World of Warcraft is fun - even for non players

I really don't know much about World of Warcraft. I have never played it. I do know, however, that as your character in the game gains experience, some of the challenges you face get so hard that you have to organize an entire crew, make strategies and retry several times untill you finally make it. Since you have to put so much effort into making these challenges, I can imagine the frustration when an attempt fails; especially if the failure is because of a deliberate sabotage by one of the guys in the crew. I must have watched this video ten times. Coffe came out my nose the first time I watched it.

Okay, let's do this! LEROOOOY JEEEEENKIIINNNNSSS!!!

A bit off topic post there, but I just had to let you know! ;)

Vmware Player for testing Linux

This post has been due for a couple of weeks now. Sorry about that.

A few weekends ago, I downloaded and installed the VMware Player. Just to experiment a little and to see how it worked. I have to admit I was quite impressed.

VMware Player is a free software solution for running virtual machines. You can use other commercial VMware software to create virtual machines, or you can download and use one of the many existing pre-build virtual machines available. In my experiment, I used the Ubuntu Linux vm.

If you want to experiment with Linux, I cannot imagine an easier way to get started. Just start the VMware Player and run the virtual machine you downloaded. After loading for a couple of seconds, Ubuntu Linux pops up on you screen. I didn't spend much time tinkering with Gnome - for instance, I don't know if it's possible to go beyond 1024x768 resolution - but I started FireFox and instantly found myself surfing the web. I downloaded and installed Java 5 and Tomcat 5.5.15. The really cool part here is that the virtual machine gets its own IP address, so I could actually access the Tomcat instance I installed in the virtual machine from the machine the vm ran on! How cool is that? I don't think other computers on the network can access the Tomcat instance, because the VM didn't show up on the client list of my DHCP server, but VMware has other software that lets you do just that.

Overall, a really great experience. Now I just have to think of some way to start using this where I work. It would be really useful to have a virtual machine of our front end server to test if the software I developed on my Windows machine really runs on the server before actually going live.