More Virtualbox, headless, Screen resolution

So my main monitor has a 16:9 ratio and a 1920x1080 resolution. The resolutions I have on my lubuntu 14.10 VM usually means they are two large and I have to scroll within  the VNC window or to small that I need a stronger pair of glass. Where is 1920x1080.

So here are the steps I used to create the resolution.

$ sudo xrandr --newmode "1920x1080"  173.00  1920 2048 2248 2576  1080 1083 1088 1120 -hsync +vsync

$ sudo xrandr

Screen 0: minimum 64 x 64, current 1440 x 1050, maximum 16384 x 16384
VBOX0 connected 1440x1050+0+0 0mm x 0mm
   1440x1050      60.0*+   60.0*
   1600x1200      60.0 
   1280x960       60.0 
   1024x768       60.0 
   800x600        60.0 
   640x480        60.0 
  1920x1080 (0x19e)  173.0MHz
        h: width  1920 start 2048 end 2248 total 2576 skew    0 clock   67.2KHz
        v: height 1080 start 1083 end 1088 total 1120           clock   60.0Hz
$ sudo xrandr --addmode VBOX0 1920x1080

$ sudo xrandr --output VBOX0 --mode 1920x1080

References:
http://askubuntu.com/questions/436558/external-display-resolution-vga-output
http://www.techsfo.com/blog/2013/07/1920x1080-ubuntu-vmware/

Lubuntu 14.10 Virtualbox VNC

I am playing around with Lubuntu 14.10 as a guest OS in virtualbox. I like Ubuntu but wanted to try something lighter. But of course when I first run Lubuntu after install  I am limited to a crap screen resolution. This is also headless which no doubt limits the OS to decide a minimal default. Here is more or less what I ended up doing.

1. apt-get install dkms
2. Install guest addition. In this case I had the vm guest mount the iso directly. Then I ran VBoxLinuxAdditions.run from the /media directory mounted.
3. I was still having issues at this stage until I found this post. http://askubuntu.com/a/450626/350726

• xdiagnose and ticked all 3 debug options
• restart
• additional drivers and reticked the "using x86 virtualisation solution guest adition module and applied the changes.
• restart

Now it can dynamically resize the resolution. Note that the maximum size of the guest window in the host affects the resolution that a VNC client to the guest can see.

Killing Motivation 18: Decreasing Benfits

Now we all know that its not mandatory for a company to provide medical or dental benefits. They are useful tools to maintain a happy and healthy workforce. They are useful to entice employees to join your workforce and retain existing employees.

Therefore, it would stand to reason that if you wanted to get rid of employees without paying a costly severance you would want to reduce or remove those things that keep them in your buildings. Benefits is one of those things that you can reduce to entice employee to leave. Think of it as constructive dismissal but on a large scale. Other than make their lives a living hell day by day, benefit reduction is a clear signal that employees are unimportant to you, and clutter the halls.

In fact, you can investigate what your employees use the most from benefits in previous years, and specifically reduce them. Lets say you have an aging workforce. It stands to reason that they need things like Chiropractic, massage therapy, and perhaps acupuncture to help their aches and pains and prevent larger issues. So you can decrease those, but, then to add insult to injury, you can increase something they don't use. To twist the knife, state to them that you are re-balancing the benefits package to better suite "most" employees. They will all know it a lie. But your little re-balancing line will be to laugh in their faces and say "fuck you".

They know they have little choice. 

Killing Motivation #17: The Employee Survey Reprise

So we have already talked about the employee survey. But there are more twists and turns than a Andes mountain road, so lets cover one of the more insipid mechanisms.

Say you have a team that responds to the survey. This team is a fun and vivacious team. They are also competent. And they love their team - or so their survey responses indicate.

But they hate the company they work for. Team Yay! Company boo!

Kudos to the manager of that team for making an exciting and engaging work environment for that team. The management chain should celebrate that manager for making a happy team against all odds.

Really?!

No, you should not celebrate that manager. You MUST punish that manager.

Clearly, he or she missed the memo on making your employees miserable. Clearly that manager is going against the carefully thought out plan of mind numbing pointless procedure and air gasping morose.

You must summon that manager to a management meeting and verbally spank that manager in front of their peers.

How else will you demotivate the whole chain.

Killing Motivation #16: When "Voluntary" turnover is your goal

We have all had to listen to those large corporate goals. Someone was paid good money to think up catchy phrases that becomes the "Raison d'Etre" of the company. These large sweeping arcs that describe what you must be striving for in your everyday workaday world. Sometimes they contain a wankfest of over and incorrectly used real worlds such as "ecosystem", "organic", or "DNA".

But how can you use this to demoralize your staff?

Simple.

Announce to your staff the usual set of pointless and soon to be forgotten "mantras". But add one new one near the top of the list. What is the amazing demoralizing mantra?

Voluntary Employee Turnover.

What the....

