novolocus.com

1. Shutdown your VM.
2. Make a copy of the latest state (or the one you want to extend the disc for). You can’t keep snapshots across extending the disc.
3. Open command prompt, and go to “c:\program files\vmware\vmware workstation”
4. Run the command vmware-vdiskmanager –x 10GB –t 1 “path_to_VMDK_file” . This will extend the virtual hard disc at the path defined to be a 10GB disc, stored as growable 2GB files.
5. Start the VM. Go to Disk Management, and you’ll see a bigger disk, now with a large unallocated space. You need to extend the partition into that space.
6. If it isn’t installed already, install DiskPart (which can be downloaded from Microsoft). This is a Microsoft tool, and is built into Windows 2003 Server. However, it works on 2000 and XP too.
7. Open a command line, and run DISKPART
8. Type list volume
9. From the list, identify the volume you want to extend (2 in my case)
10. Type select volume 2, where 2 is your volume from 9) above.
11. Type extend.
12. Job done.

Based on some instructions from here, but I think mine are simpler…

So, I’ve been forced to spend a couple of weeks modifying some code I wrote a couple of years back, in VB6. One word - crap. That’s the word for both the language, and my code.

Visual Basic 6 is just painful to code with. ‘Dim’? I’d say. The inability to return arrays from a function keeps catching me out. And I detest the way that no matter what I do, I can’t stop Visual Studio beeping errors at me and show message boxes when I try to leave an incomplete line so that I can copy and paste a variable name.

The worst part is, though, that it doesn’t really promote good program structure - well, not to me anyway. I’m often not entirely convinced that Object Oriented Programming actually reuses much code - but it does force it to be structured and organised. My code in this project, well, it isn’t. It’s suffered that sort of ‘evolutionary’ growth rather than proper, designed expansion. And some of it has to excapsulate an API that is archaic, irritating, and dangerous. (I’ve been debugging for memory leaks, dammit. Yes, this API forces me to allocate/deallocate memory).

What a sucky language. It really makes you appreciate Java/C#.

Modern Visualisation Techniques. Interesting how some look like marketing literature…