flash cards. From the man page...

Magic Rescue opens devices for reading, scans them for file types it knows how to recover and calls an external program to extract them. It looks at ``magic bytes'' in file contents, so it can be used both as an undelete utility and for recovering a corrupted drive or partition. It works on any file system, but on very fragmented file systems it can only recover the first chunk of each file. These chunks are sometimes as big as 50MB, however.

 

So even if you're operating system can't read the file system on the card you should be able to recover something. Before you use magicrescue you might want to make a copy of the flash card. First we need to know the actual device number of the card. We'll assume we actully looked at the label on the card before inserting it into our card reader and we know it's a 4GB card.

As many of you know I'm always keeping an eye on weight when I travel. I'll be in Asia for two months this summer and I'd like to start filming more video of people and places but most video cameras are either not very convenient or are too large. I took several hours of video in 2004 of London and Venice and it sat on tapes for 2 years before I got to it. Yes, I only needed to plug the camera into a firewire card and send it to the computer but it took quite a while to do this and once I had the video it was DV so I still needed to process it into something else before I could really use it. That and I had to lug that camera around.

So what I've really been looking for is a decent quality (We're not talking professional level HD video here) camera that saved video on flash cards in a format that I can view and edit easily. You might be wondering why I just don't take video with my still cameras because they do a pretty good job these days. The answer is my Canon still cameras only record in motion-jpeg. The quality is good but at 10 minutes a GB you run out of flash fast. I've really been looking for something that would film in mpeg2 or mpeg4-h.264. Sanyo who is the pioneer of small flash based video cameras has not been sitting on it's laurels in the past couple of years. I originally checked out the Xacti line and found the low light quality to be lacking and overall the video was not up to snuff. Since then they've released about 6 different cameras so it's time to investigate again.

What you see at the right is their new Xacti HD-1000 camera and you'll probably notice it's all lens!  I'm not going to just copy and paste the info from Sanyo's site because you can go there and read it for yourself but here's a synopsis.

The SANYO Xacti HD1000 camcorder combines the superb image quality of full 1080i high-definition video with 4 megapixel still images in a single compact and elegant design.

• Full 1080i HD Recording
• 10x Optical (f/1.8) HD Zoom Lens
• 4 Megapixel still photos
• 2.7" Widescreen Display
• Advanced MPEG4 AVC/H.264 Format
• HDMI high-definition output
• Records Directly to SDHC Memory Cards

Sanyo Xacti HD1000

 

Updated April 7th 2008

I've been wanting to upgrade my site to Joomla 1.5 for a long time but most of my addon modules didn't work with 1.5 and neither did my theme. I would have hacked my way through it but I've been really busy at work and haven't gotten to it. I've had a Joomla 1.5 test site running parallel to the 1.0 site for a while but since the extra components weren't ready it just sat. And since I was going to migrate to 1.5 the old 1.0 site just sat. Well, this weekend I got tired of not being able to post and rolled out Joomla 1.5. There are some things that do work and a lot that don't.

Things that work:

• The theme is ok but needs tweeking
• The blogs all work
• The photo gallery sort of works. The old Gallery2 gallery is linked in and work is proceeding on getting Phoca Gallery to replace it
• Recipe module works now
• Download module works
  

Things that don't work or need improved:

1. Theme needs improved
2. Sufficient Integrated photo gallery doesn't exist yet (working on getting Phocagallery to do what I want)
3. Review component will never be upgraded to run on Joomla 1.5. Never trust commercial software vendors. $70 lesson learned
4. RSS feeds aren't there. I don't know why they changed how they work.. Maybe I'm missing something

For now this is enough functionality for me to use it. I plan on using Phocagallery to replace Gallery2 and it's flaky bridge as soon as Phoca is good enough. It's very actively developed so it's just a matter of time. There is no solution so far regarding the Review module.

Grant

People can create usage specific websites by "mashing up" google maps with their own stuff. For example someone can create a site that shows all subway stops and schedules for NY. I just found this mashup of Points Of Interest for Paris France at tellmewhere.com .