Thushan Fernando Uncut

Nate Kohari (the head Ninja of Ninject) has announced the availability of Ninject 2.0 which has been a long time coming – being a complete rewrite. The sources are on  github repository. Oh and checkout the new website, its got more ninja references that you can poke a ninja with!

As for .NET 4.0 compatibility,  whilst not officially announced, we’ve been using Ninject 2.0 (betas) and now just moving to the final release with .NET 4.0 without issues. All documentation and material are available on the wiki however.

What a way to start the weekend, jQuery 1.4 has been released! There’s so much ubber goodness in this release I nearly fell of my chair! I have yet to muse about but most definately worth a look, the performance boosts are insane!

5 days into 2010, its already feeling a bit awkward as 99 doesnt feel that long ago.

My good buddy Edwin Vermeer has finally got his WordPress blog setup and he’s also included many of his code as open-source. Of particular interest is the assembly SVGA library he wrote (!!!) 20 years ago and various projects I remember talking with him about over the years.

• BeursMonitor – Stock application
• DBPublisher – Called SiteSkinner too for the developer version!
• ComDoc – COM documentation tool based off DBPublisher.
• Error handling – Based off my wExceptionHandler (which in turn was based off an MSDN Article) but far more improved.
• Object browser – Much like Reflector or Object Browser in VB6 but without an IDE to browse COM objects..

On a side note, I almost forgot to mention that ZScreen was updated on Christmas eve to 3.25 thanks to Santa. For those who haven’t tried ZScreen its a screen capture tool (open source and written in C#) that is chocko-block full of things that will make your life helluvah lot easier – especially when it comes to taking screenies for blog posts. Check it out, it goes beyond WindowClippings which used to be my screen-shot application.

Let the good times roll… Wishing everyone who stumbles apon this post all the best for 2010.

What a whopper of a weekend, Sun has ratified Java EE 6 and also released Glassfish 3 and NetBeans 6.8 to celebrate. If that wasn’t enough JetBrains has also released TeamCity 5!

You can read all about the Sun releases on InternetNews and catchup with whats new in Java EE 6 Overview from Suns site.

Next weekend its time to move Confluence & Jira (Glassfish 2) and TeamCity 5 (Tomcat) to Glassfish 3 in a opensolaris zone and see how things progress. Did I mention I love the zones in OpenSolaris?

Just when you thought you can start a new month without some new software, Sun has blessed the world with a ray of VirtualBox 3.1 goodness on us all! All hail the Sun. I’ve been using the Betas and trying out the spanking awesome Teleportation feature in VirtualBox 3.1. So lets take a bit of a look at the new grub.

Beam me up Scotty!

You know, people say the catch phrase thinking its from Star Trek, but did you know that it was never actually mentioned in any episode?

Teleportation or ‘Live Migration‘ in Xen/KVM  or vMotion in VMWare allows you to move a running virtual machine to another host without any downtime. Sun brings us this ‘Enterprise’ feature to VirtualBox. Whats even cooler, is that you can teleport your running VM on different host platforms (Windows -> OpenSolaris or Linux, vice versa) but not from one hardware set (Intel) to another (AMD) unless they both have the same instruction-sets. The transport layer for the teleportation is TCP/IP, so as long as the agreed port is open and accessible you can even teleport it through the tubes! (assuming you have a fast link like those pesky Dutch)

There are a few conditions and caveats as I’ve found. Firstly you must ensure (as you’d expect) the target VM has to have the exact same configuration as the source VM (same RAM, graphics memory, storage, CD/DVD images etc) the other thing is to be weary of the CPUs the host computer has. As long as its between the same generations (different clock speeds are OK) it should work (I tried between a QX6850 -> E6600 but QX6850->AMD X2 4600+ wasn’t so pretty!).

Once you’ve configured the target host to match the source host, time to ask VirtualBox to keep its eyes open for an incoming beam.

VBoxManage modifyvm [VirtualMachineName] --teleporter on --teleporterport [Port]

Then on the source host, send out the beams to initiate the teleportation:

VBoxManage controlvm [VirtualMachineName] teleport --host [TargetIP] --port [Port]

Give it some time to think and if you tried a localhost migration, it should migrate seamlessly

Scotty doesn’t know

Scotty doesn’t know about the other little changes, but you will. The new VirtualBox has lots of refinements in the UI. For one, new icons for all the Guest operating systems. The settings window has had a make over and includes ‘optimal settings’ detection.

