OpenID is a relatively new (initially established in 2005) protocol to provide a decentralize, open, shared 
identity service. What does this mean? You only have to remember one user name and password for OpenID-enabled sites. A few days ago, I converted this site to use this protocol because I believe that initiatives like this are steps in the right direction for a more secure and user friendly Internet.
Month: May 2008
Just a quick note to wrap up this series of articles. Since writing this article, I’ve switched out my main 
PC running Ubuntu to a Mac – running VMWare’s Fusion. So now I don’t have Quick Silver envy any longer as I’m using Quick Silver on a daily basis.
However, for the Windows side, I’ve decided to use Launchy. It’s very “Quick Silver”-like in operation after some tweaking. I’ve given up looking for a tool on the Linux side as I don’t use the GNOME interface very often any more.
Standardizing on one VM platform has made my life so much easier. I’ve played with a number of them 
and I’ve settled on VMWare. Currently, I have an Ubuntu Server running VMWare in my basement and I have a number of client machines that have VMWare client software running as well. Recently I’ve noticed a deficiency when I move my main computing platform to Mac OSX — there is no VMWare Server Console software.
This software is very valuable if you are running multiple VMs on a VMware server. Instead of configuring a remote control or SSH server on each client VM, you can control the VMs via the VMWare Server Console. When my main computing platform was Ubuntu Gusty Gibbon, this was a no-brainer. The software is bundled with the Linux client package. Running Gusty Gibbon on my primary PC was amazing because I could not only control another VMWare Server, the workstation had multiple client OS’s installed locally so I could have a dozen machines running on two physical pieces of hardware. But then I made the switch….
hint, hint, nudge, nudge – Mother’s day is just around the corner! Today is Apple’s last recommended day for express shipping of an iPhoto book. They even have a promo code to save you 10%. Although I got a notification in email from the Apple store, I’ll send you to Tuaw site for additional info.
Just a quick tip – I noticed lately that whenever I fire up a VM on my machine, ALL four processors would shoot up to 90+% utilization. In addition, the VM (typically running Vista) would take a good 10-15 minutes to load (okay, a bit of an exaggeration – but it took forever.) 
Took me a couple of minutes to figure out that it was my anti-virus software that was causing the issue.
As I mentioned before in a previous post, I’ve installed ClamXav software on my Macs because of the rising popularity of Macs (this begets challenges to hackers which begets to virus being written for OSX, etc. — or is that just my paranoia?) The program installs easily enough and updates itself regularly etc.
If you are using ClamXav Sentry and VMWare, you MUST exclude any VM images from being scanned! Better yet, make sure that you configure your ClamXav Sentry to ignore scanning the directory in which you keep your VM images. This will dramatically increase the start time of any VM. If you opt for the extension method of exclusion, VMs have an extension of .vmwarevm .
-JT