I’ve been a rabid Microsoft anti-evangelist, or however you’ll call me in this blog. Now is the time to expose my hypocritical underbelly.
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My Gripes on My Macbook.
I’ve been rabidly anti-Windows lately, and with reason. But this time, I will gripe on my Macbook, Sayuri. I had gotten her from my aunt just this March. Its price on Apple was at $1099. Its specs are: 60GB hard drive, 1.83 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, and 512MB RAM, combo drive. Today, Apple’s $1099 has an 80GB hard drive, 2.0 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 1GB of RAM, and still a combo drive. Whoa, look at the difference.
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My take on Steve and Bill
Before I fell in love with Linux and OS X, I was already starting to hate Windows because of the virus attacks, bugs, and the annoying reminders to get a licensed copy. And with all these annoyances, I started to hate Bill Gates with it.
When I became a Mac user, I drank in the culture of Bill-hating and Steve-loving, without understanding why I jumped on the bandwagon. So I decided to be fair and find out their personalities, so I would know if I’m hating the right person.
My sources were the writeups I managed to bump into online, and the movie Pirates of Silicon Valley. Thus this is not a very reliable analysis of the character profiles of these two computer industry giants. Nonetheless, this is Bill and Steve, from Dummygeekgurl’s perspective.
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Cold Fire Sweeping Through My Body: Near-Data-Loss-Experience
Today, cold fire flashed through me as I saw that after using iSync to synchronize my Motorola SLVR L7 contacts with my Macbook’s AddressBook, all the data in my AddressBook disappeared.
Some Good Old Darwin Lovin’
That doesn’t look like a black Macbook to me 😛
This past week I went back to school, so to speak, as I ripped my laptop apart and gave it its busiest week yet. Below, we assume that the reader knows that (1) yes, Apple has moved out of PPC and into the x86 platform; (2) it is possible to run Windows on Apple hardware, and that it is likewise true that the Mac OS can be made to run on off-the-shelf, non-Apple hardware; and (3) OS X is based off Darwin, whose native boot loader supports BIOS, unlike Apple’s EFI setup which even Windows Vista cannot touch. I’ll set aside arguments on the legalities of the existence of the OSx86 project, and whether getting your hands on a modified OS X install media for the purpose of learning constitutes fair use under the DMCA. The steps outlined below describes what worked for a dual-boot between Windows Vista (Business, but any Vista flavor will work) and OSx86 (Tiger).
It is always best to start with a blank disk, but any free, unpartitioned space of 6 GB or greater available should work. Whether this is a fresh Windows install or an existing one, the assumption is that the Windows partition (towards the beginning of the drive) is set as active.
Boot from the OSx86 10.4.8 install disc and launch Disk Utility from the Utilities menu. Here you can lock down the Windows partition so that the contents remain intact while you create and format a Journaled HFS partition. Do not forget to specify a label (which will be the mount point, and is always good practice to have). Exit and return to the main screen.
Launch the Terminal from the Utilities menu. Here we have a single-user Unix prompt. Enter:
# diskutil list
(a result of disk0s2
where it says Apple
or HFS+
indicates the Mac partition is in the first disk indicated by 0
, in the second partition)
# fdisk -e /dev/rdisk0
(the rdisk0
part here should match with disk0s2
above such that disk1s2
translates to fdisk -e /dev/disk1
. Here we enter partitioning mode for the first disk)
# f 2
(the 2
part here should again matchdisk0s2 in our example. We “flag” the partition as active and make the disk boot from this partition on the next startup)
# write
(enter y
to confirm changes to the disk)
# exit
(-out of fdisk)
# exit
(-out of the terminal session)
Proceed with the installation, careful with which kernel extension (kext) to install for the specific hardware in use. at the end of this process, you’ll end up with the Darwin boot loader defaulting to booting from the install disc. We’ll fix this in the next steps.
Boot from the install disc in GUI mode all the way to where you can launch the Terminal from the Utilities menu. In the next steps, we assume disk0s1
is the Vista partition and disk0s2
is the Mac partition.
Fixing the Startup Disk: there must be a way to set the Startup Disk via the terminal, but the one way that worked in this experiment is to use Utilities > Startup Disk and selecting “Mac OS 10.4.x” on mount_point. after this, the Mac OS should load up from the disk just fine.
Reboot from the OSx86 install disc again, but this time select F8 at the prompt and enter -s (for single-user mode):
# fdisk -e /dev/rdisk0
# flag 1
(again, 1
being the Vista install partition)
# quit
Restart the computer and Vista will present instructions on repairing winload.exe
. Basically it only involves booting from the original Vista install media (OEM recovery DVDs with more than just the Vista image will not work) and selecting “Repair my computer”. Should take less than two minutes. This fixes Vista’s boot loader. Go ahead and test it.
Reboot into single-user/command-line mode from the OSx86 install disc yet again:
# fdisk -e /dev/rdisk0
# flag 2
(2
being the OSx86 install partition)
# quit
This makes the disk boot off the second partition where the Darwin boot loader is. If you don’t see the boot menu, you will have to catch the precise second between the end of the POST sequence and the grey screen with the Apple logo and a throbber below it, or you may want to do a sudo nano /Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/com.apple.Boot.plist
and include <key>Timeout</key>
and <string>8</string>
within the dict
element. The Darwin boot loader defaults to the OS installed in the active partition and because I found no information about making it do otherwise (e.g., to the Windows partition), I’ll have to live with catching the Darwin menu and selecting the Windows partition for as long as I intend to live with this dual-boot setup.
