Eric Cosky

As I was doing some experiments with my Virtual PC setup, I realized my base disk image was just too small. I was trying to install the Windows Driver Development Kit, and the installation failed because the disk simply had no room for it. When I first created my disk image, which is a basic Windows XP installation on a single NTFS partition that filled the VHD with a variety of utilities added to it to make my work easier, I created the VHD using the disk wizard with the disk size to 4 GB. I thought that because I had set it to be a dynamically expanding disk that it would allow the disk to grow to any size I needed later. Unfortunately, I was wrong; the disk is limited to 4GB but it will only be as large as is needed to store the used sectors. This makes sense now that I know more about it, but I was left with a decision to either reinstall XP from scratch or find some way to extend the partition.

It's been just over a year now since I switched this website over to Drupal. It was a bit rough at first, not because it was bad but because it comes with a very lean set of modules and to make your site even moderately nice it can take more effort than other websites seem to require. At least, at first.

If you are still using FTP to access your website, it's time to close that gaping security hole. Every time you log in, your passwords are being sent in plain text which is exposing yourself and your host to risk of attack by anyone with access to the hardware between you and your host. That's a lot of people. Fortunately, there is a replacement for FTP that solves this security problem: SFTP, or "SSH File Transfer Protocol". In plain terms, it's a secure replacement for FTP.

I recently upgraded my main PC to Vista Ultimate and decided to take advantage of the family upgrade special, where you can buy two Vista Home Premium licenses for other PCs in the house. One of them is my laptop, a Toshiba Tecra M4. I have enjoyed Vista enough on my desktop that I thought it would be worth updating the laptop for the $50 it costs as part of the family upgrade special. The file sync features alone made it worth considering for me, but there are a lot of neat things about Vista that I was looking forward to also.

I recently felt the urge to view some PDF documents on my Playstation Portable. If you've wanted to read PDFs on a PSP, you already know there is no built in support for this. If the PDF is converted to a series of PNG files (they are more clear/smaller than JPG for this), the PSP's photo viewer can be used to read the converted PDF. It's not perfect, but it is a functional way to accomplish this.

For the technically inclined, this article describes a way to do this conversion using free software resulting in readable images on the PSP.

You will need the following:

Every now and then it's important to pull ourselves out from whatever code-dungeons we work in and look around at the world of computing to see what we've missed during the last couple crunch cycles. When I do this, once in a while I am surprised by the appearance of a new technology that has potential to make big changes in the way we make games. I've had some downtime to do research lately, and I think I may have discovered what may be the most significant improvement to browser based gaming to come along since Javascript. By discovered, I really mean I finally noticed something that people out in the world beyond game development have done which is pretty cool and worth talking about.

I'm a bit late to this party, but I just discovered Windows Live Writer which as it turns out is a fantastic tool for streamlining the process of blogging. Here's a company page with a good overview of features. I won't review it, there are already plenty of great reviews of it out there as well as plugins. I'll leave the details to the other articles that go into depth about this great new tool.

This article attempts to provide a concise description of the steps required to install Ubuntu LAMP server on the Virtual PC with the goal of providing an environment with minimal, but appropriate, services for hosting and developing web content using Linux. By the end of the article, the reader will have a virtual machine configured that has apache, mysql, php, phpmysqladmin, samba, ssh and webmin installed and operational. In short, a fully functional linux installation that can be accessed from the LAN via Windows explorer, serve pages to a web browser, and maintained via SSH to "get stuff done" under linux with the convenience of running it within a virtual machine. This can be a daunting task for someone not familiar with the process, and if you think you would benefit from having this kind of virtual machine just follow the instructions and I expect you'll be done in about 30 minutes or so.

The target audience is people who are not an expert in Linux configuration and would usually find it faster to reinstall from scratch with the correct settings than dig around looking for a way to correct bad settings.

I'm not usually one to get terribly excited about Microsoft Office (and that's an understatement), however the next update to this suite of applications is perhaps the most significant one ever. I think it may have the potential to affect developers who may not have expected Office to provide any functional benefits to the application development process. While there are many new features, far too many to list and I am sure there are more than I realize, there is one change that has the potential to have a significant impact to developers. Specifically, the Office applications are no longer just client applications. As I understand it, the Office applications are now capable of providing services, much like a web server or other back end application where there is no visible user interface and instead provides support services for other applications that build upon the functionality. Of course, the applications continue to provide all the features you expect from a client standpoint when used in that manner - you can still edit documents, spreadsheets and so forth just like you always have. However, with the new services features, it now becomes possible for developers to programmatically take advantage of all the abilities of the Office applications in the context of a UI-free server application. This is a fundamental change in the way office applications can be used; by separating the user interface of the client from the logic of the underlying application services, the office applications can now provide their functionality as an API to any managed code application.