Steven Reimer

Came across a handy trick to increase the size of a VM's hard-disk in VMware.

Navigate to the VM's directory and use this command (Linux):

# vmware-vdiskmanager -x 20GB vmfile.vmdk

Now go back to your VM in Workstation and you should see that your hard-disk is now the new specified size.

Finding a rental for 6 months is proving to be difficult. No one seems to want the lease to end at the beginning of winter. I guess I can't blame them. If worse comes to worse, I guess we'll store everything and hang with friends and family - if they'll have us. Our kids are angels! I promise.

We have one more day of decisions for our new house and then that's one thing out of our schedules. I have to say that between building, looking for a rental and starting to pack I am getting quite weary and maybe a bit stressed. I need summer to come quickly so I can ride my stress away on my motorcycle. It's funny how the ride home on motorcycle seems to evaporate worries. But we had a snow storm last night and foretasted temperatures are low.

So I wait.

I'm finally getting somewhere on my Android app. It helps that I'm getting my head wrapped around the platform. The main problem I was having as of late, was that my custom list adapter was messing with the onListItemClick listener. So I opted to go back to the simple list provided by Android and it's working much better.

Here's a small overview of my app in case you don't know what I'm talking about. One of my roles at work is keeping tabs on several servers. I get automatic notifications via email if there are issues, but I wanted to be able to initiate a check. So far it simply makes sure the domain is reachable and then gets the HTTP response code of a specific URL.

Future planned features are

• Monitor multiple services (FTP, SSH, etc)
• Load server list from a remote source (CSV) or build locally
• Monitor via consuming web services to allow 3rd party custom monitoring tools

Development isn't very rapid as we're in the middle of getting a house built and selling our home. Plus having 2 kids slows things down as well. But the project seems to be keeping my interest. I recently read that the first Android car is rolling off the assembly line. How cool would that be to work on? The possibilities that would arise from hooking into the car's control modules are endless.

I learned an Excel trick today - that doesn't happen very often. What I needed to do, was highlight values in a table if the value existed in another range on the sheet. How I did this was:

• Select the cells to apply the formatting to.
• Click the Conditional Formatting icon (Office 2007) in the toolbar
• Select "New Rule" and then the "Use a Formula..." option
• Enter "=VLOOKUP($B5,$AH$5:$AH$76,1,FALSE)" where $B5 is the first dynamic cell (the one that will be changing down the rows) and $AH$5:$AH$76 is the range in which to search for the value.
• Pick your formatting options