Damn, my VMWare Fusion demo expires in three days. Looks like I’ll be without Windows on my Mac until I can afford to buy the full version. Despite being the shortest month of the year, this one has proven to be quite expensive for reasons I can’t quite work out. I think hiring the van and moving the sofa did it, I made use of the van to buy lots of large things that I’d have no other chance to move.

Looks like I’m living on beans for March

I’m running VMWare Fusion on my Macbook. In it is an instance of Windows XP. I have a Samba server on my network that is configured to be a domain controller. If I connect my Macbook to the wired network, VMWare Fusion will create a bridged network device and the XP instance gets its own IP address from my DHCP server.

Irritatingly, if I use the Airport wireless connection, the VMWare bridging doesn’t work. I get a message saying /dev/vmnet0 doesn’t exist. After a bit of reading and asking it seems this is because Airport cards don’t support promiscous mode, which is needed for VMWare’s bridging device.

So since the Windows instance then has to use NAT, it gets given an IP address for a tiny private network living in my Mac, which is totally unreachable from the outside world. Also it means any broadcast messages to discover network services won’t go out onto my real network. The main one being Windows saying “hello, is there a domain controller out there?”.

Took me ages to work out that putting the Samba server’s IP address into the WINS part of the XP instance’s network config solved that problem. I can now do a domain logon over a VMWare NAT connection that is using the Airport card in my Mac.

I still haven’t solved the issue where I need the domain controller to be reachable in order to log in at all. Since this is a laptop it’s a bit of a failure if I can’t log into it with the usual profile when not plugged into my network. I don’t want two profiles as this will cause a right mess of duplicate settings, and me having to configure everything twice. I also don’t want to point the local user’s profile at the cached copy of the network user’s local profile. Somehow my work laptop is configured to allow me to log into the domain, even when the PDC isn’t there.

I’ve just finished making my Linux machine work properly again, VMWare Player run XP on it, and then configured my Samba server to be a PDC. I now have roaming profiles and a real Windows Doman for all these Windows instances I have.

In theory it means I have one set of application settings, rather than having to copy data about manually. I know this does actually work because they do it at school - only they have real Windows servers. I just need to work out the offline profile for my Macbook’s Windows instance. Currently I can’t log on unless I log into the machine itself. Somehow my work laptop is able to log onto the domain even when offline.

Further prodding is required, but not now I need to go to bed.

For a while it’s been possible to browse the Google search using a mobile device by pointing a browser at the Google Mobile page. From then it’s the usual Google Search affair to do a web search.

I’ve just noticed, at the bottom of my iGoogle page a link to view it on my mobile phone. Hoping this would be some fantastic RSS/GMail/Calendar iGoogle style page for my phone I followed the necessary steps to add the link to my phone’s browser.

The page loaded quite quickly but wasn’t what I was assuming. Think of it more as a list of Google services, rather than iGoogle. It’s really handy though. You can access all your Google services through it - including Google Docs.

My mobile is an Orange SPV E650 running Windows Mobile 6, and includes the pocket versions of Excel and Word. Using mobile Google I was able to download and edit one of the spreadsheet documents I have stored in my Google docs. There was also an option to view it as HTML. I don’t know if editing can be done though.

I’m fairly sure this is a feature I won’t use that often, I usually have access to a proper PC for most of the time. However there have been the odd situations where being able to call up Google Maps or quickly check my mail (booking a hotel somewhere and forgetting its address, then needing a map to find it, being an example) have been really useful and saved loads of effort.

Or “BDS” as it’s known. They warn new teachers about this, and how some days just seem to fall apart or never get started. Supposedly the trick is to not take it out on the kids. I think I managed this, but it’s not easy when you have some grinning idiot purposefully trying to throw a bag full of spanners into your neatly tuned lesson plan.

I think today I was subconsciously trying to see just how bad my day could go. I didn’t feel great for any specific reason from the minute I woke up. I’m fairly sure several good things happened today, but since I was in a “let’s focus on the crap things happening today” frame of mind they totally skipped me by.

