A VM disk image in Virtual Box (version 4.0.6) can be cloned using the command line “VBoxManage” tool with the “clonehd” command. Unfortunately, cloning a VM that already has a registered UUID in Virtual Box fails like that: ` #> ‘C:\Program Files\Oracle\VirtualBox\VBoxManage.exe’ clonehd .\MyVM.vdi .\NewVM.vdi VBoxManage.exe: error: Cannot register the hard disk ‘C:\VMs\MyVM.vdi’ {601b44ed-a301-45a7-8b17-9b2185040a1e} because a hard disk ‘C:\VMs\MyVM1.vdi’ with UUID {601b44ed-a301-45a7-8b17-9b2185040a1e} already exists VBoxManage.exe: error: Details: code E_INVALIDARG (0x80070057), component VirtualBox, interface IVirtualBox, callee IUnknown Context: “OpenMedium(Bstr(pszFilenameOrUuid).

Configuring recent versions of toirtoise SVN to work with non-standard ports is a bit tricky. I tried editing the “subversion config file” through Settings->General->Edit, to using an ssh command line, like the one I’m using on Linux for the same repository, but that didn’t work. A quick hack-style solution is to go to TortoiseSVN->Settings->Network and set the SSH client to (assuming port number XX): “C:\Program Files\TortoiseSVN\bin\TortoisePlink.exe -P XX” (The hack is also described here: http://www.

Today I solved the problem of properly indenting my Python code with my favorite editor (Vim 7.2). I’ve had this issue for some time, because I had tuned Vim for writing in C/C++, which of course proves quite annoying when trying to write Python code (no braces darling!). Googling the issue I came up with the article “Indenting Python with VIM” which proves quite useful, but unfortunately did not work out of the box for me.

Following the IEEE Cluster 2010 poster paper camera-ready instructions I needed to add an IEEE copyright notice in the IEEE Latex conference class. Well, that was not straightforward at all, since the latex class file produced the notice overlapping with my text, and of course I didn’t want to break the paper’s format by modifying the class. After wasting some time, I googled the issue and found an answer here

I needed to “compile” a latex document using the tkiz package. After spending quite a few time trying to set this up on CentOS and Fedora, I finally gave up. Fortunately Ubuntu had a working pre-built package that includes pfg and tkiz, but this also required two online searches to deal with latex errors. A summary of the process for RHEL/CentOS/Fedora  I searched many times for RPMs with tkiz/pgf for RHEL 5 or FC12 (to install it on our CentOS server).

Contrary to the CLOC tool (http://cloc.sourceforge.net) I argue that comments in the code are useful and should be counted in the “real” lines of code. I think that this gives a nice incentive to developers for commenting their code. Of course that holds assuming that you are not trying to fool anyone by artificially increasing the lines of your code. If your are trying to fool people, you can still do it with comments being removed (but I’m not going to tell you how).