Warsong

I think it should be a new definition in the English dictionary as a song that gets men going, driving him to energetic heights. The song of war. For me the song is Corporeal’s cover of the Halo theme. Beautiful.

Proxxon I love you

Proxxon, for people who don’t know what I am talking about, it is a company making high quality tools for every day use. The tools I use from them are the once you see at the right. The 56 piece bit set with – so they always promise you – 25 year long guarantee on the tools. Yeah right, I thought.

Now was the case that I lost a number 10 bit of the smaller ones, and I e-mailed them. I told them how much I loved my toolbox and wanted it complete again. I thought that it was going to be a disaster, asking, wining for the bit etc. etc. But nothing was further from the the truth.. They e-mailed me back within a couple of hours with the request for my address so they could send me a new bit!

Wow, (you got to love the Germans sometimes) I never expected that! After a couple of days I received a letter with the new bit in the envelope. So, it is nothing more than normal to say: I love you Proxxon.

How to install Mac OS 10.6 on a Dell Mini 10v

Disclaimer: Of course all this is just a mere work of fiction. I would never ever pirate software because that is very morally wrong! I don’t have a netbook containing Mac OS, neither did I ever ever install it on a non-macintosh computer. Heck, I’ve never seen it before! What is Mac OS?

First of all, I didn’t do anything special with my Dell Mini 10v. It is still ‘out-of-the-box’. Of course mind the ‘v’ behind the 10. It is not the Mini 10.

My BIOS version is A00.

The tools I used for installing Mac OS:

1. Ubuntu 9.10 (only use for the dd tool).
2. 1 USB memory stick of 1 Gb.
3. 1 USB memory stick of 8 Gb.
4. A DMG file of the original retail DVD of Mac OS 10.6 Snow Leopard.
5. A Dell Mini 10v (of course).
6. The NBI_083RC3.img boot image for tricking the Apple installer thinking it is a Mac.

Step 1: Converting the DMG image to an IMG file.

Every time when I searched on the internet for converting a DMG file to an IMG file it didn’t work. So, I will explain how you need to convert it.

Methods that don’t work, or work to slow:

• MagicISO: Seriously guys, everywhere on the internet it can be found that THIS is the best/quickest method to convert the DMG file. In fact: I couldn’t open one DMG file. Every file I tried MagicISO said it wasn’t a valid image file. Which was bullocks, because it was. So, don’t use MagicISO if I am concerned.
• ISOBuster: It doesn’t work really, it does indeed write the image file to DVD, but the DVD cannot be read afterwards.
• TransMAC: This actually does work, but it doesn’t keep the files intact, and you have no option to convert it to ISO format. It did however succesfully burn the image to DVD, and the best part: It was readable afterwards. But we don’t need a DVD, we need a bootable USB device. So this is not really a good option. Although, I want to congratulate TransMAC with it’s awesome application.
• Mount -t hfsplus -o loop imageFile.dmg: Because the DMG file (most probably) doesn’t have a valid HFS/HFS+ header you can’t mount this. And with no mount, no image.

Method that worked:

DMG2IMG, a linux application. It worked immediately like a charm! I must say that it didn’t work the first time, but that was because the DMG file was corrupt.

To install DMG2IMG you should do the following:

wget http://vu1tur.eu.org/tools/download.pl?dmg2img-1.6.tar.gz -O dmg2img-1.6.tar.gz
tar -xvf dmg2img-1.6.tar.gz
sudo apt-get install zlib1g-dev libssl-dev libbz2-dev
cd dmg2img-1.6
make
sudo make install
rm dmg2img-1.6.tar.gz
rm -R dmg2img-1.6

Mirror: dmg2img-1.6.tar.gz

After everything is successfully installed you can run the application.

dmg2img image_file.dmg

It will now create a file called ‘image_file.img’.

If everything is successfully converted (a basic method is to check the file size of both files, they should be around the same size, that is around the 7 Gb in my case). A fun thing to do is ‘file image_file.img’, it probably will return saying that file is an ISO DVD image. Which in our case, is perfect!

Step 2: Writing the image files to the respective USB memory sticks.

First we are going to create the boot USB, so stick the smallest one in the USB port (in my case the 1Gb USB stick). In Ubuntu (make sure you have downloaded the NBI_083RC3.img from the website) we are now going to write to the USB. This can be a very dangerous procedure (because you can nuke your hard drive) and must be handled and double checked with care.

