VM Fail, Take Two

Posted on September 1, 2009 by Alan V

So the last time I messed with my VM, I needed IT to come and build a new VM for me to use.
You think I would have learned better than to mess around with vmware when everything was working mostly fine.

This morning, I came in to work to a perfectly working VM and everything was fine. However, ever since IT had gotten me to install VMWare Player to create my new VM, I hadn’t been able to use VMWare Server. I figured I would remedy this.

First step was straightforward enough… uninstall VMWare Player. Unfortunately, it seems that doing so also uninstalled VMWare Server. Fine, whatever.

Second step then became to reinstall VMWare Server. This didn’t quite work… apparently I’m missing a couple kernel source files. As a result, it was unable to build the VSOCK module. This meant that my VMs, when run through VMWare Server, had no network access. This is a problem when the entire point of your VM is to run tests remotely.

After trying without success to sync the required source files, I figured I’d cut my losses and go back to the player. Uninstalled VMWare Server and reinstalled VMWare Player.

This install didn’t quite work right. It didn’t create the shortcut in my Applications menu, which I tried to do. Then, on launching, it was unable to read some required files to start up unless I ran it with sudo. In the end, I decided to just tell the shortcut to sudo it, because I didn’t want to start chowning the actual VM files.

So yeah. That took most of the morning and resulted in a less-usable Player (have to run with sudo now). Blah.

I am not touching my VM again for a while. :P

Hmm

Posted on August 28, 2009 by Alan V

It’s been an interesting couple days.
Last night, for some reason, I couldn’t sleep. I started browsed Schthack’s forums instead, and went through various image files from PSO in an attempt to find the photon blast and tech images from the game for use with RPG Get!. Succeeded, and continued messing around online, and not feeling tired. I eventually went to bed around 7 and woke up at 8 for work. That was interesting. Surprisingly, I wasn’t too terribly tired at work. I’m also surprisingly not tired now.

Work had free pizza during a presentation at lunch. Then there were leftover sandwiches from a different meeting. Then we had our Friday dev meeting and there was cake. Tasty.

Spent most of the day finishing up creation of a new object type in our code. Unfortunately, around 4:30, we found out that we were actually missing some fields that were necessary (that we hadn’t thought about before). As a result, we’re going to have to remake portions of it. Meh. This means we’ve gotten one story done this sprint, and that was a carryover story from last sprint. We really should add things we’ve been doing in as stories, because from a report standpoint, our team has been seriously slacking these past two weeks. :P

After work, I went to Safeway to buy foodstuffs, where they overcharged me $0.90 on my yellow squash (in addition to charging $4.50 for 3 avocadoes that I hadn’t bought). Safeway customer service people processing the refund can’t do math… because apparently 1.3 pounds of yellow squash at $0.99/lb comes out to $2 in their mind. Oh well.

Posted some photos from the picnic last week. Tasty food.

Also got revisions of RPG Get! posted. If you’re at all interested in the game, you should go check them out.

Found and installed this amazing interface reskin for PSO. My action buttons look amazing now. :D

Meow
Yeah, that’s really it.

Zoooo

Posted on August 17, 2009 by Alan V

Matt, Katrina, and I went to the zoo this weekend. The first animal we saw was an ostrich, which proceeded to turn its butt towards us and pee, and then poop. Other animals throughout the day also did so, including a rhino who sprayed pee all over the metal bars of its enclosure. It was very odd. We also saw them feed the penguins, which was awesome. Apparently the chick of the two gay penguins is named “Chuck Norris”…?

I have been playing PSO again. I miss having friends on there to play with, because public games are full of greedy and/or incompetent people. Blah. On the plus side, 3 level 80+ Fomars (I’m 150) versus vhard TTF = massive pwnage. There was gifoie everywhere. Vol Opt’s first form died in literally 15 seconds (one set of screens and a couple pillars was all that got destroyed). Yay for spellcasters.

Workwise, we moved buildings this weekend. I am not a fan of the new place. The kitchen is tiny (and there’s only one, versus the three in the old building), the bathroom is tiny (and there are huge gaps in the stall walls so you pretty much see someone sitting on the toilet when you walk into the bathroom), and there are only two conference rooms. Meh. Hopefully it will grow on me.

RPG Get! and Coding

Posted on August 12, 2009 by Alan V

This has been a good week for completing old goals.

On Saturday and Sunday, I worked on the RPG Get! CCG website and got it (along with a beta of the base set cards) up. This is a game that has been in progress for over four years, so finally having something to show for it is awesome.

Today, I decided to finally finish up the AlanvDotOrg backend rewrite. This had been started over a year ago, and stalled due to my computer catching a virus, rendering it unable to connect to the internet after Norton had its way. Nevertheless, I had a bit of inspiration today at work, came home, and started hacking on it at around 5:30 PM. It is now 10:30, and it looks like it’s mostly complete. The backend is done, so you can once again comment on news posts. I also got three skins ported over, so you at least have a little bit of choice there. I’ll work on porting more skins tomorrow. I also have a couple ideas for new skins that I think would be awesome, so there will definetly be some of that too.

Work has also been full of accomplishing old goals. There’s been a few bugs we’ve been pushing back for a few releases, waiting for the right time. This week, we squished most of them dead (or are at least in the process of doing so). Yay for working on old bugs. We’ve also been increasing code coverage in our packages, including some of the legacy code we inherited. A little boring, but it’s nice to see numbers go up and to have increased confidence in the correctness of the code.

So yeah. Two of my big projects have finally reached some level of completion. This is awesome.

Life lately

Posted on August 9, 2009 by Alan V

Life has gotten another update, bringing it up to today. Yay life.

I also got inspired to start working on the RPG Get! CCG again. I got the website up after about an hour of playing around with CSS and figuring how to hack stylesheets so IE does what I want it to (stupid non-standards compliant IE7). No cards yet though… still finishing up the base set.

Didn’t go to Capture the Flag with Stuff in the park today, and I’m very glad I didn’t go. Instead had a nice quiet day by myself (making tasty chicken and rice and beans for lunch, and working on RPG Get!) and then had some social activity at Sharon/Charles/Matt’s housewarming party. CtFwS would have been too much crazyness.

This is basically a dump of photos from the past few weeks:
Played with the zoom on my 18-200mm lens.

Went to the SCS picnic.

Went to Dim Sum with coworkers.

Went to Trisha’s to watch movies. Saw Smart People (finally) and decided it was a horrible movie. Dueled with Alfred with my new (very slow to reload) camera.