Steven Reimer

I joined Twitter.

Having stayed off of Facebook - I know, how is that even possible - and MySpace and all the other social sites so far, I decided that being in the industry I should give at least one a try.

It has been just over a month and after getting over my initial qualms, I have to say that I think I like it. At first, I felt egotistical posting 140 character snippets about what I was doing right now. Like anyone really cares. But then it was pointed out by @thefrontlawn that blogs could be considered just as narcissistic.

What I appreciate most is the developer community. For example, I made one small post about working on a Filemaker plug-in and almost instantly had followers asking for details or offering assistance. It's this sort of online camaraderie that could actually increase my productivity.

Have you ever spent hours and hours on a problem and just can't figure it out? And then after leaving it for a period of time the solution just strikes out of nowhere?

That just happened to me. I have a friend's motorcycle in the garage and was going to sell it except that I could only get it to run on two out of four cylinders. I took the carbs apart more than once. Inspected every little hose and passage. Checked for spark. Checked for fuel. I did everything I could think of and nothing worked. It really didn't make sense at all.

Then today, a year later, after raking the lawn, a thought popped into my head. "What if the two spark plug wires are reversed?" Sure enough, I switched the wires and all four cylinders fired up instantly.

I'm excited to have finally solved it but I also feel a little foolish.

We welcomed our son, Joel Steven, into the world April 11, 2009 at 8:20am. He weighed in at 7lbs 9oz and measured 21 inches.

And so, here begins the next adventure in parenting - raising 2 children simultaneously.

This is where the parents with 3+ kids laugh and say that we have it easy.

Situation:

• I need to develop in Visual Studio. (Don't ask why)
• I am running Linux. (Ubuntu 8.04)
• Visual Studio is difficult if impossible to install in Wine.

Solution: install Visual Studio on a Windows XP virtual machine.

1. Install VirtualBox
   sudo apt-get install virtualbox
sudo apt-get install virtualbox-ose-modules-[kernel name] - Be sure to get the right kernel module. I picked the wrong one and broke my Nvidia driver.
2. Install Windows XP in virtual box
   - Set your drive size larger than 4G as Visual Studio takes 2.7G for the default install
3. Install VisualStudio
   - Copy the install files to your harddrive first (if installing from dvd). Otherwise you will be prompted to insert a disc which you can't. They will all need to be in the same directory. ie Copy disk2/ contents to disk1/ but don't overwrite any files.

There you have it. Windows inside of Linux upon which is installed Visual Studio. I may try the Wine approach again sometime, but for now this will do.