Nathan Stratton’s Homepage

I have wanted to start playing with micro controllers for a while now, I ended up selecting the Parallax Propeller chip because of its ease of use and I liked it’s COG design with 8 32 big cores working together.

My first test was connecting a 4×20 line LCD and a few DS18S20 1-wire temp sensors to the propeller chip. Everything was very easy to learn the LCD was interfaced with no external components and the 1-wire bus only required a 4.7K pull up resistor.

Propeller PDB with LCD and 1-wire bus

Xen is one of the coolest virtualization technologies out there. It comes in may flavors, the two largest being the bleeding edge xen.org open source project and the commercial (Citrix) version. There are things I love about the commercial version, but they lost me only supporting windows in their XenCenter administration interface.

The file formats of the commercial and open source Xenare totall different. The open source is a standard image file, you can mount it, fdisk it, whatever you would like. The Citrix Xen Virtual Appliance .XVA file is quite different. It is actually a tar file with ova.xml meta data and directories starting with Ref full of 1M files that make up the drive volumes of the virtual image.

To convert .xva to an xen .img file you first untar the image:

tar -xvf {image}.xva

Then grab this handy utility and run it on your untared data, as an example:

python xenmigrate.py –convert=Ref:3 {image}.img

This will paste all of those files back together, starting at 00000000. Note I have had problems running this script on Centos 5.x.