Bloggy Hell

I had to install VMware ESXi on a machine that didn’t have a CDROM or DVD player. For extra difficulty, I also didn’t have a Linux box with a USB drive handy - but after a bit of hair pulling, I managed to create a bootable USB stick image in Linux (In my case Gentoo). Hat tip to http://communities.vmware.com/thread/75792

1. Create a fake filesystem. I created a 1Gb, but 512Mb should be enough
   
dd if=/dev/zero of=/mnt/vmware.img bs=1024 count=1048576

2. Associate it with a loopback device
   
losetup /dev/loop0 vmware.img

3. Create a FAT filesystem on the image
   
mkfs.vfat /dev/loop0

4. Mount the VMware CD ISO to a temporary directory
   
mkdir -p /mnt/vmware
mkdir -p /mnt/vmware-usb
mount -t iso9660 -o loop /path/to/vmware.iso /mnt/vmware
mount -t vfat -o loop /mnt/vmware.img /mnt/vmware-usb

5. Copy the contents across
   
cp -r /mnt/vmware/* /mnt/vmware-usb

6. Delete the isolinux.bin and rename isolinux.cfg file on the USB flash disk to syslinux.cfg in /mnt/vmware-usb
7. Add usb to the end of the append line in syslinux.cfg
8. Run syslinux to write a bootloader
   
syslinux -s /dev/loop0

9. Unmount everything
   
cd /mnt
unmount /mnt/vmware
unmount /mnt/vmware-usb
losetup -d /dev/loop0


vmware.img should now be a bootable USB image. You will need to write it to your USB stick now. In linux you can use dd (assuming your USB stick is at sdb):

dd if=/mnt/vmware.img of=/dev/sdb

In windows, use Image Writer for Windows.Or, an easier solution might be to buy a DVD Drive

For those of you that have been keeping abreast of the goings on of my work life will know that I helped start up a cooperative workspace in Leederville just over a year ago. The idea behind cooperative spaces is pretty simple: You get a bunch of freelancers together to share rent, ADSL and other running costs, which can be prohibitive if you are on your own. A lovely side-effect of throwing a bunch of like-minded people into a couple of rooms together is that you can share work, talk about problems you might have and avoid that oh-so-familiar cabin-fever that is common to people that work from home on their own for long periods of time.

When twotwenty started, we had dreams of doing big jobs together and sharing work, and generally acting like a company - except with the personality of freelancing. While there has been some sharing, lots of talking and there hasn’t really been a single cohesive push marketing or branding wise. So over the past few weeks we have been busy planning, writing, designing, photographing and coding up some marketing material to see if it is possible to do cooperative marketing. At this stage we are focusing on the local Leederville area (of course, we are more than happy to talk to people in other areas), so we came up with the “your local web guys” campaign, starting with the launch of our shiny new website: http://www.twotwenty.com.au. Designed by Pascal, the brief was to present something targeted to the local Leederville area, that spoke about the individuals at twotwenty. We wanted to be approachable and personal, hence the sometimes risky headshots. The only way we had even a chance of pulling them off was with professional photography (Seriously kids, don’t try them at home).

So, if you are in Leederville, drop in and say hi, and we can go for coffee. Oh, and you can follow us on twitter.

Due to a scheduling clash with us and the State government (There was a public holiday we forgot about), the start of Rails Training 1 has been pushed back a week. It now starts on Monday 8th and Thursday 11th respectively.

There are still spots left! Go and register. I’ll wait.

Both Alex and I are web nerds. Throw us a technical problem and will be champing at the bit to solve it. This, like many other coders who start their own business, is what we spend all day doing. Unfortunately for us, being totally awesome at what we do is only a small part of running a successful business. Alex’s business, Brown Beagle Software has just taken on it’s first employee, and I’m ready to start selling the living daylights out of my CMS so we need to move beyond adhoc, word-of-mouth “marketing” and get a bit more serious. Of course, neither of us know a great deal about that…

Alex and I are both residents of the collaborative work space twotwenty and over coffee we were discussing some joint marketing stuff that would help the whole group get some work, and the topic of mail drops and social networking came up — and we noticed a pattern: I was speaking in terms of offline networking, whilst Alex kept going back to
online networking. Being the contrary type that I am, I laid down the challenge: We should see which type of sales and marketing works best: offline or online!

Rules

The rules of our little game are pretty simple:

1. Alex can use any marketing method he chooses, but it must occur
   online.This would include Twitter, Facebook, Google Adwords, SEO. He can’t count leads from people that originated in real life.
2. Myles can’t use the inter-tron with his quest: He can only use traditional channels, such as face-to-face, networking meetups, traditional media and offline advertising
3. A lead is counted as a genuine enquiry for work. For the sake of this experiment, we can sell any of our services, but we need to be able to do the work. A completion is counted when a job is accepted.
4. Once a prospect has been engaged, communication can continue into the other medium (e.g. Myles can use email, Alex can use a phone).
5. Myles and Alex can spend up to $250 each on their campaigns.
6. Both need to track how much time they have spent on marketing.
7. At the end of the month, whoever has the best ratio of leads vs. time spent marketing will be deemed the twotwenty marketeer of the month™, and will gain kudos until the end of time (or until April).

Head over to http://www.offlinevsonline.com to watch the craziness unfurl.

Alex Pooley (from Brown Beagle Software, and fellow 220er and Rails guy) are running some Ruby on Rails training sessions in March.

It will be an intensive primer designed to get web developers who work in PHP, or .Net up-to-speed in Rails in about four classes. We will cover Ruby, Rails and unit testing as well as deployment.

The classes cost $220, with one stream running on Monday 1st-22nd March 2010 and the other Thursday 4th-25th March 2010. So if you have been meaning to look at Rails, but haven’t had the time, then this could be perfect for you!

Head over to  http://railstraining.in and sign up!