That was the title of Philip K Dick’s novel on which the movie Bladerunner was based. It is about time I watched that film again but what brought the title to mind was my experience of creating a cloned virtual machine yesterday using Oracle’s VirtualBox software. Their choice of icon for the clone button (used for creating a copy of a virtual computer), and the larger graphic that displays while the operation is taking place, was a sheep.

I was using that because I am trying to push my grasp of computer virtualisation before. I am not new to the concept and have run a number of virtual machines before but I feel that I need to get a better grip on the techonology. This is the first time I have cloned an existing machine before and the result was as painless and useful as I had hoped. I now have a basic virtual machine and an almost identical copy that has been supplemented by an installation of R (which I will use for a statistical course I am doing at work later this month).

Fingers crossed now that I won’t find it fu-baa when I go into the office later this morning!