Been to Mars!

Virtually, at least.

If you followed RedPixie’s tweet last week, I went to the e-Infrastructure South business event at the Space Research Centre in Didcot. There, they have a large HD video wall made up of 24 monitors which showed a panorama from Curiosity. Standing in front of that was like being there, almost.

I did feel old by the end of the day, having listened to the talks on GPUs. I started my commercial career in 1988 at AMT, a company that made a parallel processor, the DAP. It was about the size of a desk cabinet. Now, much more power than that is available in an NVidia GPU. Furthermore, no-one had even heard of AMT and the DAP. In many ways my career has come full circle, which is not a bad thing.

Incidentally, I solved my Ctl-Alt-Del problem from the previous post by the simple expedient of changing the hot key combination in VMware Workstation. Simple.

Too Much Virtualisation

You can have too much of a good thing, VMs included. The scenario is that I am at home using a Windows 7 VM running under VMWare Workstation. From the VM, I am VPN’d into the office where I am connected to my physical laptop, on which I am running vCenter. I have the console of a Windows XP machine open from virtual center but there is no way to log in to it because Ctrl-Alt-Delete just affects the local VM. Ctrl-Alt-Ins the same.

Will post a solution when I find it.