Riley McArdle

VMware has announced an ultra-thin enterprise virtualization solution called VMware ESX Server 3i that fits into 32MB of flash. It can be installed on a USB flash drive or can be integrated right into the server by hardware vendors.

It is remotely managed by VirtualCenter Management Server. New ESX 3i servers are automatically discovered, configured and provisioned. Need more virtualization capacity? Step 1, buy a server with ESX 3i built in. Step 2, plug it in. Step 3, you’re done! This is a revolutionary. VMware continues to show their innovation and dominance in the market by releasing features like this. Microsoft is years behind with their virtualization efforts.

And the best part of this new technology, it will be included in future versions of VMware Infrastructure 3. Which means it will be free for existing customers. You can choose either to install the standard ESX 3 server or the ultra-thin ESX 3i server.

Meet the Next Generation of Virtual Infrastructure Technology via TechGripe
VMware goes flash with 3i via tech.nocr.at

As you may have noticed, I have posted some bits of KiXtart code here on my blog and the code is prettied up to be easy to read similar to an IDE.

To do this, I use a plugin for WordPress called WP-Syntax. WP-Syntax is a wrapper around a library called GeSHi that performs syntax highlighting for programming and scripting languages.

By default GeSHi supports dozens of programming languages (see their site for a full list) but it doesn’t support KiXtart. So, I wrote a custom language file for GeSHi to add support for KiXtart.

Download: geshi-kixtart.zip (ZIP - 2.61 KB)

After installing WP-Syntax, just extract kixtart.php from the above ZIP file and copy it to the /wp-content/plugins/wp-syntax/geshi/geshi directory on your WordPress server.

To include KiXtart code in a post, surround your code with <pre lang=”kixtart”> and </pre> tags.

I have submitted this language file to the GeSHi developers so hopefully it should be added as a standard language in upcoming versions of GeSHi and WP-Syntax.

KiXtart is an easy to use scripting language that is ideal for logon scripts. I use KiXtart for the logon script at Ergotron to map network drives and printers, adjust system settings, remove unwanted programs, install standard software and more. Over the last few years, the script has grown to over 1,800 lines but still runs quickly and is fairly easy to maintain.

Periodically, I’ll post about common logon and administrative tasks that I’ve found KiXtart useful for.

Here’s an example of a simple use of KiXtart to map different network drives for different groups of users.

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; Everyone gets a drive mapped to the "Company Documents" share
USE "X:" "\\SERVER\Company Documents"
 
; Only users in the "Finance" group get a drive mapped to the "Finance" share
IF INGROUP ("Finance")
	USE "Y:" "\\SERVER\Finance"
ENDIF

Rob Rohan has a quick, easy way to allow typing pīnyīn on Windows with tone marks. It only took me a minute to install it and start using it and it works great.

I agree with Michael Arrington… I Want This In Photoshop Immediately:

Update: Turns out Adobe has hired the co-inventor of this technology, Shai Avidan, so maybe this will be in Photoshop someday soon.

ChinesePera-kun is another great Firefox extension I found recently. This extension is cool – you can hover your mouse over Chinese characters (both Traditional and Simplified) and it will show you the pinyin pronunciation and the English definition. I’ve been wanting to learn Chinese for a while and I’m starting Chinese language classes in a couple weeks. This extension should help a lot.