Yes, this is actually a term used in scholarly articles (eg. http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/256629?uid=3739448&uid=2129&uid=2&uid=70&uid=3737720&uid=4&sid=21104483170497) to describe people wanting to leave an organisation.

If you add this to, say, one of the top three goal of your organization, and you place a desire percentage to that goal what does that tell your employees? How would that make them feel?

See you .... whenever

So there are common phrases in English for departing a conversation. Things like:

See you soon.

Be right back.

Talk to you later.

Later.

...and so on.

So what are the  ways to say these sorts of things in German?

Lets start with simple a "bye".

Informally this would be Tschüss. Formally this would be Auf Wiedersehen. In Auf Wiedersehen the "sehen" part means see. So the phrase does mean to see you ... sometime. Literally is means
"to see again".

wieder-sehen : again - see

But there are a series of "see you ... whenever" sayings that are also important. They all start with the word "bis".

For example "bis bald" which means "bye for now". The word "bis"  can be means to be "until" or "up to". It depends on the context and the time frame meaning of what is said with it. Here are some other examples:

"bis später" - see you "soon" ; expected to be within some hours , usually same day


"bis gleich" = soon, but expected to be within minutes from no, this is similar to "be right back"

"bis bald" = "soon" ; in the yet undetermined future, usually several hours/days/weeks 

"Is mir völlig wurschrt"

I don't care in the least. This is how I am going to start my first post on learning German. I have started a few times and I am planning to continue, but one way to help in learning is to log what I am learning.

So the subject of this post, "Is mir völlig wurschrt" comes from the most popular YouTube video in Germany today at:

Per Mertesacker ZDF-Interview Deutschland Algerien 2:1, Fußball WM 2014: Was wollen Sie von mir?

The video is of an interview of Per Mertesacker, centre back for Arsenal and the German National Team after Die Mannschafts ("The Team") dismal performance against Algeria in the 2014 FIFA world cup in Brazil. After the game he was interviewed which was captured in the above YouTube link.

In this interview he said:  "Is mir völlig wurschrt" in response to the initial question.

This is common for "I don't care in the least". It's when someone asks you a stupid question, to which's answer you don't care at all.

More formal German would be: "Ist mir volkommen egal "

Mertesacker was annoyed with the question and only cared about the game result.

Killing Motivation #15: Pointless, Useless, Mandatory Training

If you still have people you want to get rid of without paying the layoff costs, then try this trick - Pointless, Useless, mind numbingly stupid, mandatory training.

There is nothing like a total boring time waster in the middle of deadlines to kill any motivation hiding behind the hippocampus.

Here are some handy steps:

1. Ensure that the training is running on an internal site  that does not really work. Have the training end with a quiz or a button that says "complete", but never works. So then your employees keep getting reminders that they need to complete the training. Forcing them to try and try again. This is also known as Chinese Water Torture.

2.  Ensure that it has nothing to with them, their job, their role, or their line of business. It should have more to do with an ancient insect race living underground on Mars than your intended victim.

3. Ensure that it is extremely boring.

4. Ensure that the presenter has an nail-on-blackboard voice.

5. Ensure that you send repeated reminders, even if they have completed the training.

6. Ensure links to training are broken. Continue to remind them to follow the broken links.

These steps will ensure that your staff is annoyed, remind them that the company is run by chimpanzees, and thoroughly demotivated.

Killing Motivation #14: Motivation from the de-Motivator

We all get those pointless waste of electricity messages that can only be described with on phrase: "Ra-Ra-Zip-Boom-Bah". There is nothing to say. There is no substance. Just a vacuous message that attempts - but always fails - to motivate the plebes who have the sorry misfortune to work there. They tend to congratulate the slacker or the friend or the same cultural, sports, hobby group that the sender shares.

But there is one type of Ra-Ra-Zip-Boom-Bah message that transcends all forms of mental mind spinning.

Its the Ra-Ra-Zip-Boom-Bah message from a well known de-motivator.

You know who the de-motivators are. They are the ones who can suck the air out of a meeting room. The ones who tell you that "you can't swim" when you "walk on water". The one who tell your colleagues nothing when you are in the hospital. The ones that make you question their humanity.

So lets take stock of what we have:

Ra-Ra-Zip-Boom-Bah message.

Check.

De-motivation who crafts and sends Ra-Ra-Zip-Boom-Bah message.

Check.

Why are these two elements so important?

Because the receivers now know that if the de-motivator has to send a motivational Ra-Ra-Zip-Boom-Bah message then things must really be grim.

Beyond hope.

Pathetic.

Killing Motivation #13: The Employee Survey

Why are so many people leaving? Do you care? Of course not. But you want to stem the tide since you are loosing money due to productivity lost by departing disgruntled employees. So what do you do?

You have an employee survey.

Now, don't get me wrong. You really don't care what the results are. What you want to do is show to the remaining knobs (re: suckers) that you "care". You don't care of course but you just need to fool them to think you do and that its worth staying so you can squeeze another pound of flesh from them to meet your quarter/fiscal results so you can profit from the uptick in stock.

