[dba-Tech] VirtualBox Questions

Arthur Fuller fuller.artful at gmail.com
Sun Sep 20 19:06:32 CDT 2009


Thanks all. I found the magic setting. When creating the VM, I got a couple
of messages saying something like "your NVidia does not support this,
proceed at your peril". I chose to proceed and guess what, my NVidia chip
does support these higher resolutions and thus larger frame sizes. Kewl! As
I write this, I have Windows Server 2008 as the main bootup, plus VMs
consisting of XP+Bitnami Rubystack and XP+Office 2007, and also Ubuntu. I
like this a LOT. In addition, I installed the Guest Additions (available
from the VirtualBox Devices menu -- last item on the menu) and this install
totally liberated the VMs and AM (Actual Machine or base OS, call it what
you wish).
This setup is totally amazing. I confess that I haven't spent much time at
all with Hyper-V and VMWare, but I am sooo satisfied with VirtualBox that I
have no plans to go beyond this. I have two instances of XP and one instance
of Ubuntu Linux all riding atop the base instance of Windows Server 2008 R2,
and I am one happy camper!

Meanwhile, I have some Mandarin to learn and some Mandarin-to-English
lessons to prepare. Compared with English, Mandarin is a world apart. The
concepts of tense and person do not affect the verbs, for example. This
(from the Chinese point of view) is a huge stumbling block, so in my half of
the lessons, I must introduce the concept of tense. This is causing me to
revisit stuff I learned 40+ years ago and can barely recall. I have numerous
cobwebs to dust away, and rediscover the meaning of "past pluperfect" and
the conditional tenses and so on. Wow. It's been Never since I had to
explain these, and it's a stretch for me to reach back into the definitions
and re-activate their meanings and intent.

In sum, I am learning three languages at once. The obvious two are Cantonese
and Mandarin, but I am also (re)learning English. There is an old phrase by
one of the linguistic pioneers, I forget whom, but long before Chomsky,
which says "Don't ask a fish to explain water." By extension, don't ask a
person to explain air. "Without it we would die" is about all that we can
say about it, whether from Fish or Human.

This reminds me of APL. I once worked with a financial wiz whose linguistic
specialty was APL and he even had a special keyboard designed for APL
programmers. I know virtually nothing about APL but was forced into
interpreting some of his code and to patch into his results. APL has
numerous commands that execute matrix-multipication and numerous other
dances upon the numbers. All of it went way over my head. But what I did
notice and admire about the language was its concision. What might have
taken 100 lines of C and 1000 lines of VB.NET or C#.NET or Eiffel etc., took
a single line (albeit incomprehensible to anyone outside the priesthood).

Anything doable in any programming language is by definition translatable to
another language. And therein lies the problem. Anders has addressed this
problem and he is a much smarter man than I. I walk in his shadows, at the
best of times, but in fact I am a few kilometres behind him, to put it most
optimistically.

Now and then, we encounter a Great Mind, and Anders exhibits all the
qualities of this category. I would love to sit in a room with him for an
hour, in the hope that some particles of his genus might enfuse my body and
I might grow from the experience.

A.

On Sun, Sep 20, 2009 at 4:38 PM, Gustav Brock <Gustav at cactus.dk> wrote:

> Hi Arthur
>
> That is probably the setting in the VM for screen size (size of Desktop)
>
> /gustav
>
> >>> fuller.artful at gmail.com 20-09-2009 01:26 >>>
>
> .. I cannot remember what I did to create the nice big XP window, but
> that's how I would like the BitNami XP installation to appear in a window
> sized similarly.
>
>
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-- 
Semi-retired SQL guru, interested in interesting projects not YAFOES (yet
another friendly order entry system).



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