Windows 2003 VM in VirtualBox 3.1

Here its telling me my Windows 2003 VM should have atleast 20Mb Video Memory assigned to it to work well in full-screen mode. Heading over to the Display options in VirtualBox 3.1 we find that the Video Memory selectors have got little indicators now, as well as the inclusion of 2D Video Acceleration.

Windows 2003 VM - VirtualBox 3.1 Display Settings

Depending how ever many cores you have, it will highlight what you should set as the maximum number of cores available for your VirtualMachine as well as the recommended RAM allocation. This is what I see in my Intel QX6850 development workstation.

VirtualBox 3.1 System Processor Settings

VirtualBox 3.1 - Motherboard Settings

VirtualBox now also has experimental support for Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI) which will eventually replace the aging BIOS bootstrap (which is the default). Well known operating systems that boot via EFI include Windows Vista and Windows 7, Apple OS X and Fedora 11+.

The Storage controls in VirtualBox GUI has also had a bit of a make over. The options to select a disk and a controller have changed, CD/DVD drives can be attached to an arbitrary IDE controller too now!

VirtualBox 3.1 - Storage

The networking settings GUI in the new VirtualBox has change too, not only that but you can now configure the network interfaces whilst the guest is running – YAY!

VirtualBox 3.1 Network Settings

Snapshots are a lot more flexible in this release (much like VMWare’s snapshot feature). Previously you can only restore from the last created snapshot, now any arbitrary snapshot can be restored too or branched off.

For those who use OpenSolaris (like yours truely!) the rewritten USB support (still experimental btw!) should mean we can interact with our USB devices in Solaris Nevada 124 or higher now – I’m running 127 and have USB devices appearing in my VMs.

If those don’t give you any indication on to the pure awesomeness of this release, there was a significant performance improvement for APE & AMD64 guests (VT-x/AMD-V) which will be quite noticeable from what I’ve been told by a college.

As Barack Obama said, tis time for a change..log.

He didn’t say that, I just reused 36 Mafia’s Lolli Lolli. The entire change log appears below from the website.

VirtualBox 3.1.0 (released 2009-11-30)

This version is a major update. The following major new features were added:

• Teleportation (aka live migration); migrate a live VM session from one host to another (see the manual for more information)
• VM states can now be restored from arbitrary snapshots instead of only the last one, and new snapshots can be taken from other snapshots as well (“branched snapshots”; see the manual for more information)
• 2D video acceleration for Windows guests; use the host video hardware for overlay stretching and color conversion (see the manual for more information)
• More flexible storage attachments: CD/DVD drives can be attached to an arbitrary IDE controller, and there can be more than one such drive (the manual for more information)
• The network attachment type can be changed while a VM is running
• Complete rewrite of experimental USB support for OpenSolaris hosts making use of the latest USB enhancements in Solaris Nevada 124 and higher
• Significant performance improvements for PAE and AMD64 guests (VT-x and AMD-V only; normal (non-nested) paging)
• Experimental support for EFI (Extensible Firmware Interface; see the manual for more information)
• Support for paravirtualized network adapters (virtio-net; see the manual for more information)

In addition, the following items were fixed and/or added:

