Liking the latest Chrome UI changes

If you do not have the dev or beta channel of Chrome, I can understand. There are days when I want to smash my flat panel, but then there are days when I come in to find nice subtle changes that just make sense and enhance my day. Take a look at what is coming down the road for those on the stable release... http://blog.chromium.org/2010/06/fresh-coat-of-chrome.html

How to change to the Dev channel of Chrome

How is Google improving chrome plug-in security?

The Chromium blog details how they are improving plug-in security for Chrome.

The highlights:

• Chrome will include the flash plugin in the Chrome installer and use Google auto-update to keep the Adobe flash plug-in on the latest version
• Chrome will use Google's own PDF viewer,
• The latest API Pepper will allow Chrome to sandbox plug-ins
• Try to keep users on the latest versions of all plug-ins

Google's trade floor

Thought that this was interesting enough to share... Google is venturing into another business that it had no experience in.... financial services...

http://www.unlockwallstreet.com/financial-news/googles-latest-launch-its-own-trading-floor

Server 2008 Hibernation ON by default

I was investigating an issue today where there was low disk space on one of my VM's. Come to find out, after running SpaceMonger it showed a 4 GB file hiberfil.sys. I remember only seeing this file on laptops when hibernation is turned on. I am not sure why anyone would want hibernation turned on for a server. There was no option to turn off hibernation in the GUI so I had to turn it off using the following command at the command line:

powercfg.exe /hibernate off

Chrome OS

Thought that this was an interesting article about the Chrome OS written by an ex-employee at Google.

Ex-Googler says Chrome OS will be a vastly different OS but won’t displace Windows

I think a dual boot situation is the way to go. There are still a number of websites I frequent that still only work with IE. It is disapointing, but it is reality. I thought about it and many of the things I already do are in the 'cloud'.... Gmail & Yahoo mail, searching online, writing things in a word processor or keeping track of things in spreadsheets (Google Apps vs. Microsoft Office) many of the bells and whistles that exist in Office that I use at work, I just do not take advantage of at home because I don't need to, so I use Google Apps. The one thing that I constantly do however, is retouch photographs from my digital camera before sending them to print. So Google would need to get Picasa browser based (which they may be able to do with Google Gears)

Autocomplete Gmail Searching

Gmail Search Made Easier. Finally... I have been waiting for this since they came out with autocomplete in the google search...

VMware Memory Explained

VMware has saved me a boatload of both time and money. When trying to figure out the memory utilization on the ESX host I have the other day, both my buddy and I wanted to pull our hair out because none of the numbers seemed to add up. We had the Microsoft Server 2oo3 Task Manager up and we were trying to compare the numbers to what was in the WMware Inftastructure Client and nothing seemed to match up exactly. What was found online, was found in bits and pieces and everything finally made sense, hours later. The result of all of the google searches, reading and head scratching is the image above and the information below. I hope it saves you time and your hair!

Memory Consumed =

Memory Granted – Memory Shared

Host memory usage – Memory Overhead

Memory usage % =

Memory Active / Memory Granted

Guest Memory Usage / Memory Granted

Windows Server Physical Memory (K) Total = Memory Granted to ESX VM

Windows Server Physical Memory (K) Available = Memory Shared

The difference of the two numbers above is equal to the Memory Consumed.

ESX Performance Graphs:

Memory Consumed (total amount used by guest; see Windows Task Mgr)

Memory Active (amount currently being used by guest)

Memory Usage (% of active memory relative to amount granted to guest)

Memory Shared (amount not currently used & available to share with others)

ESX VM Summary General:

Memory: amount configured (granted) for the VM

Memory Overhead: amount required by ESX for housekeeping the VM

ESX VM Summary Resources:

Host memory usage: amount the VM is using from the host

Guest memory usage: amount actively being used by the VM