Further Xcode – HelloWorld
The inevitable HelloWorld application is a staple in learning a programming language, and provides the learner with the feeling of accomplishment as their first program speaks back to them… or something. Either way, this example will present us with a basic framework which we can use to build upon.
To break it down this example consists of,
- Creating a blank project in Xcode
- Using the default Delegate class and adding our own method (interface)
- Linking the GUI to our class
- Adding code to our method (implementation)
- Drinking tea
Read MoreESXi on USB
As previously mentioned i’ve always been a XEN advocate for the hypervisor sitting on the physical machine, given the ready availability of a paravirtualised kernel for my Linux VMs. However a requirement to get to grips with VMware has led me to deploy ESXi on my systems so that I can have a proper look around at the OS and how it manages virtual machines. I’ve got disks all over the place, however my server I use for all my testing has a set up (and has reached capacity) meaning that i can’t use those disks. I found an old IDE disk that I installed in there, however the fiddling around with the oem.tgz(explained another time) never seemed to work for me at this point. So I picked up a USB key for €8 and decided to do a USB boot with the hypervisor on there.
This is pretty straightforward task to do and can be accomplished in two methods of either botching the install halfway through or pulling the image from the install CD and doing a raw write to the USB device. I opted for pulling the image from the CD and dd’ing this image onto my USB key by doing the following methods:
1. Acquire VMware ESXi 4.0 from vmware
2. Mount the CD (in linux by mount -o loop <path to ISO> <mount point>, or double clicking in OSX 
)
3. Copy install.tgz from the CD and extract in a working location, which should eventually give you a directory structure.
4. bunzip /usr/lib/Vmware/install/VMware-VMvisor-big-164009-x86_64.dd.bz2 (or equivalent file)
5. dd if=<path to .dd file> of=<path to USB device>
6. Change BIOS settings to boot from USB and boot up.
7. Set IP address, download VSphere client and off you go.
Refer to http://www.vm-help.com for any issues
Read MoreXcode Primer/Tutorial/How-to
A Google search for Xcode examples and how-to’s etc.. returns a lot of results, however after following a few steps it becomes clear that the older tutorials simply can’t be followed. The newer Xcode (3.2.1 is current) has had it’s UI changed so much, especially the interface builder and the majority of instructions no longer apply.
I’m writing up the steps i’m following to learn, so that I can follow them when I have forgotten something (which I frequently do) and so that anyone else can follow them if they wish. I don’t intend to ever go too far with Xcode development, so don’t expect to find a how-to to developing a game or a photoshop alternative.
Read MoreCastle Frankenstein
On Saturday we broke the cycle of spending the day aimlessly wandering around the centre of Darmstadt window shopping, eating junk food and ending up in the Ratskeller. Instead we went to visit Castle Frankenstein which is located a few kilometres away from Pfungstadt. I had been informed that the only way to this castle was a long walk uphill through a forest, however it appears there is a windy road all the way up to the castle that i’m sure Nick and his car would definitely appreciate.
Getting the tram to the bottom of the path was pretty straight forward, however that pretty much was the limit of the planning for the walk. So after a broken German conversation with a nearby gentleman we were pointed in a direction and told the walk would take 2 to 3 hours (I nearly went straight home at this point). We pressed on walking following random numbers painted on trees and trying to keep sense of direction that our German tour guide had pointed us in.
After walking aimlessly in the direction we assumed was correct we spotted what appeared to be the top of a castle, which still appeared quite away in the distance. After stumbling through a stables and being attacked by numerous crazy dogs, we started the ascent up the hill again vaguely in the direction of the castle. We managed the walk in one hour and twenty minutes, which beats the time given to us early quite respectably and includes fifteen minutes walking in the wrong direction at the top of one of the hills. I enabled the GPS application I have on my iPhone to give us an idea of what we were dealing with ascending/speed/distance etc.. This spat out a Google maps file that overlays the over the top route we took, which can be viewed here.
The full Gallery can be found here and if you are bored there is a wikipedia page too.
Read MoreVMware ESXi 3.5 /4.0 on Xen (How-to)
This may seem a truly useless idea to a lot of people, however I’ve always found having a ‘lab’ at home capable of building pretty much every system scenario very useful. Dealing daily with VMware ESX servers and VMs in a production environment means that I can never “fiddle” around and get to grips with whats under the hood or deal with the unsupported or hidden functionality. My Xen server has allowed me to create pretty much every scenario I may need Oracle RAC clusters, interoperability between various operating systems and various development environments. When I first received the server that I use for my environments my first choice of setup was going to be a VMware ESX setup, however the hardware requirements restrict most installations to a subset of hardware configurations meaning I couldn’t install it. Originally it would have been impossible to install it under a xen HVM on the basis that the virtualised network adapters are unsupported by ESX, however luckily from 3.4.0 onwards the xen-tools have been updated and allow the use of the e1000/e100 network.
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