• VMM: guest SMP fixes for certain rare cases
• GUI: snapshots include a screenshot
• GUI: locked storage media can be unmounted by force
• GUI: the a log window grabbed all key events from other GUI windows (bug #5291)
• GUI: allow to disable USB filters (bug #5426)
• GUI: improved memory slider in the VM settings
• GUI: the VirtualBox website couldn’t be opened from the help menu (bug #4559)
• 3D support: major performance improvement in VBO processing
• 3D support: added GL_EXT_framebuffer_object, GL_EXT_compiled_vertex_array support
• 3D support: fixed crashes in FarCry, SecondLife, Call of Duty, Unreal Tournament, Eve Online (bugs #2801, #2791)
• 3D support: fixed graphics corruption in World of Warcraft (#2816)
• 3D support: fixed Final frame of Compiz animation not updated to the screen (#4653)
• 3D support: fixed incorrect rendering of non ARGB textures under compiz
• iSCSI: support iSCSI targets with more than 2TiB capacity
• VRDP: fixed occasional VRDP server crash (bug #5424)
• Network: fixed the E1000 emulation for QNX (and probably other) guests (bug #3206)
• NAT: added host resolver DNS proxy (see the manual for more information)
• VMDK: fixed incorrectly rejected big images split into 2G pieces (bug #5523, #2787)
• VMDK: fixed compatibility issue with fixed or raw disk VMDK files (bug #2723)
• VHD: fixed incompatibility with Hyper-V
• Support for Parallels version 2 disk image (HDD) files; see the manual for more information
• OVF: create manifest files on export and verify the content of an optional manifest file on import
• OVF: fixed memory setting during import (bug #4188)
• Mouse device: now five buttons are passed to the guest (bug #3773)
• VBoxHeadless: fixed loss of saved state when VM fails to start
• VBoxSDL: fixed crash during shutdown (Windows hosts only)
• X11 based hosts: allow the user to specify their own scan code layout (bug #2302)
• Mac OS X hosts: don’t auto show the menu and dock in fullscreen (bug #4866)
• Mac OS X hosts (64 bit): don’t interpret mouse wheel events as left click (bug #5049)
• Mac OS X hosts: fixed a VM abort during shutdown under certain conditions
• Solaris hosts: combined the kernel interface package into the VirtualBox main package
• Solaris hosts: support for OpenSolaris Boomer architecture (with OSS audio backend).
• Shared folders: VBOXSVR is visible in Network folder (Windows guests, bug #4842)
• Shared folders: performance improvements (Windows guests, bug #1728)
• Windows, Linux and Solaris Additions: added balloon tip notifier if VirtualBox host version was updated and Additions are out of date
• Solaris guests: fixed keyboard emulation (bug #1589)
• Solaris Additions: fixed as_pagelock() failed errors affecting guest properties (bug #5337)
• Windows Additions: added automatic logon support for Windows Vista and Windows 7
• Windows Additions: improved file version lookup for guest OS information
• Windows Additions: fixed runtime OS detection on Windows 7 for session information
• Windows Additions: fixed crash in seamless mode (contributed by Huihong Luo)
• Linux Additions: added support for uninstalling the Linux Guest Additions (bug #4039)
• Linux guest shared folders: allow mounting a shared folder if a file of the same name as the folder exists in the current directory (bug #928)
• SDK: added object-oriented web service bindings for PHP5

Overall this is a solid new release from Sun – unsure about its stability as I’ve only been running a few VMs (Windows 2003, CentOS and Fedora 12) for about 10-12hrs. Nothing bad as yet.

Download from the VirtualBox site:

• VirtualBox 3.1.0 for Windows hosts x86/amd64

• VirtualBox 3.1.0 for OS X hosts Intel Macs

• VirtualBox 3.1.0 for Linux hosts

• VirtualBox 3.1.0 for Solaris and OpenSolaris hosts x86/amd64

Enjoy!

I recently took a look at the ANTS Memory Profiler 5.1 from RedGate software and posted my thoughts on it at the DeveloperFusion market place. Having toyed with several profilers in the past – DevPartner from Compuware (who’s now someone else who now owns the product) being my primary love since I first came across their .NET version wayyy back in 2002 when I was writing for Australian Developer – see ‘ASP .NET and the Web: Optimising Application Performance’ (who became International Developer who are now no longer around!).

If anyone’s serious about their software you ought to have atleast one profiler (ProfileSharp’s free!) with you to catch those nasty leaks and ANTS MP seems to be the best of the bunch right now. While your at it, take a look at NDepend to add to your arsenal.

I love the fact that I can take a few snapshots, go to the Class list and filter by ‘Disposed objects which are still in memory’ and get a quick list, then drill in to find the sources. Give it ago.

Today marks the release of Opera 10.

Amongst the highlights:

- Revamped user interface
- Boosted speed from the new Opera Presto 2.2 engine, giving it a 40% increase from the previous version when running web applications (such as Gmail)
- Opera Mail has seen various improvements
- Opera Turbo, designed to increase browsing speed for those on slower Internet connections
- An inline spell checker, to help catch mistakes when typing in entry forms
- Thumbnail tabs which are resizable
- Speed Dial has been given personalization features

Download a copy or read up on the new features in this release, the site’s being hammered right now by the looks of it? I still remember starting out with Opera 5 back in 2001, a close friend designated Opera as his ‘porn browser’, purely because of the tabbing and speed (not to mention lightweightness ) of the browser.

