I would like to note that the Washington State University - Cougar Basketball Team won their first game in the NCAA Tournament yesterday and are now slated to play Notre Dame on Saturday. It's exciting to see them competing with the big boys, when I was in Pullman the record was a little bit less exciting. However, it was always a good time to watch them beat the UW.

Last year we lost in the second game, I hope to see them making it to game three. Go Cougs!

The other competition is a little less fun, but very important. All of my favorite news sites have switched from technology news, to Politics and honestly at this point I would just like it to be over. The news gets nastier by the day, and if the democratic race isn't decided soon it will clearly do permanent damage to the party. Give me back my technology news!

My last blurb about competition is the Nintendo Wii, I would have to say that 'Crossbow Trainer' with the Wii Gun is probably the most fun I have had with a video game since Duck hunt on the original Nintendo.

Working with an application that has a Java back-end these days I have been experimenting with all kinds of new tools to make my life easier. The biggest problem is quickly navigating the immense directory structure to find where to put my code. Thus far the best at doing that particular task for the amount of resources it takes is Eclipse, easily.

The application to trigger this seriously annoying bug doesn't have to be Eclipse, it simply has to be any application that spits out way to much information to the system log. Eclipse apparently spits out mb's worth of data to the log per millisecond, which still blows my mind. I searched all over the place for a way to tell Eclipse that I just don't care, stop logging! I never found the solution, however I did find a way to turn of the syslogd.. making it so that if anything happens on your system you have no idea - not a great plan.

What happens is that in MacOSX 10.5 you will be happily sitting there coding away and the next thing you know you try to switch to another application and it takes MINUTES. Running the activity monitor or running 'top' you will see that the syslogd process is using the entirety of both your processor cores. The only way to make this stop, is by removing /var/log/system.log and /var/log/asl.db which have now become probably 100's of mb's. Then manually killing the syslogd process. Sometimes the problem comes back within minutes and sometimes it's days.

The word on the street is that the problem is in some re-factored syslogd code that has no bounds on the amount of CPU that it can use when processing the log files, when the log files get huge syslogd goes into overdrive and takes over your system. Since the last security update I haven't seen this bug, but I'm also now using Eclipse. Once I discovered that 90% of the code I would be working on is in a smaller piece of the directory structure it became reasonable to navigate with Textmate and the project drawer or VIM and :Ex. I know a day will come when I need an application that logs way too much data, and by then I hope Apple took care of this rogue binary.

Running VM's has become a necessary part of a the work day for a lot of developers, and sometimes you don't know exactly what you will be doing in the VM when you are creating it. I ran into this frustration when I tried to pull a whole application repository into the VM, and then run a multi gig Oracle Database inside the VM as well. Half way through the DB import I started getting errors when I finally realized that my VM was completely out of space.

A little more thinking and research could have saved me a huge amount of time here, so keep in mind that part of this entry is to share the knowledge.. the other part is a bit of venting in the aftermath.

As I am using VMWare I decided that since I needed more space, I might as well just make the VM bigger to accommodate all this data. Obviously there are better alternatives, but I am confident that there are situations out there when people really do need to resize their VM. After lots of Googling and searching I found the vmware-diskmanager, which made me feel good because it looked relatively straight forward to 'Grow' a disk. I quickly realized that someone for my VM Image, the box had somehow been checked to split the VM into many many few hundred meg files (I have no idea why). So the first step became, turning multiple VMWare files into one big image:

vmware-vdiskmanager -r olddisk.vmdk -t 0 newimage.vmdk

No errors.. looks like it worked! Now to make this sucked bigger, looks relatively straight forward:

vmware-vdiskmanager -x 50gb newimage.vmdk

Again, no errors.. I must have a working 50 gig partition. Well home come when I boot into linux it's still 20 gigs? Well thats naturally because the drive has been partitioned to 20 gigs, and you can't resize a drive that you are currently running the Linux Kernel off.. so you must go download the GPartedCD image, boot off it and resize the partition.

At this point I think I have a working single 50 gig vm, repartitioned to allow me to use all the space and I'm ready to roll. Now I create a new VM in VMWare, tell it to use an already existing Image and hit the power button.

The VM starts booting up, I get a black screen, I still have a black screen, and I forever have a black screen because something is now terribly broken.

I spent a few more hours working on this before I realized that it was insanity and moved on to the next option.

My final solution creating a shared folder, and downloading the app via Perforce onto my Mac, which my Linux partition could then mount and use. The trick here was setting the correct GID and UID in /etc/fstab so that the partition was mounted with my users permissions allowing me to be the owner of the files.

