h0bbel.p0ggel.org

A little while a go I mentioned a great little tool called Novicorp WinToFlash.

Seems like Microsoft figured out that was a great little idea, and in conjunction with todays official Windows 7 release, they've also made the Windows 7 USB/DVD Download Tool available.

Since you can buy Windows 7 and then download the ISO directly from the new online Microsoft Store (Can anyone say Apple?!) it makes sense that they have created their own little tool that enables you to install Windows 7 from an USB stick. The tool makes it easy to copy the ISO to a USB stick, and then use that to boot your computer and install from it. Nothing more, nothing less.

I love utilities like these, you know the ones that do one task and do it well?

Now this is something I don't often do as this is mostly a tech blog, but this is huge. Last night Temple of the Dog reunited when Chris Cornell joined Pearl Jam on stage.

Temple of the Dog was Chris Cornell, Jeff Ament, Stone Gossard, Matt Cameron, Mike McCready and Eddie Vedder all of which were present at Los Angeles’ Gibson Amphitheatre performing “Hunger Strike” from the self titled album released in 1991.

Now, can Pearl Jam please come play in Bergen, Norway? And, yes, I wouldn't mind it much if Chris Cornell came along for the ride too...

Nice little error message shown when trying to hot add a new HDD to a VM running on ESXi 4.0.

How much need have have do you need?

Addendum:

Clearly I'm not the first to notice this rather peculiar wording in ESXi 4. Maish Saidel-Keesing posted the same screenshot back in May 2009 in his post called Hot Add and "Need have have".

Read that post instead of mine, it also highlights what ESXi 4 is missing as well as poorly worded error messages.

Funny thing is that I can even remember reading Maish post back when it was published, but I don't remember seeing that weird error message. Oh well. :)

Thanks to Jase McCarty for pointing this out to me.

vmwarewolf.com has posted ESX PSODs

If you happen to search Google for one of the following phrases you might expect Google to return a list of official VMware Knowledgebase articles on the topic.

• crash debug screen
• machine crash screen
• ESX Server PSOD
• Purple screen crash report
• Decode purple screen error

I know this is a direct copy of some of that article, but it's an attempt to help out getting ESX Server PSOD ranked in Google. I'm sure I'll be forgiven for the verbatim copy/paste job.

Cody Bunch over at professionalvmware.com has started a series of posts called "The Best Tools You Didn’t Know You Needed". So far Cody has featured GParted and TeraCopy, both truly great tools to have in your virtual or non-virtual tool-belt.

I have my own series of posts outlined, still in draft mode though, that I plan to publish within the next week or so and thankfully they highlight different tools than the ones already covered by Cody in his series.

Seems like I need to speed up the publishing of my posts now! I'm sure there are other great (free) tools out there that are missing the recognition they deserve.

Can you think of any? Any freebie tools that make your day as a (virtual) sysadmin easier?

Leave a comment, I'd love to hear from you!