Great news this morning. My English teacher phoned me about the results of my Cambridge University BEC Vantage exam, which I took beginning of December last year. I passed with level “B”. Big smile on my face.

Reading and Speaking were in the Exceptional range. Writing in the good and Listening in the average range. Listening could have been better, since there were more than one test exam during preparation without any errors. From all the about 20 participants apparently on two finished with level “B”, me being one of them.

I guess, you can tell, that I’m somewhat proud of this result.

Well I’m someone of a keeper. I’m alway thinking, that this piece of whatever might still be usefull someday. But this is some old computer stuff, where I really have no problem with letting go.

• An ISA bus backplane
• An ISA bus CPU card originally running with a 486DX and a whooping 33MHz
• An ISA 4 channel V24 card
• Two ISA 10Mbit Ethernet cards
• An ISA Teles S16.3 ISDN card
• An ISA 1505 Adaptec SCSI controller
• An ISA 1540 Adaptec SCSI controller
• An ISA Creative sound card CT4170
• A Toshiba 2x SCSI-CDROM drive
• A Tandberg TDC 3660 QIC Tape drive (capacity 40Mb I think)
• Two V24 mouses
• An Atari ST keyboard and a PC style keyboard
• An Atari ST floppy disk
• 3 SCSI hard disks with 40 and 80 Mb
• An AT-compatible 150W power supply
• A 2400Bd modem
• A complete i486 66MHz system in a big server tower cabinet
• and other smaller parts

Not that anyone cares what stuff I’m keeping in my closet, but interesting nevertheless, what accumulates over the years.

I’m using two VMs on a regular basis on my desktop. One runs Windows XP with the standard set of software according to the guidelines of the IT department, the standard company client. This VM still originates from the time, when VMware Workstation 4.2.x was more or less current. The other VM was created with an earlier beta of the recently released free VMware Server 1.0. running on some (“stronger”) server HW in the datacenter. This VM is installed with a clean Windows XPSP2 and all patches released from MS to date. After installation this VM was moved to my desktop PC by copying all files belonging to this VM. On my PC I’ve been using these two VMs with the VMware Player.

Since VMware Server was released and since Gentoo recently provided the Ebuilds for the installation of the Server on a Gentoo system, I replaced the beta version with the released version. To unload my PC somewhat, I thought I’ll run my two VMs under VMware Server on some fat HW in the datacenter. However, this didn’t work. The VM hung with a black screen in the console. The problem was so sever, that the console software even lost connection to the actual server process and I needed to kill -9 the main server process. Creating a new VM and installing it from scratch worked like a charm, but my two older VMs couldn’t be convinced to run.

I finally created two new VMs with the same parameters as my existing twos. Then I booted my two VMs in turn from a Knoppix-CD and transferred the NTFS file system images via ntfsclone and netcat to the server in the datacenter. Then I booted the new VMs also from a Knoppix ISO and transferred the NTFS images into the VMware discs, again with nftsclone and netcat. After installing a new MBR I was all set. Now the new VMs ran just fine with the file system images from my old VMs.

Last step was to install the new VMware tools into the two Windows VMs. However this was only 50% successful. The tools installed and ran correctly in the VM with company set of software. The other VM with the clean XP installation paniced during boot and ran in an endless reboot cycle after installation of the tools. Therefore I transferred the file system images again. Then I didn’t update the tools software, so this one still runs the older VMware tools. I’m going to experiment in the time to come. This should be fairly simple, since the VMware Server allows one snapshot of the discs. So, it should be easy to roll back, if the problem persists. And I need to consult the VMware web site in more detail to see, if this problem is already known.

That’s what I am I guess. Just a tiny bit too old to be a real one.

Couldn’t resist to extract this jingle from episode 250 of A State of Trance.

I hope, I don’t getting fucked because of violating some Copyright.

Arbeitskollege Chris hat mich drauf hingewiesen. Rocken oder Raven, das ist hier die Frage.

Das schiebt mich wohl eher in die Raver-Richtung (not really serious).

In the past couple of days I’ve been trying to update my personal data at ICQ, without real success. I’ve been trying this through the Web interface and through the Windows ICQ5 client. The effect is essentially the same.

When I look at my data through the Web interface, the most peculiar data is displayed. I’ve been to update my birthday to January, 1961. However, what I’m seeing is December, 31st 1969. Sometimes my age is correctly displayed as 45, then again as 36.

Then I’ve been trying to update my avatar to something else. Again, the same unpredictable result. With each browser reload, I’m seeing something different. This is all very annoying.

Somehow I think, this fits with the uglified user interface of the Windows client due to much advertisement. I’m getting a much more solid feeling from Google Talk.