Windows Guest with Vagrant

The Vagrant tool added direct support for Windows guests this year.  Before this release, you could get some limited utility using CygWin and SSH, but now there's support for WinRM.  Hopefully, this will make using provisioning tools like "Puppet" easier.  To enable this feature, have these lines in addition to other configurations in your Vagrantfile:

VAGRANTFILE_API_VERSION = "2"
Vagrant.configure(VAGRANTFILE_API_VERSION) do |config|
  config.vm.communicator = "winrm"
  config.vm.network "forwarded_port", guest: 3389, host: 3389
  config.vm.guest = :windows

  config.vm.provider "virtualbox" do |vb|
    vb.customize ["modifyvm", :id, "--memory", "2048"]
    vb.customize ["modifyvm", :id, "--cpus", "2"]
  end
end

One this is setup, if you use Puppet for provisioning, it will use WinRM instead of SSH.  You can also do vagrant rdp, to go directly into a RDP session.

Future versions could add the ability to have a command line session using vagrant ps. 

Until this feature is merged, you'll have to install an SSH server, such as Bitvise SSH Server, FreeSSHd, or CygWin, in order to get command line console support.

Here's some links regarding this:

• http://www.vagrantup.com/blog/vagrant-1-6.html
• https://www.vagrantup.com/blog/feature-preview-vagrant-1-6-windows.html

Study Abroad In Hong Kong

If anyone is interested in a study abroad, City U of Hong Kong looks to be a great opportunity, especially for those studying Information Systems. They offer a vareity of courses in Business Process Managmenet, Business Analysis, Business Intelligence, as well as several other Iinformation Systems oriented courses.

With the cut backs to education in California, courses and programs are being sliced away, so a study abroad provides an opportunity to take core major courses as well as exciting electivies while abroad.

Some advantages of the bi-lateral program through SFSU:

Cost of Living: $700 for the whole semester

Selection: Rich industry aligned selection of courses, many courses already pre-approved by College of Business at SFSU (consult advisor).

Resident: While on study abroad through SFSU, you still remain a California resident.

Financial Aid: All federally fundeded financial aid one receives at SFSU counts toward the study abroad, as this is officially sanctioned program by SFSU.

Articulation: All courses taken count as if taken at SFSU (not transfer credit or foreign university credit), as this is official sanctioned program. Particular articulation needs to be worked out with advisors and department chair. Consult your college advisors.

Experience: Gain invaluable international insight from both courses and societal experience that will impact your life, academics, and professional career.

Cost of Books: Books outside of USA/Canada cost roughly 40% of the costs one would pay in USA. These are International versions of the book (which is the same book with a different cover, often times page-per-page formatting is the same).

Cost of Foods: Unlike at State and other campuses, the food does not cost more for students, but oftentimes less.

Need I say more? A study abroad experience is an amazing opportunity, and often times costs less.

After I complete the program, I will report on my experiences to get more details. I think overall, regardless as to whether the courses meet my expectations, I think the program may be a great opportunity.

Learning Statistics Through Scripting

In looking at the problem sets in Statistics, it occurred to me that you can simply script the solutions in your favorite language for not only learning the scripting language, but for reinforcing Statistics.  Many scripting languages (PHP, Perl, Python, Ruby) have undoubtedly some third party charting tools, and then there's also the famous RRDTool.  For PHP specifically, I came across these gorgeous screen shots of pChart: http://pchart.sourceforge.net/screenshots.php?ID=25.  A close friend of mine mentioned that JpGraph was better (http://jpgraph.net)

For Windows die-hards, I'm sure there's a way to use PowerShell and either third party .NET charting programs or simply commandeer Excel to output the charts.  This could also be done through the older VBScript or even famous underground swiss-army knife of tools used in IIS called LogParser with the output of CHART.  I came across this blog on the topic:

• http://blogs.msdn.com/b/carloc/archive/2008/08/07/charting-with-logparser.aspx

For Java, long ago my friend in Japan mentioned JFreeChart. 

Some other impressive ones were:

• AmChart, which have interactive charts in Flash or Silverlight.  
• Open Flash Chart. 
• PHP/SWF Charts - http://www.maani.us/charts/index.php
• Fusion Charts (http://www.fusioncharts.com/free/) support for jQuery and Joomla
• flot (http://code.google.com/p/flot/) - pure jQuery (javascript client)

Limitations of E-R Model

Before in the assignment for my class (ISYS 464 Enterprise Data Management), my group saw how the asset could be a support contract, software, and hardware, which all have unique characteristics and many similar characteristics.  Each asset is assigned to a user (operator), supported by some IT staff, and purchased (owned) by some manager.  To represent this in traditional ER model, it would have to look like this.

The ER Model cannot distinguish between different types of objects that share qualities, but differ slightly. We decided there must be a better way...

Asset Management Application: E-R Model

In one project for a class (ISYS 464 Enterprise Data Management), I created a small asset management application that could be used for information technology support group to track the assets such as software, hardware, and support contracts.  These would store the order information and reseller information, in case this needed to be referenced (such as a return or getting service).

Here's a simple Entity-Relationship model.

The crazy part of this is that the asset can be three different types of assets: support contracts, software, and hardware.  The support contract can support a software asset or a hardware asset.

The asset itself can be assigned to a user, managed by support, and purchased (owned) by a manager, all of which are some type of employee.  There's not distinction in the type of employee, other than has the asset relates to the employee (owner, user, supporter).

So the question is how can this be easily represented?

Purple Screen of Death

So I tried again to get VMWare ESXi running on my small Shuttle, this time with ESXi 4.0 upgrade 1, but alas, I got the purple screen of death:

ESXi vs. Shuttle X27D

School is out, so now the real learning must begin.  I thought of taking VMWare ESXi out for a stroll, and put this on the sexy petite Shuttle X27D.  But alas, I can't get no satisfaction.  Grrr.

I'm stuck with the error:  Failed to load lvmdriver.

I'm guessing that the problem is that I am using an external USB cd-rom player.  I will try to scavenge an internal slim cd-rom player from another system.