Google search FTW

Here's reason 1,000,001 why I love the internet:

The VMware Fusion Windows XP vm is pretty important to daily life for me and today it decided to hang. Halfway through a "Restoring Virtual Machine State", the progress bar just stopped moving and I had to force quite Fusion. After many restarts, and other experimenting, I was starting to worry that I was in for a long Saturday of re-creating an XP vm instead of working on a job I'm doing.

Instead, a quick Google search for "restoring virtual machine state hangs fusion" turned up this little nugget of wisdom that I bet will come in handy again someday for me, and maybe for anyone else out there who also depends heavily on Fusion.

Go to ~/Documents/Virtual Machine right click on the .vmwarevm that is causing the issue, right click on it and "Show package contents" then delete the .vmss file.

This gets rid of the session state and when you restart the vm it will boot up as if it was not saved in mid session.

Lose the session, no biggie - lose the vm...well that would be much much worse, right?

Eclipse and keycode mapping

Okay, this is take 2 because my first post was unceremoniously 'disappeared'.

My BTS team is getting geared up for writing Unit Tests in JUnit. We're using Eclipse with subclipse for SVN. Two teammates are Windows, one Linux and me on the Mac. Mac's version of Java is Apple's not Sun's so my JRE profile is not compatible with theirs. This means I will be using my Linux VM for the project - getting to know Ubuntu a little better.

Today's the first day of significant coding and I am already frustrated that I have to reach back to use the ctrl key instead of my trusty apple key for shortcuts. Also the tilde key actually produces < and there's no delete functionality (what Mac calls delete is really backspace).

So I have found a solution and here it is:

First, create a file (mine is called wickedCoolKeycodeFinder - you know, so I can always find it again)
and in that file put this:
xev | grep -A2 --line-buffered '^KeyRelease' | sed -n '/keycode /s/^.*keycode \([0-9]*\).* (.*, \(.*\)).*$/\1 \2/p'

chmod +x this file and then run it to produce a neat little window that will tell you what keycode is returned for whatever key you press.

Then, once you know the keycodes of the keys you want to map, create a file called .xmodmaprc and in that file I put:

!this sorts out the apple key + backspace to do delete
keycode 113 = BackSpace Terminate_Server Delete
! map tilde and grave
keycode 49 = grave asciitilde
!map apple key to ctrl
remove Control = Control_L
keycode 115 = Control_L
keycode 116 = Control_L
add Control = Control_L


Now I just need to figure out how I can get my two-finger scrolling on the touchpad to work and I'll be a Linux user forever!

New MacBook with no Boot Camp Utility?

Some of the newest Santa Rosa chipset MacBooks have been deployed without Boot Camp Assistant in the Utilities folder. I'm sure this will be fixed soon. Here's the quick fix if anyone else needs it:

Put the Install Disc 1 in, then in Finder, to to Go -> Go To Folder... and type:

/Volumes/Mac OS X Install Disc 1/System/Installation/Packages

in the dialogue box. There you should see BootCamp.pkg. Running that with all the defaults puts the Boot Camp Assistant in /Applications/Utilities/ (source)

So glad I wasn't going crazy...spent a lot of time poking around my new MacBook muttering "but it's supposed to have boot camp!".

The to-do list goes into high gear now as I have a couple of programs to write for BTP500, some database stuff due for BTS530, and of course all the DPS909 labs and project updates.

All this and setting up the new mac with a windows vm so that I can continue to work on the source server with Visual Studio.