Quick note about VirtualBox 3.0.2 being released, this fixes up two critcal problems – one is the poor SMP performance everyone is coming to realise, and the network IO issue (reproduced in Fedora for

• VMM: fixed network regressions (guest hangs during network IO) (bug #4343)
• VMM: guest SMP performance improvements
• VMM: fixed hangs and poor performance with Kaspersky Internet Security (VT-x/AMD-V only; bug #1778)
• VMM: fixed crashes when executing certain Linux guests (software virtualization only; bugs #2696 & #3868)
• ACPI: fixed Windows 2000 kernel hangs with IO-APIC enabled (bug #4348)
• APIC: fixed high idle load for certain Linux guests (3.0 regression)
• BIOS: properly handle Ctrl-Alt-Del in real mode
• iSCSI: fixed configuration parsing (bug #4236)
• OVF: fix potential confusion when exporting networks
• OVF: compatibility fix (bug #4452)
• NAT: fixed crashes under certain circumstances (bug #4330)
• 3D support: fixed dynamic linking on Solaris/OpenSolaris guests (bug #4399)
• 3D support: fixed incorrect context/window tracking for multithreaded apps
• Shared Folders: fixed loading from saved state (bug #1595)
• Shared Folders: host file permissions set to 0400 with Windows guest (bug #4381)
• X11 host and guest clipboard: fixed a number of issues, including bug #4380 and #4344
• X11 Additions: fixed some issues with seamless windows in X11 guests (bug #3727)
• Windows Additions: added VBoxServiceNT for NT4 guests (for time synchronization and guest properties)
• Windows Additions: fixed version lookup
• Linux hosts: workaround for buggy graphics drivers showing a black VM window on recent distributions (bug #4335)
• Linux hosts: fixed typo in kernel module startup script (bug #4388)
• Installer: support Pardus Linux
• Solaris hosts: several installer fixes
• Solaris host: fixed a preemption issue causing VMs to never start on Solaris 10 (bug #4328).
• Solaris guest: fixed mouse integration for OpenSolaris 2009.06 (bug #4365)
• Windows hosts: fixed high CPU usage after resuming the host (bug #2978)
• OVF: accept ovf:/disk/ specifiers with a single slash in addition to ovf://disk/ (bug #4452)
• Fixed a settings file conversion bug which sometimes caused hardware acceleration to be enabled for virtual machines that had no explicit configuration in the XML.

Download links:

• VirtualBox 3.0.2 for Windows hosts x86/amd64

• VirtualBox 3.0.2 for OS X hosts Intel Macs

• VirtualBox 3.0.2 for Linux hosts

• VirtualBox 3.0.2 for Solaris and OpenSolaris hosts x86/amd64

• VirtualBox 3.0.2 Software Developer Kit (SDK) All platforms (registration required)

I’ve been running it all day at work today without issues.

It only feels like last week that I mentioned the beta release of VirtualBox 3.0, Sun has released the final version of the much anticipated v3.0!

As mentioned earlier, this release is super exciting for the simple fact that it has SMP support – a maximum of 32 virtual CPUs (but relax, you shouldn’t assign more than what you can afford – or the number of cores you have!). VMWare still only supports a maximum of 2 virtual-cpus (this _may_ change in VMWare 7.0!), another feat is the hardware 3D (Direct3D/OpenGL)  support for guests.

This version is a major update. The following major new features were added:

• Guest SMP with up to 32 virtual CPUs (VT-x and AMD-V only; see chapter 3.7.2.2 of the user manual)
• Windows guests: ability to use Direct3D 8/9 applications / games (experimental; see chapter 4.8 of the user manual)
• Support for OpenGL 2.0 for Windows, Linux and Solaris guests

In addition, the following items were ?xed and/or added:

