Hyper-V and Windows Server 2019: Unable to boot

It’s been a while since I had to create a new Windows Virtual Machine using Hyper-V. Last set of VM I created were all CentOS for my Cassandra experiments and my Windows 10 Enterprise VM is at least 180 days old as the evaluation period has long expired.

When creating the VM, either using the Quick Create option or the more advanced New VM one, using the ISO or VHDX file it would always fail to boot, citing an unable to load boot disk or something.

You know that screen where it tels you to ‘Press any key to load from disk’? Pressing any key doesn’t have any effect.

The fix is to mash the keys as it boots. There seems to be a tiny time frame between when Hyper-V starts the VM and the boot loader screen takes over. For whatever reason the keyboard gets locked out if you miss this window, and the load process times out and you’re left with a stalled VM.

tl;dr

If you suffer from you VM’s not booting from the ISO or VHDX, hammer a few keys as it loads to get it to load – don’t wait too long!

Python on Windows and aliasing

I’m really lucky to have a decent PC that I can spin up multiple VM’s on when fiddling with database stacks, and a MacBook Pro that I can code from bed (being far too lazy helps).

I use VSCode FOR my IDE and have a multi-root workspaces configure for multiple[le GIT repos under a single workspace which I find easier.

This all leads to a slightly different dev environment that I switch between, so I also use some ansible scripts on my GIT repos to make sure I can run things on either machine. I have WSL set up with Ubuntu 20.x running which acts as my ansible host on windows, and ansible runs on OSX anyway.

This rambling finally leads onto Python. I’ve just started really coding in Python to build my REST API tool for Cassandra, however I’ve been tinkering from a infrastructure standpoint via Ansible for a while now. The number one thing I’ve learnt along the way is it’s a little retarded when it comes to figuring out what version you want to use between pip, python, and what ever modules you use in your app, especially on OSX.

In anycase, this is just a small tidbit on the way i explicity mention python3 on the commnd line on my OSX machine, but it’s ‘python’ only on my windows box. The easiest solution to this was t oad dthe following in PowerShell:

List of Health related datasets

I’m going to keep record of the links that I visit so I can come back later and go a bit deeper in to those datasets. Pretty much all of these links are obtained from a cursorily Google search and picked from the top one or two pages. I’ll write up my process a little later to explain why I think my method for choosing these links is unbiased.

https://www.healthdata.gov/

https://ukdataservice.ac.uk/find-data/browse/health/

https://data.world/datasets/health

https://www.who.int/data/collections

https://digital.nhs.uk/data-and-information/data-collections-and-data-sets/data-sets

I’ve also decided to restrict my search to UK based data. Now this could be data published by anywhere in the world, but the data will be focused on UK COVID data only. I honestly think trying to understand that will be hard enough, yet alone throwing in cross-country analysis into the mix.