Status-Q

Warning: Geeky stuff ahead!

The Parallels Workstation virtual machine software for the Intel Macs has a BIOS which doesn't support network booting.

I wanted to simulate an LTSP workstation, which would boot over the network from our Linux server. Here's how I did it:

On the ThinStation project site, I found a link to a Universal Network Boot package - a zip file containing disk images for floppy, CD and HD.

From this I grabbed the ISO CD-ROM image eb-net.iso and set up my virtual machine to use this as the CD instead of the physical CD drive. I also configured it to boot from CD first, and, for my purposes, I removed the hard disk from the config as well.

Sure enough, it boots up just fine and I have an LTSP terminal in a window. Much easier for experimentation than rebooting my embedded device all the time.

Here's a web service I've always valued: TinyURL.com.

Have you ever wanted to send a web link to somebody and discovered that it has a long and unwieldy URL like this one?

http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&q=trinity+college+cambridge
&ie=UTF8&ll=52.204329,0.115727&spn=0.003925,0.007972&t=k&om=1 It really messes up your email formatting, some email programs fragment it so it isn't clickable, and it's impossible to dictate to somebody over the phone or to send in a text message.

If you hop over to TinyURL.com, though, you can just paste it in and get back something like this:

http://tinyurl.com/nmcsk

which does the same thing and is much easier to hand around.

There are other services like this, but TinyURL has been around for a long time and seems to do a good, efficient and quick job.

As a Blackberry fan, I hope we do get to see some of the things they're promising in the near future.