If you really intend to get into OSx86 (and more *nix-savvy than I am, which is not at all difficult a condition), there are more intricate ways to dual-boot. InsanelyMac has a very rabid following, it comes to me as a surprise why Apple has not done anything about taking legal action yet.
Daily Review in Tech
The coolest cool things in tech:
We think they’re jumping the gun a bit, but Newsweek is running a story on how Nintendo is primed for a comeback with the Wii. Their main argument of course boils down to the e3 response coupled with an attractive price point. Oh, and while we’re on the subject of video games, there is more evidence that gaming is good for children. Told you so mom!
Hey, good news for all you WiFi anywhere freaks. M2Z Networks, fronted by former FCC official John Muleta, is looking to provide free WiFi across the USA. Ad supported of course. Now the fun will be seeing who can win the race and roll out free WiFi first. My bet is on Google…. Speaking of WiFi, looks like the geeks at IEEE can’t make their minds up about Wireless N standards. Sure, we’ve got the N draft models coming out already from Linksys, et al. But true Mimo Meshing will need to wait a while.
So, can’t make up your mind between Mac, Linux and MSoft? Why not buy a MacBook and use all three. While you’re at the software modifications game, why not try your hand at some DS Lite Brew. MmmmmMmmmmGooood!
Update: TechCrunch has an informative write-up on our current options for downloading TV shows off the internet. Neil Kjeldsen covers the current offerings from the major networks, the major platforms (iTunes, etc.) and the possible contenders. He also offers some speculation on how overlooked shows might benefit from internet distribution.
Apple Software Essentials 2006
There has been much discussion around the blogosphere this new year about software essentials for Apple computers. Here’s my list:
1. Text Editing: BBEdit. While it’s not cross platform, I’ve not found anything that worked as well for me as BBEdit – runs on top of Mac OS X. Handles PHP, HTML, and CSS flawlessly, has remote capabilities, and does alot of other things like slice my bread and make fresh cheese for me.
2. Browsing: Mozilla Firefox. The first change of the list. Eighteen months ago, I was using Apple’s Safari and was about to test Mozilla Firefox for the first time. It didn’t take me long to switch. My biggest frustration with Safari was the regular lockups I would run into with the spinning disk of death. No more. I use several extensions with Firefox as well.
3. E-Mail: Mail.app. Another change. I use it along with SpamSieve for spam filtering. No complaints.
4. Remote Connections: SSH. It’s always been the tool to use. I also tunnel my POP and SMTP connections through SSH along with some others.
5. PDA: Palm Treo 650 from Sprint. Eighteen months ago, I was using a Compaq iPaq 3850. That soon gave way to a new HP iPaq, which in January of this year, I ran over with my car (it’s a long story). Earlier this year, we switched our team over to the Treo. Although we’ve had some issues with reliability, it’s had the single largest impact on my productivity of any technological device this year.
6. Backup and Mirroring: ChronoSync and Infrant ReadyNAS X6. I was previously using rsync to a Dell NAS. Based on reading Phil Greenspun’s experience with an Infrant ReadyNAS device for a home music system, I looked into their solutions and purchased a 1TB ReadyNAS x6. This has been a great backup solution for the network here in the house. It grabs changes from the three macs (two laptops and a desktop) and the windows boxes as well. ChronoSync handles the backup process for the Macs.
7. Web Server: Apache. Haven’t changed in years and still nothing better.
8. Server Operating System: Debian Linux. Still the only linux system I’d use for personal or business server use.
9. Desktop Operating System: Mac OS X 10.4.3. The two laptops in the house are running the latest version. The desktop still is on 10.3 – not sure that I can justify an upgrade yet.
10. Instant Messenging: Proteus from Defaultware. I’ve played with some other solutions and still like this one.
11. IRC: I can’t remember the last time I used IRC.
12. Weblog Publishing Tools: Movable Type v3.2 and ecto. Really no change here. Just upgraded to MT v3.2 a few days ago. Ecto remains my main remote publishing and weblog management tool. Much of this blog network now runs on WordPress as well.
13. News Aggregator: NetNewsWire. Still the best Mac OS X newsreader. Outstanding scripting support as well.
14. Scripting Language: PHP. Nothing new here. Some of our server applications use Perl as well.
15. Database: MySQL. Generally, I use MySQL for databases. I stay as far away from Postgre and Microsoft SQL as I can.
16. Office Suite: Microsoft Office for Mac OS X is my main office suite. It is completely compatible with what I use at work. With the new powerbook, I did get Apple Keynote and Pages and have begun fiddling with them as well.
17. Music: iTunes. That one should be obvious. I have about 5500 songs in my iTunes library.
18. VOIP: Skype. I don’t use Skype often and rarely have it open, but it’s a great and cheap way to make international phone calls using SkypeOut. No complaints.
19. Widgets and the like: I use Dashboard on the Powerbook since it has OS X 10.4 along with several widgets. I use Konfabulator on the PowerMac G4 desktop since it’s running OS X 10.3. I like both equally.
What do you use on your mac?
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