The next problem was this enormous Oracle DB. After spending a few hours in #oracle I was given a step by step walk through to move my oracle db onto my mounted vmware share so that I could do the same thing that I did with the application repo. Feel free to go look at the process at: http//www.adp-gmbh.ch/ora/admin/move_datafiles.html

I tried it, it didn't work, received many errors, got frustrated and gave up on that route. Finally I copied the data files on to a new mounted VMWare share, removed the Oracle data file directory and sym linked it to the new mounted volume where I copied the files. Oracle didn't know the difference, and now I'm up and running without resizing anything.. happy day!

In an effort to keep in touch, keep up on the weekly happenings in the technology and just generally shoot the shit Mikeal, Matt and I are doing a weekly podcast called 'This Week in Code'. You can get to the audio tracks at http://thisweekincode.com. We did episode one yesterday, we actually did episode one last week but the recording wound up of the quality you probably wouldn't want to listen to. It's probably not that different than the other tech podcasts out there, but the goal is to make a list of the most important happenings of the week and go down the list discussing each. As we are all developers at different companies we pretty reliably have pretty different takes on each of the issues making for a somewhat interesting conversation.

We are yet to get a cool intro and closing clip setup, but that is on the list and we also plan to become available via iTunes for those of you who don't want to goto the site every-time you want to check for/listen to the weeks latest cast.

If you would like to be a guest on This Week in Code feel free to contact any of us and we will get you all setup to Skype in. You don't have to be a geek, you don't really have to be a developer.. but it is important that you are into technology and have some opinions about the weeks list of topics.

I am aware that I have been seriously slacking on my blogging, but I have a screen covered in sticky notes of partial entries that I will be splicing together into one decent entry in the evening sometime this week.

I would like to start out by saying, I don't really care what the billions of reviewers, bloggers and naysayers think about the Macbook Air -- it's a fine piece of machinery. I have had the chance in the last two weeks to have a MacBook, Macbook Pro Core Duo 17', Macbook Pro Core 2 Duo 15', and a Macbook Air on the table for me to use all that the same moment and unless I absolutely have to be running VM's the Air will be the machine I grab every single time.

The first thing that I have really become attached to is the new keyboard. I had forgotten how stiff feeling the MBP keyboards are when you first get them and to avoid it I have been using my wireless apple keyboard to work on it. Eventually I will have to break it in, but ill face that when the battery dies in the wireless keyboard.

Secondly, you can barely feel that the Air is even on your lap. It is like typing on a weirdly solid piece of printer paper. The processor runs extremely cool so you don't burn yourself as I have with MBP's in the past. I don't know if you notice -- but I threw together a new header today for T0asted, and this little machine absolutely rocked Photoshop. All of the manipulating and filtering was comparably fast to the MPB.

If you don't run VM's I can't come up with a single reason not to do your day to day computer workings on an Air. As for the peripherals that everyone is complaining about -- I am talking about that last because I completely didn't even notice they were missing. I didn't even buy the external optical drive -- If I don't have a single need for it in two weeks, I doubt I will find myself crying about it at any time in the near future.

I do have to note one weirdness that I have been noticing. When you do a clean boot of the Macbook Air, after not too long the fans start to kick in heavily -- like 6500 RPM. This was happening when all I had open was a web browser and Adium, which is clearly not enough CPU usage to warrant that kind of fan power. After a week of ignoring this I did some searching on the Apple Forums and found some people who were noticing the same thing that I was, and many who had taken their machine into the Apple Genius bar. The answer over and over was -- it's alright, don't worry about it. Well I don't think it's doing any damage to the machine, but it is kind of annoying. I went ahead and installed iStat Pro and spent a few days with the activity monitor running and noticed and interesting trend. After the initial boot and your Air gets itself into this state you have to reboot or close the machine and put it to sleep to get the fans to turn off because it will not cool down on it's own. The funky thing about this is that no applications I was running were using much CPU usage but the finder was using 60-90% of the CPU. So I simply killed it, let it re-spawn and until I reboot MacOSX the finder stays at 0% CPU and the fans stay around 2500 RPM.

I have many other Mac's around the house, and after watching them for a few days not once has the finder grown above 5% CPU no matter how much I was doing. I am going to make a guess here, but I believe that there is a bug in the special build of MacOS (10.5.2, build 9C31) that is causing the finder to use that much CPU.

For the moment (until Apple fixes this bug) or I get annoyed enough to install the standard version of 10.5, when I first boot I just kill the finder once, let it re-spawn and that seems to solve the problem. Since I rarely reboot and usually just put the machine to sleep I have now gone days without seeing this irritating fan activity, woohoo!

Additionally, multi-touch on the laptop is pretty cool... but not really that useful at this point. It will be a while I think before it becomes integrated in a way where it's as useful as it is on the iPhone.

Thoughts anyone? :)