silly – 67 Bricks blog

Migrating a VirtualBox Windows installation

I have been using Linux as my primary OS since 1999ish, except for a brief period early in the history of 67 Bricks when I had an iMac. Whenever I have used Windows it has invariably been in some kind of virtualised form; this was necessary in the iMac days when I was developing .NET applications in Visual Studio, but these days I work solely on Scala / Play projects developed in IntelliJ in Linux. Nevertheless, I have found it convenient to have an installation of Windows available for the rare instances where it’s actually necessary (for example, to connect to someone’s VPN for which no Linux client is available).

My Windows version of choice is the venerable Windows 7. This is the last version of Windows which can be configured to look like “proper Windows” as I see it by disabling the horrible Aero abomination. I tried running the Windows 10 installer once out of morbid curiosity, it started talking to me, so I stopped running it. I am old and set in my ways, and I feel strongly that an OS does not need to talk to me.

Programming a Tesla

I have a friend called Chris who is a big fan of the band China Drum. Many years ago he challenged me to program their song Last Chance as a custom ringtone on his Nokia phone and, being vaguely musical, I obliged.

Time has moved on since then. With his hitherto rock-star hair cut to a respectable length, he is now the CEO of a company providing disease model human cells. And he owns a Tesla, something he likes to remind me about from time to time. Now it turns out that one of the silly things you can do with a Tesla is program the lights to flash to make a custom light show for a piece of music of your choice. You can probably see where this is heading.

Embracing Impermanence (or how to check my sbt build works)

Stable trading relationships with nearby countries. Basic human rights. A planet capable of sustaining life. What do these three things have in common?

The answer is that they are all impermanent. One moment we have them, the next moment – whoosh! – they’re gone.

Today I decided I would embrace our new age of impermanence insofar as it pertains to my home directory. Specifically, I wondered whether I could configure a Linux installation so that my home directory was mounted in a ramdisk, created afresh each time I rebooted the server.

Why on earth would I want to do something like that?