About this blog

'Going Spatial' is my personal blog, the views on this site are entirely my own and should in no way be attributed to anyone else or as the opinion of any organisation.

My tweets on GIS, Humanitarian, Tech, Games and Randomness

Thursday 20 February 2014

Virtualbox - changing the UUID of a hard drive





I have been using VirtualBox for the last few (several) years and I love it. While my main working laptop is chockful of software, it is never enough so I use lots of virtual machines, all being created, run and managed through the excellent VirtualBox.  It means that I can install some very beta software on a variety of platforms, test them out and then get rid of them. I also have virtual machines to ensure that I have a very clean environment for training. For example, I have a windows 7 virtual machine loaded with Python 2.7 that I use to train and practise Python almost exclusively. Pity that I can't really use VMs for gaming....




I tinker with Linux (lots of distros), different versions of Windows and I even have a VM running 'Haiku' (go on, get it here) and I am seriously thinking of getting an emulator and running the old Spectrum, BBC Micro and a few others. I miss the old games!

Monday 3 February 2014

2014 - more AWS and GIS and stuff

(AWS) Awesome sauce


Some awesome news from AWS to kick start 2014: the prices of EC2, EBS and S3 has dropped - some by as much as 50% (!) and there's a new general-purpose instance type called 'M3' to play around with.


We have already started to use the new m3 instances and we are impressed: the m3.xlarge is only a few cents more expensive than the older m1.xlarge but with twice the RAM and twice the vCPU count, as well as being generally faster, they are well worth the switch. No doubt the excellent price reduction, has come from keen price competition from the likes of Azure and Google which is great news for us customers! Long may it continue. Am sure the other players will respond and soon.