At work we use Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 a fair bit. In some circumstances, particularly when running a Windows guest, the virtual hard disks can grow exceedingly quickly. Thankfully, there is a provided set of tools to help with this problem. A precompactor and a compactor. You run the precompactor to zero out the free diskspace, you then pause or shutdown the virtual machine and run the compactor. This is all well and good, unless the virtual machines are running in a production environment and you need to do this at 2am in the morning.

Earlier today I managed to find time to watch Randy Pausch's last lecture (Randy is sadly suffering from terminal cancer), entitled “Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams”. I'll try not to give away too much, just incase you might want to see it, but it's certainly one of the most interesting, and moving, lectures I've ever had the pleasure of being able to watch. Randy talks about the lessons he's learnt and gives advice on how to achieve your dreams, by recounting his experiences in life.

Whilst arguingdiscussing the merits of Exchange over RPC over HTTP/S, with SIR-Millarand Theo, and how it would've been nicer to see some viable calendaring alternatives in the long term (and how I've become a corporate whore), I started thinking about my current personal calendaring system, only to come unstuck. I really should be storing my calendar remotely, and not relying on the $work calendar. Unfortunately there are relatively few calendaring solutions out there.

Those of you interested in Live For Speed, and fancy a blast from the old* days, or want to see what pre-S2 was like, might be interested in checking out this threadon the official forums. I've simply patched the executables to look at the new master address, ensuring the executable size remained the same and with a little bit of luck discovered that the master server is still serving requests from older clients to unlock.

Regardless of who you are, or what you do, you're a member of some sort of community. Most people invest time, money and more, often to simply give back. As a result of this some members come to expect a certain level of mutual respect from their peers and possibly even the creators / developers of said project. When this respect is broken it can often lead to ill feeling within the community.

Some of you may be aware that I “maintain” a how to guide for the Live For Speed community, briefly detailing how to run a dedicated server. Within this guide is a section on running it on a Linux based system, under Wine. As good as this guide is (obviously - as I wrote it :P), there are a few issues that I feel need to be addressed, predominately; Most distro's packages of Wine have X.

For the last few years I've had a computer running 24/7, under the desk in my room, serving the various domains and services under my control. As of a few nights ago ‘ezra’, as it was known in it's last incarnation of hardware, was turned off. Overall it felt like quite a sad occasion as the mini-itx box had served me well, and saved my bacon in a number of situations.

Something most people will agree on, is that when you're faced by a great unknown, is that it's scary or exciting. Personally, I'm absolutely petrified. I do enjoy my job a lot, but despite working with some really great people, it can be rather mundane from time to time, and it isn't always challenging. As such I've decided that I'm going to start Open University next year, as well as do a few vendor specific exams (including my LPIC-1).

Occasionally Windows 2003 Small Business Server will “forget” (it appears to be an issue with one of the recent updates) about the Help and Support service. Unfortunately as this powers the Remote Assistance system, which I use to resolve some user incompetence / desktop configuration issues remotely, its slightly annoying when this happens. I was talking to a friend in a similar situation from another company, and it appears as if he didn't know how to resolve the issue.