Some interesting comments to yesterday's post on working with VMs, enough so that I'm going to free-associate in a follow-up.

A couple of people reported success with using a second virtual hard drive rather than a shared folder. I did start down the road of separate virtual hard drives for databases and projects. But I found out pretty early that you can't share it between virtual machines. Or rather, if you do share it 'twixt machines, you can't have both of them open at the same time.

That may not be too big a deal-breaker. At the time, I had visions of using it to store documents, code, and databases on it. Tom Clarkson outlined what I think is a better solution. Use a shared drive for documents and store code and databases on virtual drives.

This scenario will work provided I don't need to share too much among VMs. Which I think will be the case. At the moment, I have only two development VMs, one for coding and one for Livelink. I don't expect there to be any overlap there.

I know other people that spin up a separate VM for each client they have. I have a base image ready to do that should the need arise but at the moment, I'm trying to keep it simple. If I do need to do that, I suspect there will be considerable overlap in the tools and utilities I use in each one. (Note: And I'd prefer not to store them with the underlying VM itself because they change often as I pick up new tools, update existing ones, and drop others.) But in this case, I don't see the harm in some overlap. Disk space is cheap.

What I envision then is thus:
- Shared drive for documents, music, videos, etc.
- A separate virtual hard-drive per VM to store code and databases used by that VM.

Some may claim I should have one drive for code and another for databases. I'm open to that. But at the moment, this already sounds like a lot of overhead. It's easy enough to move files around at a later date. I suppose I won't truly appreciate the effort I'm putting in until my hard drive crashes or I get a new computer.

Kyle the Optimistic

Since getting his new desktop a couple o’ weeks ago, the hillbilly’s gone all virtual. I’ve been playing with virtual machines as my primary destination, leaving the host as dumb as I can possible make it. And to be quite honest, it is difficult to make something dumb, which is surprising considering some of the comments from past clients.

One of the things I had hoped to do was keep all my data on the host machine and access it via a shared drive from my VMs. It’s basically the 21st century version of creating an Apps partition and a Data partition. Then I’d use SyncToy to keep that folder up-to-date on an external hard drive as well as the virtual machines themselves. (On a side note: I dearly hope the promise of virtual machines holds true because setting up a new workstation is more mind-numbing than the stuff I have brewing in the still in the basement.)

I’ve run into a couple of issues with this set up. First was a time-sucking annoyance where I wasn’t able to copy documents in the same folder. I.e. Select the document, press Ctrl-C, then Ctrl-V. Kept getting permission errors. I was able to create new documents just fine. It’s one of those annoyances that goes away if you ignore it long enough apparently because I’m no longer able to duplicate it.

The second problem was trying to attach a database to SQL Server from a shared drive. Perhaps it’s possible with a SQL statement but from the GUI, it doesn’t even list network drives.

Problem three: IIS seems to have trouble with web apps using a network drive as well. It had trouble reading the web.config file until I moved the thing locally.

Problem four actually pre-dated problem three. I didn’t actually have IIS installed when I started this odyssey. After I did, it took a while to figure out that I had installed IIS after I had installed .NET 3.0. Hence, none of my WCF services would register. That was solved by running servicemodelreg.exe –r from C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v3.0\Windows Communication Foundation. It appears to be analogous to aspnet_regiis.

So all in all, it’s been a configuriffic afternoon. I’m still trying to get the hang of booting to various virtual machines. I do NOT like the fact that I can’t change my primary monitor in a VM with VMWorkstation.

This is also my first foray into the 64-bit world and I’m discovering the idiosyncrasies that brings. For example, UltraMon still has some work to do to make it work on Vista 64-bit. The smart taskbar is kinda flaky and the two extra window icons (move to other monitor, maximize across both monitors) don’t appear, though you can click in the general area and get the same effect.

Kyle the Virtual

Oh all right already, I'll post on tabbed interfaces. I seriously thought this was a dead (or at least dormant) issue because the most meaningful conversation on it was over two years old. But shortly after my quick little swipe on it, it is again Jeff Atwood who is questioning the movement. I actually did have a fairly length post on this typed out a few weeks ago but deleted it during a "what was I thinking" clean-up of my computer.

Firstly, there are some pretty spurious arguments in the comments on his post. One of my favorites, which sums up a few others, is this one:

I seriously can't understand why you would want to have several browsers open at the same time even if you have 3 monitors. It's the whole point of tabbed interfaces. Just one browser for all the web-sites you have open. I normally have about 35 sites open and all is in one browser-window. I never have any trouble in finding one specific tab.

