VirtualBox VM Disk Clone UUID problem

A VM disk image in Virtual Box (version 4.0.6) can be cloned using the command line “VBoxManage” tool with the “clonehd” command. Unfortunately, cloning a VM that already has a registered UUID in Virtual Box fails like that: ` #> ‘C:\Program Files\Oracle\VirtualBox\VBoxManage.exe’ clonehd .\MyVM.vdi .\NewVM.vdi VBoxManage.exe: error: Cannot register the hard disk ‘C:\VMs\MyVM.vdi’ {601b44ed-a301-45a7-8b17-9b2185040a1e} because a hard disk ‘C:\VMs\MyVM1.vdi’ with UUID {601b44ed-a301-45a7-8b17-9b2185040a1e} already exists VBoxManage.exe: error: Details: code E_INVALIDARG (0x80070057), component VirtualBox, interface IVirtualBox, callee IUnknown Context: “OpenMedium(Bstr(pszFilenameOrUuid).

Using TortoiseSVN with svn+ssh tunnel over non-standard ports

Configuring recent versions of toirtoise SVN to work with non-standard ports is a bit tricky. I tried editing the “subversion config file” through Settings->General->Edit, to using an ssh command line, like the one I’m using on Linux for the same repository, but that didn’t work. A quick hack-style solution is to go to TortoiseSVN->Settings->Network and set the SSH client to (assuming port number XX): “C:\Program Files\TortoiseSVN\bin\TortoisePlink.exe -P XX” (The hack is also described here: http://www.

How to indent Python with VIM

Today I solved the problem of properly indenting my Python code with my favorite editor (Vim 7.2). I’ve had this issue for some time, because I had tuned Vim for writing in C/C++, which of course proves quite annoying when trying to write Python code (no braces darling!). Googling the issue I came up with the article “Indenting Python with VIM” which proves quite useful, but unfortunately did not work out of the box for me.

Using the tkiz package in latex [on RHEL5, CentOS, Fedora or Ubuntu Linux]

I needed to “compile” a latex document using the tkiz package. After spending quite a few time trying to set this up on CentOS and Fedora, I finally gave up. Fortunately Ubuntu had a working pre-built package that includes pfg and tkiz, but this also required two online searches to deal with latex errors. A summary of the process for RHEL/CentOS/Fedora  I searched many times for RPMs with tkiz/pgf for RHEL 5 or FC12 (to install it on our CentOS server).