Talk In Code

Dealing with code can be a pretty taxing business simply because you are constantly focused on the job at hand and you are likely to face long hours at the screen doing nothing but work. However, you need to know when to tell yourself to relax and start enjoying being at the screen in between periods of work.

If you get some spare time at your screen then you might want to start getting involved in online bingo. There are a lot of different online bingo sites out there and their main aim is to help you have fun while giving you a hope of winning some excellent cash prizes.

If you play Cheeky Bingo, for instance, you could put yourself in with a shout of winning jackpots every single day just by signing up. The site offers free games with cash prizes as well as games that you have to pay to enter, but which offer more lucrative prizes.

Take your mind off some of that troublesome and complicated code by enjoying the entertainment you can tap into online. For a better idea of the kind of promotions that appear on some of the best bingo sites online, have a look at ohmybingo.com.

Google Code has turned the grand old age of 5 today, having been launched on the 17th March 2005. I’d like to say well done!

While some people may think Google Code is yet another SourceForge clone, they’re only half right. What Google Code brought to the table was more than just project hosting, it was a whole ethos of development which is now sweeping the world as if it were a brand new concept: open source.

With the Summer of Code schemes run by Google to promote open source development in universities, hosting of all of their own APIs on the service (going from a handful to a few dozen by now), along with the code for all their open source projects (now numbering in the hundreds), Google Code has shown off the more ethical side of the advertising giant.

So happy birthday Google Code, long may you prosper and others follow in your path!

Regular followers of this blog will remember that in the middle of 2009, the original author could no longer commit to posting new articles and announced their departure with a final blog. I would like to say that the response to that post was quite nice, so thanks for that!

However, the time has now come for someone new to begin posting to this blog. I can’t guarantee that the posts will be quite as regular – what with work and other commitments – but what I will say is that I will be trying my hardest to provide nifty tips, tricks and news on the programming world to make your life easier.

So, enough about that – what do you guys want to see here? My focus is on web development (the same as the previous author), but I hope to take a little twist with more posts about the art of programming and updates on the latest tools and news. Anyway, this is me signing out for now – until the next time…

The time has come for me to stop writing on Talk In Code. It has been a fun couple of years, and I have learnt a lot, but as of today I will not be able to write any more posts on this blog. I want to thank everyone who has posted comments and contributed to the site since I have been writing.

You might see the blog being updated non-regularly in the future as I have now passed the rains on to someone else.

This is Tech, signing off.

Virtualization is basically a term used to describe the creation of a computer in software. The main benefits of which are that if you want to try out an operating system or test client server communications you don’t have to get multiple computers. You can simply create a few computers virtually, which will act just like the real thing.

There are quite a few virtualization products available, some are free and some cost quite a bit of money. After messing about with quite a few different virtualisation products other the past few weeks I have uncovered a great bit of software called VirtualBox from Sun Microsystems.

After installing VirtualBox it took me only a few minutes to set up a new virtual machine. I decided that I wanted to create a virtual machine with Ubuntu installed on it, so I selected the options that optimise VirtualBox for this system. Note that this doesn’t set up a virtual machine with Ubuntu already installed, you have to go and download it yourself! Here is a screenshot of the main interface, which is very easy to understand.

VirtualBox interface

Using virtual machines in the past I have found that to install anything can take a very long time. Installing Ubuntu took not more than 30 minutes, at which point I was presented with the bootup screen.

VirtualBox Ubuntu Boot

Here is another shot of the operating system fully loaded.

VirtualBox Ubuntu Loaded

VirtualBox also supports the creation of snapshots, so if you have a fresh install of an operating system that you want to mess about with (or break) then you can create a snapshot of the virtual machine before you begin. This way, after you trash the system, you can revert back to a snapshot of the system before you started messing about.

The only trouble I had was figuring out how to interface the virtual machine properly with my network, but after reading the documentation this all became very clear.

Overall VirtualBox is a great bit of software, with a detailed and comprehensive manual. I just can’t believe that this software is free!