Here’s a short version of today…

• My car seat was inexplicably stuck on its runners, making it impossible for me to get into my car
• Period 1, my kids moan “this is boring” and then stop listening. When I get them to do the work they say “we don’t know what to do” and seem confused about why.
• Period 2, the software I wanted to use didn’t work so I had to make up a backup lesson. This worked fairly well actually.
• Period 3, two of my kids decide that hitting each other in the head is a great way to pass the time. One of them gets sent to sit with another teacher.
• Period 4, the vast majority of this class seemed totally unable to shut up and listen. I issued a record breaking six detentions in that lesson.
• Period 5 was free and quite nice
• Period 6 saw me emergency covering two kids and confiscating a bottle of alcohol hand cleaner from another kid (wtf? where did that come from?). One of the kids turned his PC off so I moved him to the middle of the room, he then decided to mess with his phone so I took it off him. He then went mostly nuts so I got rid of him with another teacher. Turns out he has a “time out” card to help him manage his anger problems. Well if I’d known that I would have been a bit more tactful with him. Stupid bugger.

So yeah. Tomorrow I now get to waste my break telling kids off. Mind you, if they don’t turn up I’m keeping them behind after school.

Normal service will be resumed shortly, stay tuned.

Went to Scunthorpe car boot sale today. It was really cold and windy and we arrived about 11am so most of the potential bargains had potentially gone. Still, it was fun walking around looking at the tables full of crap.

I bought some Terry Pratchett books, a milk jug and some dish cleaning sponges (the coloured sponges with green scratchy pads on). Amy bought an entire dinner set for £3 and some rolls of tape.

I then spent the rest of the day writing lesson plans while Amy installed Windows on a PC for someone.

This half term is crazy. It’s only four weeks long, and the first week has ended already. It continues to amaze me just how quickly time passes when at school. It’s also good to see that some of my tactics for keeping order are working. I’m currently trying the divide and conquer method. It’s not good to shove kids outside your room, and sending more than one outside doesn’t really work. So instead I’ve taken to standing them in the corners of the room.

It’s an extra curricular day on Wednesday. The year 10s are filling in their work experience application forms, having mini interviews and other things like that. The rest of the school do other little random lessons.

I’ve got the 30 day trial of BlitzMax on my Macbook. I’m quite bored of wasting time messing around when writing games. So bored that it puts me off beginning anything. I’ve got loads of ideas and I get stuck not knowing where to start, the effort of having to reinvent the wheel making sprite libraries is irritating.

I’ll give BlitzMax a go and see what that’s like. To keep up the motivation I feel like documenting the process on my main website.

I had a good bit of fun with Processing the other week, using the tilt sensor in my Macbook to control stuff on the screen.

After running my heating at a higher temperature, and pointing a small fan heater at the mould patches, my house is probably drier. I made up a solution of bleach and water and wiped the walls with it. This seemed to take the mould off leaving no visible staining. Hopefully the bleach will also prevent the mould from coming back.

My house is so cold! It’s one of those red-brick victorian terraced houses that had no insulation because it wasn’t invented back then. Also, with a fire place in each room who needs insulation? Just chuck another log on.

Only this is 2008 and all the fireplaces have been bricked up, which is a shame. There is central heating and it does work, in every room except the front room, the kitchen and my bedroom - conveniently the three largest rooms in the house. Well I lie, the heating works fine, it’s just not enough to heat the rooms effectively and I think it’s down to the crap insulation.

I have a thermometer in my bedroom, the highest it gets up to is 16c and that’s during the day when the heating isn’t on! At night it drops to about 10c, with 6c being the lowest recorded (ever slept in your fridge?).

After coming home today I found a letter from the landlord saying they want to arrange a house inspection at some point. In anticipation of this I have done some tidying up. While picking up some random stuff from my bedroom floor I noticed this behind my chest of drawers…

Isn’t that nice! For the curious, here’s a closeup…

Needless to say the heating has been cranked up some more and the timer altered to run for longer. There’s also a fan heater whirring away up there now in an attempt to dry the room out. I think I’m on a losing battle though, what with the space under the house containing a large pool of water…