Well a lot has happened in the last 2 weeks - finally i said goodbye to Swindon and all my friends which was tough to do We had a big party on Thursday to say goodbye which involved running into our mates house at 1am singing songs; playing street football and generally having one last good night!

I moved up to Manchester on Sunday, with my mum and dad coming down to help me take some stuff. Fran came up too to keep me company and help me settle in which was nice of her I got into my room and the first impression was @oh fuck, what have i got myself into here@ it was tiny, dirty and generally depressing!

However, Fran did her usual trick of planning rooms and stuff and we went to Ikea today with my mum and dad and i spent 200 quid on shelves, desks etc and now all my kit is setup again, working beautifully and making me feel generally a lot more relaxed and @at home@ The only casualty, which has made me annoyed, is one of my 19″ TFT screens got smashed in transit, which is a fuggering pain!

Over the last 2 weeks a few things have happened which i’ll write about! I applied for a few jobs for when i move back to Manchester at the end of this month and one of them, ICT Support Engineer at a Consultancy firm actually emailed me and asked me for an interview. After a preliminary phone interview they were apparently so impressed they decided to offer me the job outright - which means they obviously see something in me This is good because it means ill be earning roughly £150 a week working 16 hours part-time, which means no being super poor! Hurrah.

Aside from the employment, it was my 21st birthday! I went home on the weekend before my birthday for a huge family party. On the Friday, me and Fran went to the rugby to see Wigan vs Hull (her first game EVER of rugby!) which we won 66-6 - so smiles all round! On Saturday we had a big family party to which about 40 people turned up - family and friends! On sunday, i took my birthday money and a bit of my own and bought an Xbox 360, games, extra controller etc and ive been addicted to it ever since

We came home on the Monday night and had a fairly quiet one. On Tuesday i went for a meal with Fran to Frankie and Bennys which was great fun followed by a few drinks etc afterwards and other stuff

Rest of that week and this week ive generally just been wrapping up loose ends in Swindon - i packed up and sent home 40% of my stuff when we went back up to Manchester, and the rest of my stuff is gradually being torn down and packed up. I lost internet connectivity on the 10th August as we didnt want to pay another £20 for an extra month worth of internet, it just means i dont have much to do on my PC anymore - lack of internet and Xbox 360 has led to that! On a side note - Fight Night Round 3 is arguably one of the best console games ive played in YEARS - so addictive in Career mode lol.

As far as life goes, im just getting ready to leave Intel and Swindon, move back up to Salford - start my new job, and wait until October when i start my final year of my degree again. Its very exciting times in the world of Sam Marsh - stay tuned!

First off, V-Kernel is going great - ive settled on a theme, ive created content already, and i got 15 hits in my first 36 hours of being online (all direct, nothing from google as i havent added it yet). I configured Akismet, and ive created the “About Me” page etc and all is going well! Matt has joined the VKernel Team and he will be posting about security and linux, as well as various other items - and i will be posting on Virtualization and whatever networking topics i can get my hands on!

In a side note, Dell warranties are very f… silly; apparently the warranty doesnt cover accidental damage: so what is the point in taking out a policy?! Its apparently £200 to replace the screen, although ive found a screen on ebay for £120 i can replace myself so Fran will save a little bit of cash i guess!

In other news, im going home for my birthday this weekend with Fran, big family party etc will be nice nice nice!

And finally, went to see “Dark Knight”, the new batman film last night. At first, i thought all the hype about Heath Ledger being amazing as joker was just because he was dead and people like to rave about dead actors etc, but Oh, my, god, he is actually immense! The film is amazing and definitely one to watch, 9/10, 2nd to top bracket (top being Godfather pt 2, Scarface, Raging Bull, Tax Driver etc).

Stay tuned to www.vkernel.co.uk and get your RSS feeds tuned in!

VKernel is now live with its first post, comparing Para-virtualization. I had a bit of a ‘mare, whereby i overwrote the SQL DB by accident and lost 3 hours worth of work… but oh well. Its up and running now and all linked in. I set up email etc and ive just finished configuring Google Analytics (c) so that i can monitor the hits i get.

Also, got 2 x 2GB PC2-5300F on eBay, for a sum total of £35! Bargain or what, it arrived today so im eager to get it in my system and test the crap out of it! Fun fun.

Today, the 29th July, the Virtualization/Server blog  - Vkernel.co.uk, is born! Yes thats right, this blog will now become solely my personal blog for whats been going on in my life, and nothing to do with technical stuff. That will now be handled by VKernel.co.uk - which will be pushed as a technical go-to page for news and information!

Thanks,

Sam

Evening all.

Not a bad weekend so far - spent today in Lydiard park chilling out in the sunshine with everyone, playing rugby with raj, broom, andy li etc. Came back to mine, had chinese and now were just watching a film (too skint to go out!).

Had a technological thought (not sure if its already been done) to allow better quality (possibly HD) video/audio to be streamed over a network using up less overhead than a standard stream at the moment.

Broadcast a low-res, low quality version of the stream and installing upscaling/Codec software on the client recieving the images, which then process the low stream images into high def media in seconds. If this can be done, then you can get HD content on a 1mb internet connection!

Morning All,

Have been thinking a bit more about virtual networks recently - studying on Virtual DMZ infrastructures etc. One thing that i have thought about, which hopefully someone with a few more figures than me, can answer.

In normal P2P transfer/ad-hoc network transfer; the data transfer rate (MBps) is constrained by the medium; the NIC, the stack and the drivers, normally limiting to either 100Mbps or 1000Mbps (full/half). These are physical issues which need to be addressed at a layer 1 level / layer 2 level.

My question to you, the world, is - why arent virtual networking p2p transfers faster? If you want to transfer files beetween 1 VM and another VM; the transfer should be upwards of 1/2GBps - as you are transferring files in beetween the same file system (granted via a few security measures). There is no interaction with the physical NIC’s or mediums at all. In theory, all it will be doing (please correct me if wrong), is transferring a file out of the virtual machine hard drive, from the hard drive through the VM Container, out onto the VMBus/Hypervisor bus, back into the other container, and then into the other VM’s hard drive. The only constraint here, is the TCP/IP stack, which im sure can be slightly modified / a new protocol made for VM Transfer, allowing 2/3/4 GBps and upwards transfer.