PSMG Winter Drinks

This evening I went to the Professional Services Marketing Group's (www.psmg.co.uk)winter drinks event. A really good opportunity to network and catch up with people in Professional Services marketing. Organised by Michael Sugg and his team, I had a great time.

I have to say that while there are people who, when faced by a room full of people they have never met before rub their hands with glee at the prospect, I don't! However I was made to feel welcome by lots of people, and even met people who had attended one of my Web Analytics seminars, and still talked to me. Hello to the Anne and Gemma from DPP the team from Driver Jonas, Matthew, David, Judith, Mario and everyone else.

So, thank you everyone, and I look forward to seeing you all at the annual conference.

The Raw Shark Texts - a work in progress

I have recently been reading the The Raw Shark Texts - what a revelation. A review will follow shortly, but I just had to say what a great book this is.

It starts in an interesting, although slightly unpacy way. It has a good helping of strangeness and a promise of more whether that be story or weirdness it isn't clear. The anticipation is there without an obvious route and outcome. And this is what the book delivers. As it moves on it lurches further into unfamiliar territory, every time I get to thinking I know where this is going (well, to be fair not always) it surprises me with.

I will not go on, other than to say that I have to wrench myself away from reading it before missing my stop on the train.

Other books I have read recently that I would recommend are:
The Undercover Economist
Hard Evidence
Rashomon and 17 other tales
Galileo's Finger

More later!

Virtualbox better than VMWare?

I have been running VMWare desktop for several years now, my main workstation runs Linux (SuSE initially, now Ubuntu) and running Windows under VMware when I needed to. I think I started at Workstation 3.

I have now dumped it for Virtualbox, and wow is it so much better!

Don't get me wrong, VMware is good, it is stable, simple to use and effective. But Virtualbox is (for me) better.

It installs well, with no issues at all, unlike VMware that required custom modules to be compiled. Not such a problem, except that this had to be done everytime the kernel updated.

Virtualbox installed "out of the box" and just works. It includes full paravirtualisation (Intel Vanderpool and AMD Pacifica technology for hardware virtualisation on multi core CPUs)as standard, which can be switched on and off per VM. The device support is good and I happily run a Linux Host a guest XP and a test Linux VM on an Intel quad core with 2 gb without a hiccough.

It is significantly faster to boot and shutdown a guest than VMWare (faster than native it seems) and really stable. It has really good screen support, including a fantastic seamless mode where (in my configuration) it sits taking up one monitor in a multi-screen setup.

We are testing it in a server environment at the moment, with good results. It is not a full "bare metal" solution with the kind of management and control that VMWare/XEN Source can offer, but for flexibility Virtualbox is great. We are looking to have warm standby's of common servers, and spare servers to cope with demand e.g. running up another volume mail server, rather than a full failover system, as we don't need that level of resilience. So it fits the bill perfectly.

And did I say they have a range of licencing options from fully supported to open source.

Virtaulbox is a product that exceeds expectations and is one of those bits of software that constantly surprises you with how good it is (no offence guys) www.virtualbox.org