18 April 2012

Running IE Application Compatibility VPC under Virtual Box

This post is no longer necessary as microsoft now provide official virtualbox images, yay!
http://www.modern.ie/en-us/virtualization-tools#downloads

----
Microsoft provide Virtual PC images for testing your website with IE. You can download them from http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=11575

Note that the XP image has no expired so is no use, it will reboot immediately after login.

I wanted to make use of the Win 7 / IE 9 image, however Virtual PC is unavailable on Linux. Fortunately VirtualBox can mount Virtual PC's disk images.

For me the image would get half way through booting windows, and then blue-screen (BSOD). I discovered that it was possible to get past this by removing the SATA controller the machine's settings, and instead adding the disk under the IDE controller. After that the machine booted successfully.




Capturing the BSOD, basically press F8 after a lot rebooting, and select "disable automatic restart on system failure" (ref: http://www.webtlk.com/2009/07/02/how-to-stop-windows-7-reboot-loop/)


And here's the bluescreen:

05 April 2012

Poll svn server for changes with git clone


Just for convenience, paste this in a git bash window:


while true; do date; echo "Polling svn server..."; git svn fetch;
echo "Sleeping."; sleep 300; done


Then just refresh your favourite git log viewer.

Get the gist: poll-svn.sh gist

That's all folks!