Monday, March 31, 2008

A Simple VMware Guest Statistics Collector

Since the beginning of the last year, I've been working on virtualization issues at work, and I did some research works on VMware ESX Server recently.

About 1 year ago when I worked on Xen, the biggest problem was resource monitoring.
I got similar problem this time too, but the situation was better than that time.

VMware provides several SDKs for management such as VMware Guest SDK.
Using VMware Guest SDK, we can collect basic resource usage information on guest operating systems (Linux or Windows). This feature is quite useful I think, and
I wrote a small statistics collector for Linux guests using the SDK above.
It's available here, and I hope the small tool is useful for people working on VMware ESX Server. :)

At this moment, the tool I wrote is beta status and almost no documentation. :(
I built the tool and did some basic tests using VMware-GuestSDK-3.5.0-64557.tar.gz available in the above URL.

BTW, the download URL will be moved to Kusanagi Project as soon as enough tests have done.

Sunday, March 30, 2008

Day 174 : Baby Food

About two weeks ago, we began to give our daughter baby foods.

Today, I had a chance to take photos of the scene.
She doesn't look like enjoying in the photo below. But, actually she ate some. :)



BTW, the first baby food was on March 19, 2008 (Day 163).

A Defective Component

As I wrote before, last November a HDD of my desktop PC failed and I bought a new one.

Recently, I read an interesting article. According to the author, as HDD capacity got extremely bigger than before, some HDD vendors sometimes omit physical formatting. Thus, we often see
defective sectors after going into production phase. :(

In other word, it might be possible to use normally those drives which once looked defective if we do physical format by ourselves.

So, I tried. :)

I downloaded "Drive Fitness Test Tool" from Hitachi GST web page, and the 2 pictures below show the consequence.



In my 160GB SATA driver case, it took about 3 hours.



Indeed a defective drive ... orz

Wednesday, March 26, 2008

Shimoyame Case : The Last Testimonies



Shimoyama Case : The Last Testimonies (下山事件 -- 最後の証言)
Tetsutaka Shibata
ISBN 978-4-396-33367-6

Shimoyama Case is one of the biggest mystery in the post World War II history of Japan.
There are so many books and research works on the case, but the view point of this book's author is unique and interesting.
He is a grand son of a possible person involved, and the main reason that drove him to investigate the case deeply was to know if his grand father was really guilty or not.

BTW, the case happened in 1949 during occupation by GHQ. Thus, you can find a lot of official reports in The National Archives of the United States:

http://arcweb.archives.gov/arc/basic_search.jsp

Friday, March 21, 2008

Innocent Japanese



Innocent Japanese (何も知らなかった日本人)
Seikou Hatakeyama
ISBN 978-4-396-33367-6

Its Japanese subtitle is "戦後謀略事件の真相". In English, that means "The Truth of Outmaneuver Cases after World War 2".

Tuesday, March 18, 2008

One Page Management



One Page Management
Riaz Khadem and Robert Lorber
ISBN 978-4-492-55600-9

I didn't know this method, but it seems to be quite old and established one.
For example, Google gave me about 82,000,000 links for "one+page+management" query.

I'm wondering if this method works for a colleague of mine because the focus report and the performance report look like very good for concentration.
Hey, Furuta-kun!
Are you reading?
It's you. :o)

Sunday, March 16, 2008

Try Not to Develop Your Staff



Try Not to Develop Your Staff (部下は育てるな! 取り替えろ!!)
Keita Nagano
ISBN 978-4-334-93421-7

This is an interesting book.

BTW, the English title expresses only the first half of the original Japanese title.
The second half says, "Change (unprofessional staff)". :o

The author says managers should fire staff who can't think logically.
But, for me, people who really should be fired are those who use perfect logic but do not have sense of choosing principles. :(

Monday, March 03, 2008

Day 147 : Girl's Day

In Japan, March 3 is the Girl's Day.
We display dolls, and pray for good health and for prosperity of girls on the day.



As you can see in the photo, my daughter got a bit unique design dolls. :o