Monthly Archives: January 2007

Ubuntu running Windows in VMware Player

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I managed to destroy my Windows XP partition a few weeks ago while trying to resize it. Fortunately I made a backup. I decided to try to run Windows inside a virtual machine. After removing the broken NTFS partition, I reused the free space to create a new /home partition.

I created a disk image with QEMU, and ran a Windows XP installation on it through VMware Player. And I must say, it works perfectly. I am even able to connect to USB devices such as a PocketPC.

In the picture below I am debugging a Compact .NET Hello World application in Visual Studio in Windows in VMware. The application is running on the PDA that is attached to the PC.

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Here is a screenshot of Visual Studio running the PocketPC emulator:

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Speed is not an issue: the image runs almost at native speed thanks to the kernel modules. Whenever I need Windows (I rarely do), I just fire up VMware Player, and I am able to dig right in because it saved the previous state. And when I’m finished I just suspend the virtual machine.

I don’t think I’ll go back to a dual-boot system soon.

EIS 2007 paper accepted!

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Yesterday, we were informed that the paper we submitted for Engineering Interactive Systems 2007 was accepted. It’s also my first publication where I’m the first author :-)

The paper describes a way to augment semantic service descriptions with high-level user interface models. The resulting service description is called a service-interaction description. This approach allows a service to present a suitable user interface (for interacting with it) on a wide variety of target platforms. We also introduce a semantic network built on top of the UIML vocabulary. More on that in a later post.

More details about the paper can be found at my publications page.

Domain name problems

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I had some problems lately with my domain (jozilla.be). The guys who I registered it with didn’t answer any mails, nor did they answer any phone calls. I was lucky once to speak to someone from support, who told me everything would be taken care off if I deposited another 4 Euro’s to get the domain out of quarantaine. Of course, this didn’t solve anything. My domain is still in quarantaine.

I wish I knew who the CEO of this company (and others) was before I registered my domain with them. It seems he has quite a disputable reputation. The people of the be.comp.internet newsgroup didn’t have a high esteem of him either.

Since you are reading this, I guess you found my new and permanent domain (jozilla.net), which I registered with Site5 for no more than 7 Euro’s.

I’m glad everything is working again. As always, the staff of Site5 was very helpful to resolve any problems I had during the migration.

In the future I will be looking into integrating my blog more into my main homepage. I might also move away from Typo since its instability is quite annoying. Apparantly the original creator of Typo has moved on as well. Mephisto seems promising. If the infrastructure is in place I hope to blog more often, and publish more material about my current research.


Edit: A few days ago, my .be domain was reactivated after all. A little too late however, since I already registered jozilla.net by then.