The Navy’s latest Class of Destroyer, the Zumwalt Class, once on shaky ground, has finally had its contract awarded. There will be two ships of this class built simultaneously, one in Maine by General Dynamics’ Bath Iron Works the other by Northrup Grumman’s Ingalls Shipbuilding in Mississippi. What makes this class of ship so unique, aside from it’s Animesque name, is all the high-tech goodness that will be pumped into it. From it’s stealth hull which, purportedly, reduces radar signature more than 50x over current hull designs, to its Advanced Gun Systems, to its automated cargo handling system, to its use of the LynxOS RTOS as a systems OS this ship has many seemingly incredible advances.

Maybe too incredible, many concerns over the design (especially the hull which is said to be unstable during high seas) have made this class of Naval vessel controversial to say the least. With the USS Iowa (BB-61) being stricken from the Naval Register in 2006, no more battle ships exist in the US fleet, which means there are no ships with the capacity for truly frightening naval surface fire support. That’s one of the roles the Zumwalt class should address, but even that is role is in doubt.

Still, have a look at the specs, pretty impressive…

Images courtesy of Wikipedia, the US Navy and the Public Domain (link, link)

Hello from Flu-land! I’m writing this as my nose flows as free as a river to the sea, and I cannot hear from my left right ear. Yeah, that’s an attractive picture. I’ve got the flu, and I ain’t havin’ fun yet. So forgive me it this post don’t come together well.

This is Pumpkin. She’s a fosterino who came to live with us on Halloween (hence the name). She’s made herself at home and we’d love to keep her, but our 900 sq ft just isn’t enough house for four cats (barely enough for the three we have). I can post more later, but for now, have fun bathing in her cuteness.

We’re keeping her for the local animal adoption group AARF. She’s been a bit sick lately, so she hasn’t been able to get all of her shots, but when she does, she’ll be able to find a permanent home. She’s extremely playful, affection aggressive, and a great lap cat.

I’m taking the RedHat RHA030 and 130 right now at ECU. The really cool thing about the class is that it’s all online. We use VMware Workstation 6 and connect to the classroom servers through a VPN connection. The biggest drawback to the class is that it’s all online. Weird how that works.

Any-who, one of our labs has us using mount and umount (did I mention that RHA030 is a basic GNU/Linux skills class with a RedHat flavor?) with a floppy drive. There are a couple of problems with this, however. One, there’s no virtual floppy disk on the virtual machine that’s been configured for class. Two, VMware Workstation 6 has this weird quirk (at least the version we have) that won’t allow you to create floppy images in the img format. It adds flp to the end of whatever you put want to name your file, and then gives this error that the file already exists, which doesn’t make a lot of sense since the Workstation just created the file and should know that.

So, here’s a (mostly) graphical tutorial that allows you to create your own floppy image and use it with VMware Workstation 6.

Step 1. Open VMware Workstation and select the virtual machine you want to add a virtual floppy drive to.

Step 2. Select “Edit Virtual Machine Settings” from that virtual machine’s “Commands” menu.

Step 3. From the “Virtual Machine Settings” dialog’s “Hardware” tab, click the “Add…” button

Step 4. On the “Hardware Wizard” dialog, select the “Floppy Drive” hardware type and then click the “Next” button.

Step 5. On the “Hardware Wizard” dialog, choose the “Create a blank floppy image” radio button and then click the “Next” button.

Step 6. On the “Hardware Wizard” dialog, click the “Bowse” button to choose a location for your floppy image.

Step 7. Type in the name of the image file you want to create. Notice I tried to input an “.img” extension which is one of the types listed in the file type select box. Don’t bother trying that because Workstation will automatically tack on a “.flp” extension regardless of what you input.

Step 8. Check your file’s path and then click “Finish”. What’s supposed to happen is, Workstation creates an image file with the name in the text box.

Step 9. What happens is Workstation adds the “.flp” extension, creates the image file, then gives you this Alert box stating: “Unable to create floppy image. File exists.” Idiotic really. Just click the “OK” button and proceed as follows.

Step 10. You’ll now see that your file name has been appended with the “.flp” extension and that and further “Finish” clicking will merely give you to opportunity to view the Alert box again. But don’t worry, because even though you’re getting error a strange and magical thing has happened. Click “Cancel” to proceed to the next step.

Step 11. Click “OK” on the “Virtual Machine Settings” dialog.

Step 12. Ok, this is less of a step than just a view of the results. Remember that “strange and magical” thing I mentioned? Well, as it turns out Workstation has added the floppy drive to your virtual hardware and created and added the floppy image to your floppy drive just fine even with those errors. Weird, weird, weird, but I’m not really complaining, now I can do my lab!

Hope this helps anyone still having problems with this.