Hackintosh

Spent the whole night trying to get back my hackintosh on my PC rig but keeps failing.  Either because it's waiting for the root device or it's just hanging before waiting for the root device.  I've basically given up now.  I've changed as many of the drive settings as I can.  IDE/AHCI, boot order, flagging my PATA drive as boot and active ...  I have no idea how I did it the first time.  I remember having the same problems but it worked after changing the hard drive to AHCI and flagging the primary partition as boot.  Meh ...

I think I'll just find some obscure OSes to install.

Compaq Presario 5BW472

Started salvaging the parts to the Compaq and noticed the different headers coming from the motherboard.  Quite a few looked proprietary like ones for the status lights, front panel usb ports, and power button connector.  So I decided to check out the motherboard layouts from the one I might buy and the one of my current rig and found out that the connectors were proprietary and the Compaq power supply was missing the 2x2 pin power connector.  So, that basically means I can't reuse the case or the power supply.  I know have a few choices.  One is to find a new Micro ATX case.  Second is find a new ATX case and/or find a new ATX sized motherboard.  Third is to just get a stock standard base unit so we can get the standard shop warranty that my parents like so much.  Fourth is that we just get a laptop.  Hmmm

Vista Ultimate virtualisation; openSUSE 11.0; Open Flash Chart; Down Across and Up

While searching for an answer to my reactivation issue with Windows Vista Ultimate after a BIOS upgrade, I found a nice *thing* to allow me to use Vista without having to authenticate with Microsoft's web servers.  It does a nice job to trick the operating system in thinking the BIOS of the computer is from an eligible company for pre-activation.  So now I have a copy of Vista running in virtualisation.  Not sure what I'd want to do with it though...

While looking for computer parts to retrofit into the now deceased Compaq, I noticed that the prices of parts I used to build my PC rig (hackintosh) have increased quite a bit.  It now costs more to buy the parts now than a year ago.  Just shows how fast the online stores change their prices based on the FOREX.

With the help of a friend, I managed to get openSUSE 11.0 up and running with wi-fi.  After upgrading Ubuntu from 8.04LTS to 8.10, the UUID of the openSUSE partition changed or something about the partition changed and the bootloader couldn't find the root device.  I ended up reinstalling openSUSE because I didn't know better and I had already wasted 1 day changing the menu.lst file and grub.  After getting openSUSE booting, I had the same wi-fi problem.  I couldn't get it to make a connection to the wireless access point.  In the end, my friend found a link that basically told me to extract the firmware (rt73.bin) of the wireless adapter (ASUS WL-167g) into /lib/firmware/ and then restart the wireless module.  After that, I was able to connect to the access point but I only had intranet access.  Couldn't access the internet.  The problem I found was that the DNS server wasn't resolving the namespace correctly.  Retardly, this was probably because of my fetish for static addresses.  Once I started using DCHP, I could access the internet and pull down some updates for openSUSE!

I looked at Open Flash Chart (OFC) for a brief period.  Pulled down version 2 and had a little play around with the Python library and demo.  It seems to work quite well and feels more light weight than version 1.  I noticed that the point where the x and y axis come together is missing.  It's almost as if it's a bug in how the origin is drawn and just looks wrong.  Version 2 requires an ActionScript 3 compatible interpreter so that's basically version 9 and above of Adobe Flash Player.  So the consequence of upgrading StockShaping to use OFC is that people need to have one of the latest Flash Players from Adobe.  I guess it won't be too much of a problem since the ubiquity of version 9 is quite high given the popularity of youtube and the like which require Flash Player.

Just came back from a private screening of a movie made by a couple who are my sister's friends.  The movie was called "Down, Across & Up" and documents the couple's trek around New Zealand on horse back.  It was made possible by sponsorship, family and friends who supported them throughout their journey using horses.  Unfortunately it was shown that the phrase "Animals were not hurt during the production of this movie" couldn't be used but all the animals used seemed to have come out fine in the end.  They had a nice journey around farmland and lots of random people coming out to help them along the way; even if they had never met them.  All in all, it was quite a fun movie and they did a good job of taking us around New Zealand, quasi-horse back style!  Hmm also my first movie premiere XD

Compaq Presario 5BW472

Further to yesterday's achievements of borking the Compaq, I decided to turn it on this morning and to my surprise it POSTed and started booting Windows ME.  I decided to restart the comptuer and I was able to get into the BIOS and change some settings around.  I restarted the computer, placed the Windows ME setup CD into it but it fuxored again.  Took the CD out and restarted but remained fuxored at POST.  So in conclusion, it's still fuxored.  I'm going to wait a few hours before I try booting it back up.  If it fuxors after a few restarts then there's probably some hardware component with a half-life of a mayfly.

Compaq Presario 5BW472

Looks like the end of the road for our *trusty* Compaq Presario 5BW472.  Ever since Windows ME was reinstalled on it, the mouse went crazy.  Every time you'd move the mouse pointer it would move off in a different direction.  It was like moving the mouse over a slippery terrain and never knowing what the terrain was like.  Other times the mouse pointer would just freeze into place and the only way to navigate around Windows was through keyboard shortcuts.  Well today I decided to take a look at it and unfortunately I broke it even more.  I repeat, I broke it even more.  The machine won't even get past POST.  Stuck at the Compaq boot up screen.  Tried clearing the CMOS BIOS using jumpers and taking out the backup battery.  That made it worse as it now has to count up the RAM before fuxoring.  Tried unplugging all the I/Os but still fuxoring so it's nothing to do with the devices stopping the POST.  Trying to do a BIOS recovery flash but Compaq seems to have cleverly disabled that feature ...

Yay for 4 years of Computer Systems Engineering!

Python / Cherrypy goodness

Got stuck into some python and cherrypy madness.  Been looking back over my code for my peer-to-peer project for CompSys 302.  Made quite a few improvements to it but I think I can still make some more if I finish reading the Python manuals.  There's a few fundamental things I'd like to change as well but I'm not going to make those changes yet.  I'd like to change the way the server and user information gets handled.  The classes right now for them are quite repetitive and not very "object orientated".  Worked a bit more on StockShaping as well.  Since I wrote the code for that a year after learning Python, the code base is a bit more solid and more "pythonic".  It would be good to experiment with generators and iterators.  Templating is also another issue I should sort out since I've basically made my own that does basic string substitutions.  Works all right but not every extendable.  Wonder when Cherrypy will be written to be Python 3k compliant... Might play around with Ruby on Rails; another pair of scripting tools for use in web development.

The end of lectures

Well, no more lectures for me ... ever ... well unless I'm the one taking the lecture XD.  Since this blog has mainly been about lectures for the last semester of Engineering at the University of Auckland its use as a scratch pad for random thoughts during lectures and note taking are all but gone.  So, I'm basically going to convert it into a *real* blog where I just blog about things beyond academia, if that makes sense.