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VMware Server 2 – windows 2008 64bit virtual machines stops working after bios upgrade

John Spence — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 20:39:38 +0000

Just a quick reminder, if you have a virtual machine of windows 2008 R2 64bit which when you start it can be seems to start loading Windows within the console window then suddenly restarts after showing the “loading files” progress bar completes and keeps repeating this cycle for ever but you know the image was working last time you used it.

Double check you haven’t tweaked your BIOS settings and disabled the “Intel virtualization technology” option in your bios by accident.
In my case I had updated the bios on my P8P67 Pro motherboard which reset the value months ago and hadn’t fired up the Windows 2008 image since.

6am Wake up alarm, I swear I never set that!

John Spence — Thu, 25 Aug 2011 23:19:50 +0000

One of the joys of having a phone that syncs with your outlook calendar is knowing where you need to be without having to find a computer to work out where you’re suppose to be for that meeting you had half forgotten about.
However where there is a UP, there is a DOWN and this one is due to Outlooks’ default reminder period for all day events being 18 hours which is a serious issue if you tend to put your holidays in your calendar as all day(s) events so people don’t try to arrange meetings whilst you are away.
18 hrs before an all-day event is of course 6am which is not a nice time to getting woken up unnecessarily.
Yes you can just disable the reminder, but I never seem to remember to do that so onto a technical solution.

Whilst looking for an fix, I found Pierre Rossel’s http://blog.prossel.info/30-solution-to-disturbing-default-reminder-for-outlook-all-day-events/ which is a nice and easy solution to my 6am wake up issue.

A simple macro which fires when you save/update an event, that checks if the alarm/reminder will be outside the allowed hours you have set and warns you and also suggest a better hour for the reminder that is a sane hour of the day.
Simple and logical, just also remember to sign the Outlook macro otherwise Outlook (2007 / 2010 etc) won’t run it unless you have tweaked the macro security to let anything run which doesn’t seem wise.

OSX 10.6 Snow Leopard: Missing icons issue + suggested solution

John Spence — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 00:27:45 +0000

Just updated to snow leopard which took around an hour. Looks like it worked ok except for a few apps that no longer work (expect compatible versions soon enough).

One issue I did come across was that random icons were missing from the desktop / applications / finder side bar etc.
A normal reboot or two didn’t seem to fix it

The solution after a quick search seems to be to delete com.apple.desktop.plist and com.apple.dock.plist from “User>Library>Preferences>” which means the dock defaults back to default which is annoying but at least files will have icons again.

A quick reboot/restart and all was back to normal for me.