If you create a virtual disk, using Vmware's vmware-vdiskmanager, SOMETIMES after you use the disk in a VirtualBox VM, vmware-vdiskmanager will refuse to mount the disk. VirtualBox (version 1.6.2) adds entries to the disk header file that "VMware DiskMount Utility version 5.5.0 b­uild-18463" is not prepared to accept.

Instead of installing the full Oracle Client plus ODBC drivers, you can use Oracle "Instant Client" plus Instant Client ODBC supplement.  Setting it up is not intuitively obvious, so here's what I did.  Note that you do NOT need a tnsnames.ora or a sqlnet.ora.

Sometimes, Microsoft Office will demand the Office CD,even though it has already been installed.  This usually happens when you start an Office application.

In the particular case of MS Project 2003, it may tell you that it can't find sku03a.cab, but with different Office applications, different files will be demanded.

I'd like to have a zero-install, Windows, virtual machine environment.  In theory, this would let me run my OS and desktop environment on any Windows computer, without installing the VM software.

When running VirtualBox with a Windows XP client, I ran into a problem where it worked fine before I installed the Virtual Box Client Drivers, and then, any mouse movement resulted in the mouse pointer moving slowly down and to the right.  It turns out this is a known VirtualBox conflict with the SMS mouse driver. (SMS allows the Windows domain managers to manage your PC, including remote control.)

So I uninstalled SMS.  Problem NOT cured.

So I checked Device Manager.  SMS Mouse Driver does not appear.

1. Open a command prompt
2. set devmgr_show_nonpresent_devices=1
3. devmgmt.msc
4. In Device Manager, click View/Show Hidden Devices in the menu

I thought I'd try Windows Live Writer.  It won't work with Windows 2000, which I use because I despise product activation.  (I do a LOT of PC setup and tear-down, with a lot of OS re-installs.)  Bummer.

Then I read about Windows Live Writer Portable.  It actually works -- under Windows XP. Under Win2K it crashes.  I'm betting it is using DotNet 3, which is a no-go on Win2K.  I do have GDI+ installed on my Win2K, so it isn't that.

Or maybe it has a dependency on IE7?  Good luck getting THAT to run in Win2k!

When I learned of the nonsense I would have to go through in order to move from Windows Quicken to Mac Quicken, and if the major loss of functionality, I abandoned my test-drive of Mac OSX.  Then I said, "Hey! I could probably use the same instructions to move to GnuCash and reduce by one my use of paid software.  (Free is a good price, right?)

Unison is a wonderful tool.  Cygwin is a wonderful tool.  Windows is the dominant desktop platform.  Synchronizing two PCs with Unison, where both run Windows is possible, with the aid of Cygwin.

Unison+Windows+Cygwin is NOT obvious to set up.  Here's what I did:

TiddlyGrande is a plugin for TiddlyWiki, adapting it to store its data in a SQLite database.