In my case, the USB drive was located at ‘/dev/sdc’, but of course this will be something different at your station, so to be sure that you don’t copy paste everything right in the console, I am replacing it in my examples for ‘/dev/sdX’. You need to change that to the respective USB drive.

Copy the image file to the small USB:

sudo dd if=NBI_083RC3.img of=/dev/sdX

After a short while it should return to the command prompt and now you have a boot able USB for booting the installer.

We are now going to write the big (freshly converted) installer image to the second (around 8Gb) USB stick. Of course, I did the same with the device names here too.

sudo dd if=image_file.img of=/dev/sdX

After a long while, say 15 minutes in my case it returns to the command prompt.

Now we are finished with the preparations and we can begin installing it.

Step 3: Installing Snow Leopard.

Insert the first (smallest) USB stick into the left of the Dell Mini 10v while it is still off, and when you turn on the Dell Mini you immediately insert the big USB stick in the slot right under the other USB. Now press F12 to see what boot option you want to use, in our case select the USB Drive (it probably has a plus sign (+) in front of it). When it is booting, you have the option after a while to install select the ‘Mac OS Install DVD’, in my case. Just press return and go install the OS.

A few things:

1. You will need to format your hard drive to HFS+ Extended first. (option in the menu ‘Utilities: Disk Utility…’), otherwise it doesn’t display your hard drive.
2. After the installation everything is recognized. Wifi, sound, microphone, everything I needed. It doesn’t however recognize the keyboard. I still need to find out why I can’t use any of the CTRL, ALT, Windows keys. An update will follow about that.
3. The installation probably takes about a hour, however Mac keeps telling you that the installation still takes 30 minutes. It does tell you that the full hour. Installation of Snow Leopard is VERY slow.
4. WARNING: DON’T INSTALL THE UPDATE FROM APPLE. IF YOU DO, THE BIG 500MB UPDATE YOUR MINI10V WILL NOT BOOT ANY MORE AND NEEDS TO BE REINSTALLED.

I hope you found this work of fiction very useful.

My secret ode to my wife

This little post I am writing is about what I think about my wife. My wife, in short, is probably the most loveable woman in the world. She is -of course- my heart, my everything, but I think I don’t I say it much enough to her. I know she knows that I love her, but I don’t say it let it see at the same amount as I feel it. This of course is the fault of everyday life, working, sleeping, and of course the needed stress of this all. I wish I had more time with my wife, although we are being together for 24 hours in a row for  the last 9 months (just being moved to England etc. etc.). Our houshold can be described as a little Big Brother show. We are together every moment of the day, but still, I want to spend more time with her.

I love her, I genuinly love that woman. She is always there for me, even when I am in my crazy period and worry about things that -probably- don’t really exist. She almost always cooks for me and she is there when I am feeling ill. But now, she isn’t here, she is in the Netherlands at a friends wedding. She is gone for 3 days but I miss her immensly. And that, my friends, is the best feeling ever. I know she is coming back and I know it will take a couple of days, but my love is building up like a, like a, I don’t know. It builds up.

So this blog is about the secret ode to my wife, because I really don’t want her to read this. She would get way to cocky of it.

Well, I am off now, see you later.

Windows 7 Event log service crash

Since I have Windows 7 I have never been so happy with an operating system. It works like a charm and every (except for the usual NVidia problems) application is working even better then before. But… Since a couple of weeks my Event Log service began to crash. And because of my daily use of a VPN I saw that it was crashing, otherwise I probably didn’t see it. Restarting the Windows Event Log service worked, but it wouldn’t stay started, it justed stopped itself. After long searching on Google and trying at least a hundred different methods and none of them worked I thought I needed to do it myself (again).

So, it worked out pretty fine. Here is what I did:

The error I got everytime I accessed the event log:

The service is stopped, although it says ’start automatically’:

The first thing I wanted to do is debug the starting process. I seen a lot of computer problems in my life and the thing I know from it, is that it is best to try to isolate the problem. Debugging a Windows service though isn’t easy because we don’t have access to the sources, so we never know exactly where is went wrong. But nonetheless Microsoft supplies a little tool called Process Monitor what is a very handy tool to really debug a process. So I started the application and filtered it on ’svchost.exe’ what is the application starting the services (in full it means servicehost), so I knew that if I tried to start the service this little tool was called.

