However, over the last week I’ve come across problems with this environment, or more specifically, VMWare Tools. Rather than repeat what’s already been posted – here’s some links:

http://blogs.dirteam.com/blogs/jorge/archive/2005/11/14/60.aspx

http://blog.baeke.info/blog/_archives/2006/1/24/1720712.html

http://www.vmware.com/community/thread.jspa?forumID=21&threadID=18782&messageID=211835#211835

The number to listen to and delete SMS messages is 0845 602 1111

More than 95% of e-mail is junk, be it spam, error messages or viruses, report mail monitoring firms.

Analysis of the contents of millions of e-mails has revealed that less than 4% is legitimate traffic.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/5219554.stm

YouOS is a web operating system that lets you run diverse applications within a web browser. Small applications like sticky notes or clocks. Large applications like word processing, mp3 players, and instant messaging. Even better, it’s very easy to tweak an existing application or write your own.

You can apparently try a demo here: https://www.youos.com/, however everytime I’ve tried it’s come up with Too Many Users Online – I guess that’s due to it being digged!

It looks very interesting and as soon as I can get a try I’ll post what it’s like.

Update: I’ve just had my login details and had a quick look:

It appears to work well, though a bit slow and jerky. Basically you get an operating system-like environment within your web browser (which is saved if you exit and login again later). There’s a few applications and I imagine more to come with development.

rPath provides rBuilder and rPath Linux, the first platform for creating and maintaining software appliances.

Quite simply, this web site and its associated back end technology allows you to create Linux builds (or appliances) based on your chosen kernel, window manager, applications and projects. It then provides your final build as an installable CD or DVD, raw hard disk image, VMWare player image, raw filesystem image or tar archive.

The underlying packaging system is developed by the rPath founders is called Conary – information available here.

I’ve had a quick look and it seems very impressive (with a web 2.0 feel) and very powerful. So far I’ve not built any appliances, but Clive has come up with a Knoppix-style SIP phone appliance – VOIPPIX.

• Pretty Printer – http://www.prettyprinter.de/ - a source code “beautifier”
• dp.SyntaxHighlighter - http://www.dreamprojections.com/syntaxhighlighter/ - a source code highlighter for web online snippets
• RegExLib – http://regexlib.com/ – I’ve used this for a while, a library of Regular Expressions and tester
• Lightbox 2 – http://www.huddletogether.com/projects/lightbox2/ - “a simple, unobtrusive script used to overlay images on the current page”
• ThickBox – http://codylindley.com/Javascript/257/thickbox-one-box-to-rule-them-all - based on Lightbox, but can also display HTML pages – watch out on this site for an implementation soon
• jQuery – http://jquery.com/ - a library that changes the way you write javascript code
• Bite Size Standards – http://bitesizestandards.com/ - picked up from Tim’s blog a few week’s back – a very interesting read for useful CSS snippets and tips

Hope these prove useful – I plan to use at least some of them on this site over the coming weeks.

It’s a Twin Tuner Freeview box with a 160Gb hard drive for recording TV to MPEG and allowing you to watch it later (just like a video recorder but it’s all recorded to the internal hard drive). You can also pause live TV, watch picture-in-picture, copy the MPEG files to your PC and schedule recording using the 7-day EPG.

The quality is excellent and general operation of the device is sound. The worry of making sure you have a video tape free to record on is no more – you just leave it to get on with the job. The disadvantage is that you can’t now just take a tape to another video recorder to watch it, but coupled with a DVD recorder this could be a work-around. Or copy to a PC using the USB interface and burn to DVD.

A word of warning – after ordering this from 247electrical, I was promised delivery in 3 days. After 7 days the order status hadn’t changed from “Processing” so I emailed the company to find out what was going on.

I then found a number of reviews of the company (1, 2, 3) which I really wish I’d found before. Eventually I heard that they didn’t even have any in stock, so I cancelled the order and requested a refund. Given the worries I now had, happily the refund arrived about 4 days later.

So then I ordered it from CWDigital who confirmed they had it in stock and delivered 2 days later. Very impressed and well recommended.