Tools - 30

VMware's Christian Hammond and David Trowbridge have released a new tool called Parasite that can hook into GTK+ applications to facilitate interactive GUI debugging.

Parasite will provide a visual outline of the widget hierarchy and allow you to dynamically modify various widget properties while the program is running. It also includes a built-in Python shell interface that you can use to programmatically manipulate the GUI. You can even use it to add new GTK+ widgets to a window while the program is running. A few other features are also bundled, including a tab that shows GTK+ Action items and a special mode that will display a visual indication when widgets are being repainted.

Read the complete article by Ryan Paul.

Quickly following up on Beta 1, Beta 1.5 introduces three important new features:

• In addition to VMware Infrastructure 3 and VMware Server 2, VMM now supports the management and monitoring of Citrix XenServer 1.5.
• VMM now works on ALL mobile devices via its new Lite Mode. VMM will gracefully degrade itself to a zero-Javascript version if a fully-Ajax capable browser is not detected. You can now manage and monitor VMware and Xen from your BlackBerry, Windows Mobile device, or any phone with a web browser!
• Beta 1.5 introduces a feature we are calling Accidental Touch Detection (ATD). ATD prevents users from accidentally brushing up against a power button in full mode (as opposed to the new lite mode) and shutting down a VM. ATD requires an intentional touch (measured by a depression of 500 milliseconds).

Get beta 1.5 and read more about VMM at http://lostcreations.com/vmm/.

StorMagic’s SM Series Lite with no expiration will be available in 30 days. That’s right! In 30 days, you will have the opportunity to unlock the full potential of your ESX Server with StorMagic’s SM Series Lite. After VMware users asked StorMagic to develop an easy SAN Management solution to help users like yourselves, StorMagic is ready to release a breakthrough product redefining Shared Storage. It’s time to benefit from all the features your ESX Server has to offer and let StorMagic take you there!  And the best part? The SM Series Lite has no expiration which means you enjoy the benefits of shared storage for life!

• VMware Certified
• Turn unused internal disk drives into a virtual SAN
• Integrated into VI Center
• Single step storage provisioning
• Automatically expand you environment as your business grows
• Manage your VMs, Data Storage and O/S from 1 management tool

Replicate Technologies has announced a new software update for its flagship product, Replicate Datacenter Analyzer™. The new release, Replicate Datacenter Analyzer (RDA) 1.2, expands its best practices library to add IP Knowledge Modules that increase the innovative product’s ability to detect and resolve configuration issues across a broader range of network issues, provides enhanced notification capabilities and drill down diagnostics, offers an easy-to-use user interface with advanced navigation and an updated dashboard, and supports VMware ESX 3i.

RDA 1.2 offers the following new capabilities:

New IP Knowledge Module – including the ability to detect and resolve configuration issues across a broader range of network issues. RDA can now identify routing and subnet misconfiguration and can determine if a guest VM network stack is operating correctly, as well as check for duplicate IP address usage in a common subnet.

Expanded drill down diagnostics – providing data to explain issues and guide IT towards a quick resolution – going beyond the basic identification of errors to save IT time and money.

Advanced item level notification – offering email notifications which now include full details on the exact changes that RDA has detected. The detailed notifications provide IT administrators with the latest information, delivered directly to their inbox.

Broader platform support – including support for VMware ESXi.

Increased scalability – offering significant performance improvements, including enhanced support for large scale datacenters of 100+ hosts.

Steve JIN from VMware CoDevelopment Engineering reports 1025 downloads of the Virtual Infrastructure Java API.

Since its debut in May 2008, VI Java API has quickly caught the attention of VMware developer communities due to its elegant design and simplicity. As I know, many commercial companies use it for their product development and really enjoy the benefits the API brings in. Accoding to the project statistics, it hit the 1,000 download milestone days ago. As of today, the total number of direct download is 1,025. Many thanks for your support and I look forward to bringing you more features in 2009!

