Virtualbox Ubuntu Guest Vista Host File Sharing

It just took me 2 hours to figure this out so I thought I would post my solution.

I have Ubuntu running (I guess it's 9.04 amd64 desktop) inside VirtualBox (version 3.0.12) on a Windows Vista host.

I am trying to share a folder on Vista so that Ubuntu can see it.

There are countless forums on how to do this. However, no one seems to know that when you mount the folder on Ubuntu, you can only copy to and from it as the root user, because the permissions are all jacked up thanks to NTFS and Ubuntu not interfacing correctly (I assume this is the issue...)

Anyway, here's what I did to solve the issue. I want my share to appear every time I boot.

I edited /etc/rc.local as root and added the line:

mount -t vboxsf -o uid=1000,gid=1000,dmode=774,fmode=774 sharename /mountpoint

Where sharename is the share name assigned when you create the share in VirtualBox, and /mountpoint is the folder you create to mount the file.

What this does is sets the ownership of the mount to the first user of the machine (1000)... alternately you can use your username instead of 1000. It then forces the permissions on all the directories and folders inside the share to 774 (owner and group can read write and execute, everyone else can read).

Adding this line to /etc/rc.local makes sure it is run every time the machine is restarted. I tried also adding it to fstab, but it didn't work because I don't think the vboxsf service is started yet at that point. Anyway, this appears to work nicely.

Hope that helps someone.

Gold Price vs. CPI Take 2

Here's a more complete plot of Gold Price vs. CPI for the last hundred years at least.




CPI Data:


Gold Data:

Browsers

Web browsers are starting to frustrate me. The main reason is that there are lots of features I like in each but none of them have them all. I am not into really fancy features, I prefer a bare bones browser, but there are certain things I want. Things I like about each browser:

Like	Don't Like
Opera
Speed Dial New windows are restricted to the inside of the tab and don't create a new task bar item. When you maximize them they become a normal tab. I like that not many people use it.	Giant tabs and toolbars at the top. Once removed they are actually comparable to Firefox, but they feel bigger for some reason. Password saving seems to be ineffective.
Chrome
Tabs are in the window bar at the top giving more room for browsing. Tabs are their own process so crashes are not browser wide. Super fast javascript.	I feel like Google has an interest in people using their browser because they are probably tracking browsing habits and using it to sell advertising. It would be interesting to packet sniff Chrome and see what kind of extraneous data it sends.
Firefox
Add-ons. Firebug being the main one.	Has some stability issues. No speed dial. Maybe there's an add-on for that... Just found an add-on with speed dial. Sweetness.

Finally, none of the browsers has a feature which I would love to see: a drop down back button tree menu, that shows different browsing paths. So if you hit back, and go to a different page, you can navigate back down and then back up another path without going into the history. Firefox has a tree-style history, which is similar to what I am looking for, only I want it to drop down from the back button with a click or even mouseover. Maybe I'll code it up in my spare time...

Gold vs. Consumer Price Index (CPI)

This is a plot of CPI vs. Gold Price in the last 35 years or so. I haven't drawn any conclusions yet. It seems as though the rate of increase of the price of gold is lower than the CPI. Also of note was the CPI before the Gold Standard was removed in 1971 (not in this plot). The CPI still increased at a steady rate. This I suppose could be linked to an increase in gold supply through mining. Anyhow, one would expect the CPI and gold to be linked in some manner, but I am not sure how they are related.

I'd also like an explanation for why the gold price increased drastically starting in ~2001? What happened then that caused gold demand to increase so drastically?