So, you create a feel good caring and sharing (the Care Bears where laid off years ago) survey and circular file the results. I am sure you will get a boat load of angst. But again, why should you care? The results are worth less than a conservative voter suppression bill.

But what happens next is the real act (please do not read further if you are eating) . You generate a PR marketing worthy result document on an internal website about how employees feel empowered to help the customer realize their dreams. You gibber on incessantly about how the slaves feel the team spirit in the "New" organisation.  And how we will all achieve success with the "New" organisation.

Has anything changed?

No.

Is the organisation still clueless?

Yes.

But the sheep you still employee may just be fooled to hang around another quarter.

The Stupidity of an Emerging War

So we all can accept that Ukraine was and is in a mess. The former President Viktor Yanukovych was not a good guy. There was a barely palatable agreement for Ukraine to transition to a new government and elections in a year. Europe and Russia also agreed to this.

But then the radical right got involved  and since then  everything that could go wrong has gone wrong. The West has been complicit in by pulling out of an agreement with Russia, the new Ukrainian government is also complicit in stupidity by bringing in the fascists into cabinet and demanding the removal of language rights for ethnic Russians, and Russia, well, Russia does what Russia does and therefore is also complicit in stupidity.

The press is along for the ride and on all side media is controlled to manipulate and pander to the public.

And all this will cause lives to be lost on an an unnecessary and contrived war.

Will people allow themselves, their sons and daughters be sent to another useless slaughter? Is this just a distraction from something else?

And the Canadian Government, that dot in the letter "i" of the word shit parrots what its allies want to hear to gain political point for votes sleepwalking to disaster.

An inability to configure correctly on your part does not consistute a bug on my part

Ever wonder how, in an organisation that is constantly laying off people, how some manage to not be touched by that layoff when they clearly are depriving a village of an idiot?

 I was recently reminded of this when a well known individual (lets call him Raoul) insisted our software had  a bug even though this was clearly a misconfiguration.

Now, please do not misunderstand me, I like helping people. I especially like helping people who try, who try to understand, who do their homework, who listen. But eventually my patience recedes like a middle aged male hairline for those who constantly ask the same question, who, despite repeated explanations, with diagrams, and sock puppets just continue down their blind alley. I finally in the end give up, and put them on my block list.

And so, Raoul emerged again. I had been down this road before with him, and it reminded me, of previous encounters he has had either directly with me, or with my other colleagues.

An issue was presented to me from another colleague, little did I know who was the cause at this point that SSL was the cause of the bug. Here was my first warning.

Beware of people who present answers to you when they are asking you questions.

I have had to endure this before, when something does not work it must be that thing we do not know or understand, in this case, it was SSL. Lets ignore for a moment that they could connect, get almost everything working over SSL, yet for this one item, it did not work, so it must be SSL. Many do not understand that with SSL, the coms are working, or not. There is not "kind of". Its like being "kind of" pregnant.

The problem was caused by the configuration of a load balancer. This thing was configured to key off a hostname but they neglected to include a domain name. In addition, as a flaw of the device it read the HOST HTTP header. The RFC states that the host header can have a HOST and PORT but the port can be omitted if it corresponds to the protocol default. However, it should expect an explicit port definition. In this case, it could not.

This was not a problem with our product. This was a misconfiguration at best and at worse a load balancer that is not RFC compliant. Yet despite frequent explanations, references, displays of traffic, Raoul insisted it was bug. Ok, lets takes this to a logical progression. A bug is raised, but what can we fix in our code?

 And then, how much time do I have to waste when someone either cannot or will not attempt to listen and learn?

Ubuntu 12.04 + virtualbox

So a linux VM running in virtualbox crashed. Well, they all crashed.

But when I restarted the server I was hit with a couple of error. The core one was this:

Kernel driver not installed (rc=-1908)
The VirtualBox Linux kernel driver (vboxdrv) is either not loaded or there is a permission problem with /dev/vboxdrv. Please reinstall the kernel module by executing

'/etc/init.d/vboxdrv setup'

as root. If it is available in your distribution, you should install the DKMS package first. This package keeps track of Linux kernel changes and recompiles the vboxdrv kernel module if necessary.

Scary. But, google is my friend. I found this post in an Ubuntu forum:

http://askubuntu.com/questions/205154/virtualbox-etc-init-d-vboxdrv-setup-issue

It was an excellent review of the problem. The steps that worked for me were:

sudo apt-get install linux-headers-`uname -r`

My headers were up to date so this was not that important, but should be performed regardless.

Then reconfigure dkms and load module:

sudo dpkg-reconfigure virtualbox-dkms  
sudo modprobe vboxdrv

This  got me farther but then received another network error which was solved with:

sudo modprobe vboxnetflt

And now we seem to be back in business.