June 28th, 2008
A friend of mine asked me for some help on mobile device detection. He introduced me to WURFL, a giant database contains mobile devices information in xml format, in a single file.
First thought came to mind was: how do I store this thing in a database? I Googled around, found a couple of .NET libraries working against WURFL, but they all directly working against the xml. Queries are done against memory objects.
To store this thing in SQL 2005, would need to define a schema, too much work.
I just got access to the SSDS beta, what a perfect match:
- No need to define any schema.
- WURFL would be an Authority.
- Devices would be the container.
- Each device would be an Entity in the Devices container.
- device_Id will be the entityId
- device.Properties will hold the user_agent, fallback_id, and all the capabilities.
Within 30 minutes, I whipped up a console application, parsed the 8MB xml, and stored all the 5755 devices into SSDS.
Next, I will write a web service to query the data.
Posted in .NET, Mobile, SOA, SSDS | No Comments »
June 11th, 2008
A couple of points on running Virtual Server 2005 R2 on Home Server:
- Always apply Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1 first
- Install the server hosting software on C drive. C is the OS partition for Home Server, mine is 20GB in size.
- Install the VM hard drive files in a share like \\YourHomeServer\VM, not D drive, otherwise, you might get into file corruption issues.
- If you are running none-Windows guest operating systems, and the guest OS won’t boot up, try turn off the “Enable hardware-assisted virtualization if available” option.
While trying to install UBuntu on Virtual Server 2005, at one point, I gave up, decided to try VMWare Virtual Servers 2.0. VMWare did not like the \\YourHomeServer\VM path notation for virtual hard drives, it kept complaining the size was too small to create the hard drive. On Home server, other than C, you could not use any local hard drive letters, so I had to go back to Virtua Server 2005 R2.
Posted in Other | No Comments »
June 8th, 2008
I am running my home server on an AMD dual-core 4200 box with 4GB of RAM. It mainly served as a file server, thought I could utilize it a bit more. Running virtual machines is the natural choice.
I wanted to be able to run the VMS without login the home server, so it seems I need the Virtual servers: Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2 or VMWare virtual server. They both are free.
Since Home Server is essentially Windows Business Server 2003 stand edition, so I decided to try Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2 first.
Within an hour, I have Virtual Server 2005 R2 installed and an instance of Windows Server 2008 Trial up and running. That’s promising, but I did not want to run a trial version of Windows 2008. How about Linux?
First, tried to install Fedora, but could not get anything going past the boot screen. I gave up after several tries. Decided to go with UBuntu. Downloaded the desktop, and went a little bi further, but after the initial screen, everything went black. After Googling a bit, found that was a color depth issue, following the instructions on the net and forty minutes later, I reached the final reboot screen.
After clicking the button, the VM rebooted, but hang shortly after the boot screen. Remember the old DOS days, if you had a piece of incompatible device driver, your machine would not even start.
Again, back to Google, but this time nothing came up. Someone suggested going into to recovery mode at the grub screen. That’s did not help, but it did prove one thing: indeed it hang while detecting some kind of device.
After hours of trying, I was at a point of giving up, then I noticed the “Enable hardware-assisted virtualization if available” check box. I unchecked it, and powered on the VM. Boom, everything worked!
Posted in Other | No Comments »