Blog de Joe Freeman

This is quick note on importing a Windows 8 or Server 2012 BootCamp partition that had Hyper-V hypervisor enabled. By default, you cannot have Hyper-V booted inside of Fusion because of hardware vitualization conflicts.  You know you have this problem if you see the following messages in the guest machine's window in VMWare Fusion. Your PC ran into a problem and needs to restart.  We're just collecting some error info, and then you can restart. (100% complete) If you'd like to know more, you can search online later for this error:  SYSTEM_THREAD_EXCEPTION_NOT_HANDLED (winhv.sys) Edit the Fusion VMX configuration file directly. You can fix this by editing the vmx file directly. Shutdown Fusion Find your Virtual Machine definition. Navigate to /users/<username>/Library/Application Support/VMWare Fusion/VirtualMachines/Boot Camp . Right Click on the Boot Camp package and select Show Package Contents Edit the file that ends in .vmx  using TextEdit o...

Death Notice  Stackato was sold to HP and rebranded as Helion. The entire Helion product line was killed in 2016 Previous blog article A previous blog article described how to set up a developer micro PaaS using the Cloud Foundry based Stackato from ActiveState.  This article will describe some of the languages available in this environment. Application Languages Cloud Foundry and the Application Stackato clusters support the following languages "out of the box". You can use any of these languages in the Micro CloudFoundry instance we just configured Java, using the Tomcat server Node.js Perl PHP Python Ruby .Net languages are supported through either the Mono runtime or integrated .Net support provided by Iron Foundry. Active State has several  wiki/blog pages  on this. Other languages, including Clojure, can be added by importing  Heroku BuildPacks. Demo Apps Stackato demo programs http://community.activestate.com/stackato/...

Death Notice  Stackato was sold to HP and rebranded as Helion. The entire Helion product line was killed in 2016 Previous Blog Text Cloud Foundry  Open Source Platform as a Service (PaaS). It was initially driven by VMWare and later given to Pivotal when it was spun off from VMWare and EMC. The original version of Cloud Foundry was available as a hosted service and in a Micro  developer version that ran on a single VM that could be hosted on a developer workstation.  A community grew around this and there are now multiple versions of Cloud Foundry available. Cloud Foundry supports a Multi-tenant architecture where a cloud can support multiple organizations  each of which can have multiple spaces  to partition their work.  This architecture is available across all CF PaaS installations. Cloud Foundry updated to a new V2 architecture and implementation in June of 2013.  The CF "on a stick" micro version was abandon at that time. The Micro...

I was having a problem with VMWare after my Windows 8.1 upgrade.  Windows 8.1 had no network connectivity.  I ran into the same problem after upgrading a Windows 8 guest to Windows 8.1 on a Windows host. I wanted to look at my VMWare Fusion configuration for my bootcamp partition.  VMWare stores its information in ~/Library/Application Support/VMware Fusion/Virtual Machines which is normally not visible in the Mac Finder.  There are a bunch of pages on the interweb that describe how to make all directories and files show up in Finder.  Many of them are incorrect for Mavericks which is now case sensitive.   This posting describes how to show all files in Finder. You can show all files by typing the following in a terminal window defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles -boolean true killall Finder You can go back to the default view by typing the following in a terminal window defaults delete com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles killall ...

We have an Azure cloud network that we would like to monitor with a standalone status board.  One option is to do the "all Microsoft" Powershell thing with a windows device. Another option is to use the Linux and MAC Azure management tools released in 2012. There is also a Node.js based set of tools . An older MSDN blog entry is also useful for understanding this. Another option is to directly consume the Azure REST services used by the Node.js library.   I decided to try the Node.js tools.   REST service information is available on MSDN. It didn't work out for this generation of Raspberry Pi Hardware Sometimes when you have stuff lying around you just have to come up with some way to use it. Sometimes it works out fine and some times not so much.  I have a 700MHz 512GB  Raspberry Pi B computer sitting on the shelf with nothing to do. It is a nifty Linux ARM based computer: with built in Ethernet, USB, video and an hardware extension bus. This could host o...

You don't really have to worry about connectivity when you have a single in-house data center.  All your proprietary data is on "your" network that you manage. You firewall protects your sensitive information from internet intruders.  The internal network provides routing and name lookup services. You don't really worry about connectivity when your are consuming publicly available resources on the internet.  Your internal network allows outbound connections to the internet.  Your gateway knows which DNS servers provide name support. Note: IPV4 network numbers in the diagrams are just examples. They happen to be how my internal and Azure networks are configured. Azure a Cloud Provider Cloud providers give you the ability to spin up off-site data centers that are visible and reachable from the internet.  The actual remote data center organization and configuration is somewhat opaque to you since it is managed and controlled by the cloud provider.  ...

The folks at Adafruit have put out a nice "NeoPixel shield" which is essentially an 8x5 addressable RGB LED strip built into an Arduino shield.  They have created a nice library available on github. You can see the project on their product web page .  Here is a picture of the board mounted on an Arduino Uno. The LED in the bottom right corner is LED 0.  The LED in the the bottom left corner is node 7.  The second row up is node 8-15 and so on.  The LED in the upper left corner is node 39. This picture shows the LED panel on my desktop. It totally overwhelmed the camera to the point that the rest of the room looks dark. Firmware I've created simple Arduino firmware that lets you send LED blinky commands over the Serial Port via USB.  You can set each pixel color individually along with one of 10 blink patterns.  Pattern 0 is off and pattern 1 is solid on so there are 8 actual blink patterns.  The firmware is located on github . The ...

NServiceBus acts as a .Net (C#) distributed messaging abstraction layer for message-driven systems.  It runs on top of a variety of transports including MSMQ, Azure Storage Queues, ActiveMQ on RabbitMQ.  This blog describes how NServiceBus configures and uses RabbitMQ using the Video Store Sample program available in the NServiceBus github repository   . It looks like the images attached to this article have been removed from the google image store Background Message-driven systems are asynchronous distributed systems that have two main message concepts, at least in our project. They have commands, targeted messages, where the sender knows the intended destination. The producer sends the messages to a target. They also have publish/subscribe or event-based messages where the sender target is unknown. The sender posts the event which is then received by parties that have registered interest, and subscribed. Producers: Programs that send messages or post events...

I have a lab environment of 5 machines, one AD/DNS/Manager and 4 Hyper-V virtual machines.    I want to be able to monitor the performance of the various hosts under different conditions to see where I've run out of resources. There are two major components to the monitoring.  The first is the performance counters  on each monitored machine. These act as the source of performance information. The second is a monitoring console. That console can either be one that displays all information or can be one that displays information only when performance numbers fall outside some criteria. Windows Server Manager Performance View The Windows Server Manager  displays performance information for out-of-bounds situations where the values coming off of a machine are outside of some specified range.  Server Manager monitors as many machines as you want from its' All Servers  page. Select the servers that you want to monitor in the Servers  pane of ...