Updated Website
For the new financial year, Perl Training Australia has a new special offer. Customers who book and pay for their course before the early bird special date will receive free perl books.

Many thanks to Jacinta who spend a good part of the day stuffing book information into the XML files that are used to generate our website.

B.....o......c......h.......s
Bochs is too slow for what I need to use it for. Despite that, I'm hugely impressed by its capabilities. It's awesome.

I've managed to find a solution without having to resort to commercial software. It's called picking up one of the many old machines that I have lying around, figuring out what's inside it, and installing my new system onto that.

Today's find is a 1GHz Celeron with 512Mb of RAM, and 20Gb of disk drive space. Amazing what I have lying in the spare room.

Unfortunately, it appears that the reason this machine was lying in the spare room is that it's made from the parts of a machine that died a particulary gruesome death, with much smoke and heat. It's rebooting at random intervals, so it doesn't look particularly stable. Hopefully it's something simple like a heat problem (it's got the itty bittiest fan), and I can fix it just by whacking a larger heat-sink on it, or underclocking the whole rig.

Update
After installing Windows on a real machine, I'm not that sure that Bochs was that slow after all.

Bochs
It works! I've got Windows running inside Bochs, network and all. I still don't know how fast it is for the things that I want to use, as I've got a bazillion critical security patches to install.

Bochs
I'm currently playing with Bochs as a way of having a baby machine inside my real machine. I don't have a good estimation of how fast it's running, because it's installing the new OS on the emulated machine. What is impressive is how easy it was to get things to that stage. Simply grab the example config file, tweak a little, and have the emulated machine boot of a real CD-ROM.

I'm curious to see whether the performance of the virtual machine is fast enough for what I'd like to do with it, which is primarily to run Windows applications in a restricted environment, and good ol' games that have a hard time running on newer operating systems. I'd love to use plex86, but the project is only intending to emulate linux from linux, which doesn't suit my needs in this particular case.

So far I've installed 31% of the required files for my windows install while writing this journal entry. I don't know if that's good or bad, I can't remember how long windows installs usually take.

I wonder if running two copies of an MS operating system at the same time on the same physical hardware poses a licensing issue?

Geeks from Childhood
Jacinta is in the process of updating many of our contacts, including old freinds from high school, and she came across a fascinating discovery. One of our friends from University, Aaron Zurbo, I apparently knew when I was around 13 years old. It's even mentioned in the minutes of a DataServe Business meeting. I had no idea that we had such a long history until today. It appears that geeks at a young age tend to re-meet again as geeks when they get older.