• Solaris hosts: allow suspend/resume on the host when a VM is running (bug #3826)
• Solaris hosts: loosen the restriction for contiguous physical memory under certain conditions
• Mac OS X hosts: ?xed guest PAE
• Linux hosts: kernel module compile ?xes for 2.6.31 (bug #4264)
• VMM: ?xed occasional guru meditation when loading a saved state (VT-x only)
• VMM: eliminated IO-APIC overhead with 32 bits guests (VT-x only, some Intel CPUs don’t support this feature (most do); bug #638)
• VMM: ?xed 64 bits CentOS guest hangs during early boot (AMD-V only; bug #3927)
• VMM: performance improvements for certain PAE guests (e.g. Linux 2.6.29+ kernels)
• VMM: some Windows guests detected a completely wrong CPU frequency (bug #2227)
• VMM: ?xed hanging and unkillable VM processes (bug #4040)
• VMM: ?xed random infrequent guest crashes due to XMM state corruption (Win64 hosts only)
• VMM: performance improvements for network I/O (VT-x/AMD-V only)
• GUI: added mini toolbar for fullscreen and seamless mode (Thanks to Huihong Luo)
• GUI: redesigned settings dialogs
• GUI: allow to create/remove more than one host-only network adapters (non Windows hosts)
• GUI: display estimated time for long running operations (e.g. OVF import/export)
• GUI: ?xed rare hangs when open the OVF import/export wizards (bug #4157)
• 3D support: ?xed VM crashes for client applications using incorrect OpenGL states
• 3D support: ?xed memory corruption when querying for supported texture compression formats
• 3D support: ?xed incorrect rendering of glDrawRangeElements
• 3D support: ?xed memory leak when using VBOs
• 3D support: ?xed glew library detection
• 3D support: ?xed random textures corruption
• VRDP: support Windows 7 RDP client
• Networking: ?xed another problem with TX checksum of?oading with Linux kernels up to version 2.6.18
• NAT: ?xed “open ports on virtual router 10.0.2.2 – 513, 514” (forum)
• NAT: allow to con?gure socket and internal parameters
• NAT: allow to bind sockets to speci?c interface
• PXE boot: signi?cant performance increase (VT-x/AMD-V only)
• VHD: properly write empty sectors when cloning of VHD images (bug #4080)
• VHD: ?xed crash when discarding snapshots of a VHD image
• VHD: ?xed access beyond the block bitmap which could lead to arbitrary crashes
• VBoxManage: ?xed incorrect partition table processing when creating VMDK ?les giving raw partition access (bug #3510)
• VBoxManage: support cloning to existing image ?le
• OVF: several OVF 1.0 compatibility ?xes
• OVF: ?xed exporting of disk images when multiple virtual machines are exported at once
• Virtual mouse device: eliminated micro-movements of the virtual mouse which were confusing some applications (bug #3782)
• Shared Folders: sometimes a ?le was created using the wrong permissions (2.2.0 regression; bug #3785)
• Shared Folders: allow to change ?le attributes from Linux guests and use the correct ?le mode when creating ?les
• Shared Folders: some content was incorrectly written under certain conditions (bug #1187)
• Shared Folders: ?xed incorrect ?le timestamps, when using Windows guest on a Linux host (bug #3404)
• X11 clipboard: ?x duplicate end of lines (bug #4270)
• X11 guests: a number of shared clipboard ?xes
• Linux guests: Guest Additions support for SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 11
• Linux guests: new daemon vboxadd-service to handle time synchronization and guest property lookup
• Linux guests: implemented guest properties (OS info, logged in users, basic network information)
• Windows host installer: VirtualBox Python API can now be installed automatically (requires Python and Win32 Extensions installed)
• USB: Support for high-speed isochronous endpoints has been added. In addition, read-ahead buffering is performed for input endpoints (currently Linux hosts only). This should allow additional devices to work, notably webcams (bug #242).
• USB: ?xed error handling for some USB dongles
• Web service: ?xed inability to handle NULL pointers for object arguments, which are valid values for a lot of APIs, in both the raw and the object-oriented web service.
• Web service: object-oriented bindings for JAX-WS did not exhibit interface inheritance correctly, ?xed
• Web service: added support for IDisplay and IGuest interfaces, which were previously unavailable
• Registration dialog uses Sun Online accounts now

Why keep reading, upgrade dammit!

• VirtualBox 3.0.0 for Windows hosts x86/amd64

• VirtualBox 3.0.0 for OS X hosts Intel Macs

• VirtualBox 3.0.0 for Linux hosts

• VirtualBox 3.0.0 for Solaris and OpenSolaris hosts x86/amd64

• VirtualBox 3.0.0 Software Developer Kit (SDK) All platforms (registration required)

Enjoy, see the manual online too!

The moment we’ve all been waiting for, Mozilla has released the final version of Firefox 3.5 (which was originally slated to be 3.1). Amongst the highlights include the new Gecko 1.9.1 rendering engine and (from their release notes):

• Available in more than 70 languages. (Get your local version!)
• Support for the HTML5 <video> and <audio> elements including native support for Ogg Theora encoded video and Vorbis encoded audio. (Try it here!)
• Improved tools for controlling your private data, including a Private Browsing Mode.
• Better web application performance using the new TraceMonkey JavaScript engine.
• The ability to share your location with websites using Location Aware Browsing. (Try it here!)
• Support for native JSON, and web worker threads.
• Improvements to the Gecko layout engine, including speculative parsing for faster content rendering.
• Support for new web technologies such as: downloadable fonts, CSS media queries, new transformations and properties, JavaScript query selectors, HTML5 local storage and offline application storage, <canvas> text, ICC profiles, and SVG transforms.

For the developers, the Mozilla developer centre details the changes in this release. But the most exciting is the support for <video> and <audio> elements from the HTML 5 draft and the inclusion of the TraceMonkey JavaScript engine.

Download it now!