03.23.09

breakfast

Posted in cooking, offline at 8:03 am by paul

Sometimes you get a hint that things are not starting well. Other times it is a little more obvious.

No four-year old present to be blamed, either

No four-year old present to be blamed, either


On the plus side, at least the quart of yoghurt somehow landed right side up …

03.20.09

newbies

Posted in Mac at 9:59 am by paul

One of the frustrations of being a Mac user is that when looking for a solution to a relative simple problem, one sometimes finds a large amount of virtual ink spilled to solve a problem similar to what you have.

For example, I recently installed VMWare Fusion on my Mac at work. I set up a RHEL (Ok, CentOS) VM, and a Windows XP VM. I found that every time I started VMWare Fusion, the RedHat VM would start up. That wasn’t what I wanted and consumed a lot of RAM and generated a lot of disk activity, so I set about disabling it. I found a bazillion pages devoted to explaining, in excruciating detail, how to drag a VM definition file into your startup items. That was precisely the opposite of what I wanted, and doing the reverse wouldn’t help because that was not what was causing the RedHat VM to start.

Then I thought I might just find and edit the config file. For the record, it lives at:

~/Library/Preferences/com.vmware.fusion.plist

Unfortunately, VMWare elected to store this in binary, as opposed to XML, format. So I converted it with this:

$ plutil -convert xml1 -o ~/Desktop/vmware.xml com.vmware.fusion.plist

Then I edited the XML version. I found a <key> called DefaultVM (or similar, I’ve sadly lost the snippet), and deleted it and the <string> it referenced. Then I converted the plist back to binary1 format and replaced the existing one:

$ mv com.vmware.fusion.plist com.vmware.fusion.plist.hold
$ plutil -convert binary1 -o com.vmware.fusion.plist ~/Desktop/vmware.xml

Ta-da! No more auto-starting of the RedHat, or any other, VM when I start VMWare Fusion.