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VMWare Server has been acting up lately. The network connection to guests gets dropped seemingly randomly. The problem is noticed as dropped network connections are normarlly noticed: web pages are unavailable, logins fail (eg. on XP a message about AD not accepting connections or not recognizing you), and if the guest runs a service, the service is unavailable.

The problem can sometimes be fixed (or even avoided) by pinging from the guest to some external address. I've also had luck in disconnecting and reconnecting the network device for the guest.

The host is always available and the guests can be controlled via the VMware remote interface. Our VMware Server boxes use bridged networking, so that the host and guests are all on

Service Location Protocols (SLP) in discovering the existence, location and configuration of the networked services in enterprise networks.
Users of network applications have been required to supply the host name or network address of the machine that provides a desired service and making sure that right information is provided to the users and the applications has been a pain. The SLPs provide the solution to this and are already included in many network operating systems.

The operating system installation files are stored onto the server and the SLP helps in finding the existence, location of the installer (on the server).

In creating your own drupal announcement module using IBM's tutorial (part 6) there is a missing function that the module uses but never defines. The function _announcement_unixtime2drupaldate is first used in the hook form but it is never defined in the announcement_insert area or supporting functions area (listing 15 of the tutorial). They have been informed of this but until they update the tutorial, you will need to add the function:

 function _announcement_unixtime2drupaldate($unixtime) {
	$drupal_date = array();

It seems the latest version of PHPEclipse 1.1.8 is not yet compatible with the latest version of Eclipse (3.2.1). However, it is compatible with version 3.1.X of Eclipse. Along with this version of eclipse, you will need to download:
JS2E 5.0
DBG PHP Debugger (matching the PHP version you are using)
Eclipse Web Tools Platform Project 1.0.X

Then you can download the PHPEclipse through the Help -> "find and install..." and "Search for new features to install" feature, selecting the remote site of http://phpeclipse.sourceforge.net/update/releases as the update site.

Going through this file Install PHP, mysql, phpMyAdmin on linux I had a few issues with some mysql and phpMyAdmin installation. Only that these details were not mentioned in the link there.

Additional sources thst would help the phpMyAdmin installation:

The Documenation.txt / Documentation.html file present in the phpMyAdmin folder.
It lets you set up a password for the root user and also lets you know on how to grant permissions to additional users that you create.

Once you create a new user you can log out of the root account on the system and login as ordinary user of the system and enter "mysql -u username -u" and press enter on the terminal.

The MPI boot camp was a well designed and thought provoking seminar for me. It not only introduced me to the world of parallel programming but also showed how MPI was one among the approaches to solve the parallel computing program.

It cleared the myth that more processors on a computer would make a program run faster. A program has to be tailored for it to make use of all the processors on the machine that it is being run on. It also gave enough boost to explore the world of parallel computing with MPI on my own. I think this tutorial would surely serve as a great start for the Distributed and Parallel Computing course I am likely to take the next semester.

The Python programming language is increasingly becoming the language of choice to those programmers that require ease of coding and readability over speed and expressiveness. Knowing this I was curious why programmers in a High Performance Computing environment were giving a boot camp in how to program in Python. My previous experience with Python consisted of writing a couple of programs that were to perform some complex bioinformatics algorithms. Scripting languages such as Perl and Python are common in the field of bioinformatics so I was informed that it would be a good way to program. Unbeknown to me when beginning to code in python, one of our programs was to be a brute force algorithm (one with many orders of magnitude) and one that I learned would take my python program about two hours to run. That same algorithm written in java was compiled and ran in about 3 minutes, quite a difference. However, the java program contained about three times the amount of lines of code, making it much harder to read, and most likely, much longer to code. This tradeoff of run/compile time and coding time was exactly why the HPC guys chose Python for some of there mid level programs.

Mike Gancarz proves with many examples and illustrations how the Unix philosophy has brought about changes in the world. He packs the entire power of Unix in a few principles and says these are the ground rules to be a good Unix programmer.

There were a few interesting sections which need special mention. He compares a software to a human system and says that it has a youth, mature and old age. This part gives a clear overview into the software industry and I feel is the highlight of the book. It gets you near to practicality. He also explains why some bad decisions are taken in the software development industry. What is the thought process behind them and proves why are those practices wrong. And also illustrates how the unix principles fit aptly in those places.

The caption of the article Web 2.0 sounded to me as something related to new model of web development but it turned out that I was completely wrong and the author starts off with the same too.

The author suggests web is no more to be called a world of connected computers. Its a medium people are in today and if a standard has to flourish here then it better relate as closely as possible to its people. He implicitly states people are as important to the web as the web is to the people. And suggests that a standard developed with this in mind will always flourish and is the way to the future.

Gancarz finishes his book by explaining the ten "lesser tenets" to the UNIX philosophy. These are those philosophies that are not universally agreed upon and are often seen as moot. I thought some of these were very interesting, such as 'look for the 90 percent solution,' where he basically says that you can deliberately ignore those aspects of a problem that are costly, time-consuming, or difficult to implement. Your solution thus has a better "bang-for-the-buck" in implementation costs, and carries the attitude of "if someone needs this capability bad enough, they can do it themselves." Yet not all tenets were as worthwhile in my mind as this. He says to 'use lower case and keep it short' when typing any text in UNIX. It has been my general practice to adhere to the 'keep it short' part of this tenet. Terseness is highly valuable, especially with the piping abilities of the UNIX command line, were some commands may get pretty lengthy. But I say if someone wants to capitalize, capitalize. He explained that lower-case letters are generally easier to read. I disagree, I believe some words/phrases are easier to read if some of the letters (not just at random) are capitalized. But again, that's just a personal preference.