JT's Blog

About 5 or 6 Years ago when VoIP was “the new thing”, I looked at a few companies.  Packet8 was a little too expensive, Broadvoice was awesome and they started the whole “free international” calls thing, but they had a lot of latency/delay (in my opinion, at least.)  Then there was Vonage.  Audio quality was good, low latency, didn’t wait on hold 45 minutes for tech support… The price seemed right and they were the “biggest” and seemingly the most likely to be around forever.

VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) seemed poised to eradicate land lines.  Then, all the cable and phone companies started doing their own VoIP thing.  Then Verizon sued Vonage for patent infringement.  It seems that the legal team funded by over-priced verizon services had a squatters pattent on an idea of regular telephone service using the internet.  They waited until Vonage really started to be successful and then sued.  In addition to a lump sum judgment, Vonage has to cough up 5.5% of every subscriber to Verizon.  Kinda makes you want to have sympathy for Vonage, no?  How do they stay afloat, right?  I’m not so sure.

Continue reading…

I run a few Linux VMs without Xwindows, and as such there is no convenient check box to enable time sync with the ESX server.  It turns out there are two ways to set up time synchronization: the first is from the service console, the other is from the VM itself.  Either way, it boils down to a setting in the VM’s VMX file, the difference is how we install that setting.

The following were found in the VMware communities forum here.

From the Service Console command line:
# vmware-cmd /vmfs/volumes/datastore/VMname/VMname.vmx setconfig tools.syncTime TRUE

From the VM’s console (include the double-quotes in the command):

(to turn it on)
# vmware-guestd –cmd “vmx.set_option synctime 0 1”

(and to turn it off)
# vmware-guestd –cmd “vmx.set_option synctime 1 0”

The command is: vmware-cmd

So start of by running that to see what your options are, or even you can man vmware-cmd.

OK, so now the juicy stuff:

vmware-cmd /<path to VM directory>/server.vmx getstate
vmware-cmd /<path to VM directory>/server.vmx start
vmware-cmd /<path to VM directory>/server.vmx stop
vmware-cmd /<path to VM directory>/server.vmx stop hard

You get the idea 🙂

Last week I was working in the greater London area.  Much like New York City, if you’re staying and working in the city, mass transit is the way to go.  However, last week I was staying and working near Heathrow, which qualifies as suburbia.  While there are buses, it’s nowhere near as efficient and practical as the Tube (or Subway) in the city.

So I rented a car.  I was astonished at the gas mileage.  As you can see from the photo – taken when I returned the car to AVIS after a week – I used 5/16 of a tank of gas and got 222 miles.  That would mean roughly 800 miles to a tank!!!  Why is it that I have the same car back home in the USA, and I’m lucky if I squeeze out 370 miles before running out of gas?  And I only get those numbers with cruise controlled highway driving.  The UK mileage was a combination of suburban roads, highway and city driving.

I suppose the key was the fact that it was a diesel engine.  Many places in the USA don’t allow the purchase / registration of diesel powered vehicles due to emissions and health concerns; however, with new catalytic converters, diesel particulate exhaust is drastically reduced… even negligible, compared with gasoline engine exhaust.  We’d be better off overhauling those nasty school buses if we really want to improve air quality.

Then again, what do I know about anything.  After all, I’m sure the petroleum industry wouldn’t want us Americans to be mass consumers of gasoline, right?  I mean, if we all got 2.5 times more miles out of our cars, that wouldn’t be a good thing, right?

I think the proliferation of diesel powered cars in Europe stems from the cost of fuel over there.  For example, in the UK, fuel is sold by the liter.  Diesel was £1.09 a liter.  So at 3.8 liters to the gallon, that would be £4.14 to the gallon, and with the exchange rate £1=$1.59, that’s USD $6.58/Gallon.  No wonder they have more efficient cars than we do.

It’s a very common problem when using "other" as the operating system type.  As such, ESX doesn’t know what settings to put in the VMX file.  You need to follow a few simple steps to fix this.

For starters, make sure the VM is off, then edit the VMX file.  Go to the bottom and add the following line (mind the syntax and CaSe SeNsItIvItY)

Keyboard.TypematicMinDelay = "2000000"

That’s it!
Save your VMX and start the VM, you should be all set.

-j