The crux of this argument seems to be: You should use tabs because they're there. I.E. Why open several browsers when you don't have to (even though I'm not going to tell you why you don't have to)?

Yes, the point of tabbed interfaces is so that you don't have to have several browsers open at the same time. But just because this solves that problem, doesn't mean it's a better interface than the original. My counter-argument is that it's easier *for me* to navigate 'twixt multiple browsers than it is tabs within a single browser.

The key there is that this is *for me* which was another reason I didn't originally plan to post on this. By and large, the context for browsing is task- and user-specific. If you are booting up your computer specifically to look through your RSS feeds and nothing else, I can see how tabbed browsing could be beneficial. I still don't totally agree with it even in that edge case but yes, it saves space (and I'd argue it isn't necessarily "valuable" space) and helps you keep everything in one logical place.

For me personally, though, I can only dream of a world where I'm doing only one thing at any given moment and that the one thing involves only browsing. As I type this, I have three browsers, two console windows, Outlook, two Visual Studio instances, and five Windows explorer windows open. The browser is the only application that can be tabbed (Visual Studio is within the context of a single solution but 'twixt solutions). And it is a *major* annoyance to have to switch 'twixt using Alt+Tab and Ctrl+Tab to get where I want to be.

Even more annoying: When I'm done with an app, I don't want to have to think about whether to type Alt+F4 or Ctrl+F4 to close it. My colleagues started to complain about me screaming "Mother Pusbucket!" too many times when I would close down the browser by mistake when what I really wanted to do was close the current tab.

Another reason for the sake of completeness because Jeff touches on it already: For the times when I do use the mouse, it's easier to select what I want by scanning the title bars along the task bar. I.E. I don't want to click on the task bar, then click on a tab. If I wanted to be overly statistical, that's a 100% increase in the number of clicks but frankly, clicking isn't exactly a time consuming application.

The only reason this mini holy war is going on is because of browsers. You could almost hear the groans from the northwestern US when reports started coming in about how much people loved tabbed browsing in Firefox. (I picture Ray Ozzie watching CNN going: "Ya gotta be kidding me. Aren't these the same people that complained that Word was an MDI?") Very few other applications are tabbed. Notepad++ and Console2 are the only two that come to mind (and thankfully, the latter isn't tabbed by default). So I don't understand why the big kerfuffle over browsers.

Ultimately, I simply don't understand the problem that tabs are meant to solve. Is it lack of taskbar space? If so, I'd probably use the taskbar grouping feature before I turned on tabbing. At least that applies uniformly to all applications, not just browsers. Plus you don't have the issue with accidentally closing an app or having to Alt+Tab, then Ctrl+Tab to what you want. But I don't particularly care how much space is taken up on the taskbar. I don't usually use the mouse to switch between apps anyway. Plus I use two monitors so space isn't an issue.

I like Jeff's idea of using search to find what you want. There are all manner of utilities to find programs/emails/documents/websites on your machine. Maybe we just need to extend this to include running (or recently run) applications. Kind of like the ReSharper Ctrl+E shortcut.

But the main reason I deleted the original post: Who am I to tell you whether or not to use tabs? Personally, I don't and these are my reasons. Whether or not they apply to you matters not to me nor, I'm sure, does it to you. If you like 'em, use 'em. Far be it for me to preach to you about user interaction practices.

But you should still turn them off.

Kyle the Single-Documented

By most accounts, I'm a patient hillbilly. I am willing to put up with Google paying $1.65B for YouTube and not filtering a couple hun'erd grand my way.

So I'm a little bewildered at how homicidal I get when, after an automatic update, Windows XP keeps popping up a dialogue that says, "hey buddy! I know I've reminded you every ten minutes or so for the last three hours that you need to reboot but just in case you forgot, it'd be SWELL if you considered rebooting now...NO? Right, gotcha, that's okay, I understand. I know you're in the middle of something and have six dozen windows open and don't want to break your concentration. I'll be here if you need me, though. Don't forget, okay? You gotta reboot. Not right now, mind you, but soon. Okay? Remember, reboot. Soon."

Seriously, this is really bugging me. In the past, I've eventually given in and rebooted but not this time. I'm in a battle of wills with it now. I'm betting it'll flinch first and stop reminding me. Now that I think about it, I think it's been at least a half hour since the last message. I think I may have finall---

I SAID LATER, YOU &#*$*%!!!! I KEEL YOU DEAD!!!