Rumors of Death Once Again Exaggerated…and Misplaced

I freely admit that I often run out of things worth saying. Lately, I have been rooting through my old LinkedIn posts for reusable gold and dug up this gem today (if Google stuck an add right below this, keep scrolling to the LinkedIn post):

To save you scrolling through the glitchy LinkedIn iFrame, it is:

Scrum is dead: Breaking down the new open development method

It is one of those that I posted with no context, which is a habit I think I will break starting today. Anyway, I went to re-read before re-posting, especially given the show-and-awe headline. Well…turns out Scrum really isn’t dead (gasp!). Other than a theme based on a very narrow view of how software is built, the article does have some valid points about good habits in open source.

What hit me was the irony. The conclusion has a link to a GitHub repo that has not been updated in many years. The main link on the page points to a site dedicated to the articles’ key concept. Well, I assume it used to. Currently it goes to one of those cheesy, spammy Buy this domain pages.

I’ve certainly written my own poor predictions over the years. And, come to think of it, my domain changed since then, so any links to those errors publicly posted will have a similar result. And so will the correct ones.

This morning ramble brought to you by PTO and writing before coffee.

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© Scott S. Nelson
Temporarily Disable MWB to Update VSC

Malwarebytes and Visual Studio Code Updates

Either my Google search skills are degrading or the signal-to-noise ratio on this topic is so high only the noise comes through. Either way, I am posting a fix I should think would be easy to find but wasn’t…How to complete Visual Studio Code (VSC) updates with Malwarebytes Premium installed.

To say I found no answer is a bit of an exaggeration. I found several that were just plain unhelpful, and one that worked, but not acceptably. The first time this was an issue, I found an unacceptable solution (I say an, because I don’t consider removing Malwarebytes to be a solution, nor any of the less-polite suggestions of what to do with it) was to turn off Malwarebytes to run the update. While this works, every-vigilant Windows thinks it is an opportunity to win back territory for Defender and starts it, which prevents re-starting Malwarebytes. Being a busy techie, re-starting Windows is a long task because I always have at least 20 applications running.

So when the issue came up again today, I dove back into to the deeper Google waters, i.e., page 2 of the results, and did find a suggestion to temporarily uncheck “Enable Protection”. This must have been referring to a different version, as that was not one of the options. There were several others that could be disabled. To cut a long story short (note that whenever that phrase is uttered is inevitably too late already), I went through the options one by one and found that one that allows the installation to complete: Ransomware Protection.

Temporarily Disable MWB to Update VSC
Temporarily Disable MWB to Update VSC

Here’s hoping this post saves someone some time.

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© Scott S. Nelson
Virtual Box Disk Space

Managing VirtualBox VDI size for a Linux Guest

If you are just looking to save space on your operating drive, always remember to use the Description box for snapshots and delete those you no longer need.

And if the guest host is Ubuntu, see some good pre-wash steps at https://itsfoss.com/free-up-space-ubuntu-linux/.

Assuming you are using a dynamic disk you can perform the following steps below save more space:

Check for a dynamic disk VDI
Verify the VDI is a dynamic disk

From within the Linux guest, run the following in a terminal:

dd if=/dev/zero of=/var/tmp/bigemptyfile bs=4096k ; rm /var/tmp/bigemptyfile

It will take some time to complete. Depending on the size of the disk and the amount of empty space, it can be a long time, so be patient.

When the commands complete, shut down the guest.

The next step is to run VBoxManage.exe. First, locate where VirtualBox is installed. This is usually C:\Program Files\Oracle\VirtualBox, though you can also find it by checking the path of the VirtualBox launch icon:

Find the VirtualBox install location from the launch icon properties
Find the VirtualBox install location from the launch icon properties

Open a commend prompt (search for cmd.exe) and cd to where VirtualBox is installed:

cd "C:\Program Files\Oracle\VirtualBox"

Locate and copy the path to the VDI:

Locate and copy the path to the VDI
Then run VBoxManage as follows:
VBoxManage.exe modifymedium disk “[absolute path]” –compact
ex:

VBoxManage.exe modifymedium disk "T:\VirtualBoxes\Ubuntu_21.04_withVPN\Ubuntu_VPN_21.04-disk002.vdi " –compact

I also back mine up, which is why I need to reduce the size.

VirtualBox Export Appliance Menu

 

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© Scott S. Nelson