Virtual Infrastructure API is an open source project from VMware CoDevelopment Engineering. It aims to simplify the use of VI SDK. If you are using Java to develop applications talking to VMware Virtual Infrastructure, this API is for you. Using this API instead of the VI SDK web services interfaces results significantly less line of code, and much more readable code.
The Virtual Infrastructure Java API was initially created by Steve JIN from VMware CoDevelopment Engineering with strong support/help from Sujit Panikatt and other VMware colleagues. It's open sourced at sourceforge.net under BSD license in May 2008.

Perti Purho over at Kloonigames released Crayon Physics Deluxe. This is a 2D physics puzzle game, in which you get to experience what it would be like if your drawings would be magically transformed into real physical objects. Solve puzzles with your artistic vision and creative use of physics. This is the coolest game I’ve seen since Pac-Man. Make sure you watch the video and let me know if you also experienced the WOW. Also the Playground (which hosts user generated levels) is now open for the public.

Crayon Physics Deluxe trailer 2 from Petri Purho on Vimeo.

Petri Purho is a student at Helsinki Polytechnic, studying computer science. Game development has been a his hobby for at least ten years now. His gaming interests don’t just limit to video games, but also include pen & paper role-playing games, strategy games, board games and card games.

Update : Just played my first game and made a mess of it, dam I suck. Have to create bigger blocks.

My good old friend Jeroen van der Kamp, Chief Technology Officer at Login Consultants brought me up-to-date about their newest release. The Login Virtual Session Indexer (Login VSI) is a free and platform independent benchmark for Virtual Desktop Infrastructures and Terminal Services. This 1.0 release has been fully tested, the workload has been carefully tuned, and now publication of your own results is allowed. As usual, Login VSI 1.0 is a free download from www.loginvsi.com.

Changes for Login VSI 1.0:

• Publication of Login VSI results is now allowed when the Login VSI publication guidelines are used;
• The workload is now tuned and can be categorized to be medium/heavy load of a typical knowledge worker (this is in comparison to average Terminal Server deployments);
• The CPU workload may be categorized as medium/heavy (above average);
• The Memory workload is now medium (slightly above average);
• Many typical beta bug fixes, Login VSI is now battle proven in the benchmarking project: “Virtual Reality Check” by PQR and Login Consultants;
• Improved schema to calculate the optimal performance index;

Login VSI 1.0 at 200% speed from Jeroen van de Kamp on Vimeo.

Chris Pirillo reports : This phishing domain appears to be registered in China, and I’m about to report ‘em to OpenDNS (via PhishTank.com).Please, tell your followers to NOT VISIT or LOGIN THROUGH that site! Watch out for these direct messages. If you did happen to visit one of the offending URLs, you should be safe so long as you didn’t try to log into your Twitter account there.

JanusVM is software that allows you to surf the Internet without oppression or censorship, while protecting your privacy, security, and identity. It has advanced filtering capabilities for modifying web page content, managing cookies, controlling access, and removing ads, banners, pop-ups and other obnoxious Internet junk. JanusVM was designed to be used on Microsoft Windows (2000/XP/2003) and Linux.


JanusVM Features

• Works with WiFi.
• Support multiple users in a LAN.
• Protects you from most man-in-the-middle attacks.
• Protects you from Javascript, Java, and Flash based side-channel privacy attacks.
• Protects your identity and your true location by masking your IP Address.
• Encrypts and re-routes your DNS request and ALL TCP traffic to ensure strong privacy.
• Strips out most privacy sensitive information your web browser may leak.
• Blocks popups, annoying ads, banners, and other obnoxious Internet junk.
• Very simple setup and operation.
• Works transparently for applications using TCP. (No UDP or ICMP support)

How does it work?

JanusVM is powered by VMware, built on the Linux 2.6.14 kernel, and brings together openVPN, Squid, Privoxy, and Tor, to give you a transparent layer of security and privacy that is compatible with all your TCP based applications. DNS request are also passed through Tor so even your ISP doesn't know what web site you are looking at. All your web traffic is passed through squid and privoxy to filter out unwanted internet junk & prevents your web browser from leaking information about your computer system. One of the core components that make this possible is an awesome piece of software called Tor. Tor is what allows you to re-route your traffic around the internet anonymously. A more detailed explanation of this can be found here.