What happened 2015?

So, as you noticed, I did not really blog a lot this year, i.e. 2015.
Let me quickly recap what I was busy with in the last couple of month (lame excuse, I know).

In summer I changed job from Oracle to vmware. Still handling the channel/partner business, but now no longer for (boring) hardware, but for - to me - exiting software. The concept of the software defined datacenter - or SDDC for short - is something I really like. Virtualize everything. Move from on-premise to cloud(s) seamlessly... pretty cool I think.

Enough of the professional plug.
I still found time for some nice hacks at home.

I've been recording my electricity and gas consumption at home for years, nay, decades now. What started with a plain ascii file in the early 90s, turned in to a DB2 application on OS/2 (with visual REXX) , and then to a very rudimentary web application (against the same DB2 database) under Windows XP and 7. Over the years I slightly modified the web application to also be mobile friendly, so I could take my phone (Nexus 5 right now) or iPad and enter the data while I was reading the meter.
Did I mention that I'm a nerd and do this weekly? No?
Well perhaps I should.
Not very interesting from a hack perspective, is it?

So this year I decided to change this, and I

1. created an Android app for it
2. added the anyline meter reading to it (because I did not want to get into the OCR stuff myself)
3. created a REST interface to my database (building upon the old web application I had), using Jersey.

Two really impressive things here. Anyline... check it out. Excellent meter reading SDK (and other OCR stuff) on iOS and Android. 

And Jersey, wow!! REST with the click of a button, yet you are still in full control. And also getting JSON and XML with the same code. Nice.

Now for step 4 I'll re-write the old web-app to a pure Ajax/jQuery/JSON thing, and will only keep the REST interface to the database.

And step 5, already started: I bought some NFC tags (from whiztags, thanks for the hint, Max). One will go to the gas meter, the other one to the electricity meter, and both are registered to my app on Android. So when I go near the meter, it will automatically open the app with the OCR scanner for the respective meter. Click, and done.

So that's the last half year - or so - in a nutshell.

24 bit RDP under Windows XP

Just recently during (probably my last) Sunray/VDI demo installation I ran into the problem that we could not get 24bit color depth on the virtualized Windows XPs.

The SunRay part of the installation (i.e. the Desktop Unit (DTU, aka. ThinClient) itself could not be the problem, because they always are 24bit (incl their respective X session on the SunRay Server),
we also ran the RDP client (uttsc) with the -A 24 option to force it to 24bit (which it would default to anyway) ... but to no avail.

Of course as always google is your friend; several people have posted and blogged this already: under Windows XP you have to explicitely enable 24bit for RDP. So in the Windows XP image (or template) open the registry and change

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Terminal Server\WinStations\RDP-Tcp\ColorDepth

to the value 4.
Not sure if you have to reboot the virtual machine (VM) then, but since rebooting a virtualized XP is quite fast anyway, just reboot it...

No cheap Vista for Desktop Virtualization?

I just got a pointer to this litte know fact (at least I did not know it) from the VMware site:

Microsoft Virtualization Licensing and Distribution Terms - VMware: "Restrictions on Virtualization and Vista:

Microsoft has recently announced a prohibition on virtualizing the less expensive versions of Vista (Vista Home Basic and Vista Home Premium). Microsoft’s explanation has been that virtualization is not broadly usable by consumers or other mass market users, and therefore should be restricted only to the more expensive versions of Vista"

This means that you cannot use a cheaper version of Vista for desktop virtualization (VDI) ...

And this in return means, that Microsoft is afraid of VDI. That simple.

Citrix to buy XenSource

The week of (HW) virtualization (companies) ?

Hm, too many brackets for a good title, ... anyway, just hours (ok, I'm still exaggerating) after the VMware IPO, Citrix (of all) announced that they are to by XenSource, maker of Xen, which is a rival to VMware and favored by like half of the techies. It's one of those tech-religious things, I guess.

Citrix to buy virtualization company XenSource for $500 million | Tech news blog - CNET News.com: "Citrix to buy virtualization company XenSource for $500 million"

I wonder, why Sun haven't bought them....