Soon I came to find out the following problem..

As you can see tried the service host to access the file ‘System.evtx’ and that apparently went wrong. Because he basically returned just one error it was clear that it needed to be the fault of ‘System.evtx’. After opening the directory I first tried an event log what didn’t create an error. So I double clicked ‘Security.evtx’, and I got the error again. Of course, I thought, because it tried to start the service again. So, I opened the file in Notepad. I got a bunch of machine language and that was good, not that I could read it, but it was good that the file opened.

I did the same with the ‘Security.evtx’ and opened it with Notepad.

Resulting in the following error…

A, everything was clear now. The file itself was corrupt and that is why it couldn’t open. Of course deleting the file was a good idea, because I knew that the Windows Event Log just created a new file. But that didn’t explain why the file was corrupt in the first place. So I scheduled a deep disk scan to scan my whole drive even for bad blocks.

Drive scan scheduled:

It turned out there was nothing wrong. So I deleted the ‘System.evtx’ file and restarted the Event Log service. And…. it worked! Happy ending for me!

New Java portfolio item: ProxyCheck

My wife likes to watch Dutch television on websites like uitzendinggemist.nl and rtlgemist.nl, but for some reason both the websites decided that you need a Dutch IP address for watching them. As you can understand, that is a hard thing to do if you live in the north of England. So, my wife decided she wanted to use a proxy for this, so she could fake that she was in the Netherlands. All well and good, she wrote down a few of IP addresses and ports of known Dutch proxies.

But as the experts all know, proxies aren’t always available for different reasons. My wife however couldn’t tell from sniffing the air which one of the proxies that exactly was, and she therefore needed to check every single proxy until she found one that worked. As a good husband and developer I said to her that I would develop a proxy on-line checker for her. And so I did. And because I liked it, I thought I could add it to my on-line portfolio as well at the same time.

So here is a piece of free software for you all to view/execute.

Remember: You need Java to run this application.

You can download the application on Megaupload.

Preparations for the installation of Windows 7

As we all know Windows 7 is going to be released next week Thursday (the 22nd of October) and because I think Windows Vista wasn’t that bad (of course, could be better. But seriously, it works) I thought it would be a good thing to buy the new Windows 7 (Professional). I am already preparing my computer for the installation of the new operating system. From past experience I know that it is a bad thing needing to back up everything seconds before you reinstall your computer, so since Vista I decided to do a week of preparation. That way I know for certain that I have all the files I need, and nothing is being left on the hard drive.

Of course this means for me a week without playing games (although I almost have no time playing games, I hate it when I can’t) and of course carefully selecting everything I want to keep.

Well, I keep you updated! I also have a Windows 7 release party (do I hear nerd somewhere?) at a very good friend of mine the 23rd of October. He told me that the Windows 7 party pack didn’t include any strippers or cocaine, so I am pretty worried that this will be a sausage fest (again).

Re: nvlddmkm problem in Microsoft Vista

Since Nvidia driver version 190.62 some things have changed. The problem is mysteriously coming back… but… (and there is a big but(t)). The driver successfully restarts itself.

For me this means that the monitor is going to flicker for a couple of seconds, the computer is running as if it is software rendering everything, and after that ‘poof’, everything back to normal.

I usually have this during Batman: Arkham Asylum. So Nvidia; whatever you did, I am comfortable with this solution.

One of the best things about England

Is probably the Sunday lunch. The Sunday lunch, oh my god, the Sunday lunch. For a man who ate in the Burj al Arab in Dubai, I must say that I ate better in the Black bull inn in Frosterley. Everytime I eat there (now is the second time) I find myself in an utopia of culinary delight. Of course I am not a food critic, and maybe is my taste not so highly developed in that sense. But I think more people agree with me that if you want to eat good food you are pretty good at the Black bull inn in Frosterley.

And the best thing of all, they switch their desserts! Oh how I love that cheesecake of them!

I may be Dutch, but I think I am on a good way becoming English!

PS. My bike is imported!

I like curves

2009-07-19_1532

Originally uploaded by mrcetrac

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