mcbeen.com

I’ve been experimenting off and on for some time now with OS X on alternative hardware. My experiences has been somewhat mixed, as I generally don’t pick middle of the road hardware for the systems I build.

But since I have extra time on my hands these days, I have pushed further into it than before. I have been met with moderate success, although I would never recommend this process to anyone. Its cheaper to buy a real mac.

Here’s my config:
ASUS P7P55D EVO motherboard running 915 firmware.
ATI 4770 Family Graphics

Noteworthy sites for reference:
http://www.insanelymac.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=199411
http://osx86.sojugarden.com/installer/
http://netkas.org/?p=315

Tips so far: Watch your security settings. Repair permissions before every boot while building. PFix can help tons with this (found on the second site). Don’t burn media, its not worth the money or time.

I’m currently wrestling with my graphic card, as its not fully supported.

I’ve made no attempts to hide my frustration with vista, and the incredible stupidity shown by the management over at Microsoft. The latest court cases bear out much of what I thought all along.

Well, after two full years, and many patches and updates, Microsoft has announced repeatedly that all of Vistas out of the gate hiccups have been cleared… though they have never actually acknowledged that there was a problem in the fist case. It’s selling like hotcakes!!!

Nothing has changed. At all.

Today I began retesting our internal applications on vista to see how our vendor compliance has come along. We can’t take their word for it, because they lie as much as Microsoft. We have to test ourselves.

Unfortunately, I never got that far. The problems with Vista started immediately.

#1) DON’T CANCEL AUTOMATIC UPDATES. EVER.
If you do, you will run into a nasty little problem, where vista THINKS all your updates are installed. The remaining updates have to be forced into service. This is improved by the fact that the Windows Update GUI happily allows you to click the “Update Now” button, only to be given back a cryptic fatal error after timing out. Looking online reveals this to be caused by “me” having dared to setup my own update server. The problem was corrected by using two other cryptic windows commands that are not limited to vista. “wuauclt /detectnow” and “wuauclt /downloadnow”. Running these in series a few minutes apart will kick vista in the ass and get it going again. BTW, when executed, neither gives any feed back. You could type in “wuauclt /youmomeatspants” with no error at all.

#2) UAC IS STUPID AS STUPID DOES
Don’t store your app installers on your network. UAC STILL cannot comprehend this simple reality. Why? because windows fucking blows. Its really simple. You will love it. UAC runs under a different user context than you. When you run your installer, UAC is invoked in it’s own security context, asking if you really really want to run the installer. When you click yes, UAC tries to execute it for you. Here’s the rub… UAC CAN’T SEE your installer. It can’t run it. You will get an error telling you the file cannot be found… but why? Because… windows does not allow multiple security contexts to map to the same drive letters. Microsoft COULD resolve everything to UNC paths, but, there are major legacy issues with some installers requiring driver letter to install. So… you are just fucked. You have to copy installers to your local hard-drive before you can install. Yes my domain is setup to trust both my drive letters and the UNC paths to the installers.

#3) UAC SUCKS SOME MORE… and crashes your windows too.
So, I was curious to know why exactly my windows session was using so much memory. I opened the task manager, and clicked on the process tab. Since the window doesn’t show all processes by default, I clicked “show all processes for all users”…. nothing happened… so I clicked it again… so I clicked it five times fast… oh no.
I got a UAC prompt… that I accepted. Then I got another. Then nothing. Except a ding every time I clicked anywhere on my screen. FAIL. UAC was up… in another context… and my screen didn’t flip. GREAT!

#4) cannot connect to services remotely.
In another amazing stab at admins everywhere. Windows 2008 and vista REQUIRE your helpdesk admins to also have vista. Otherwise you cannot remotely manage the machine settings. You can connect into the console… but in some cases that simple isn’t possible.

#5) Admin tools!
Would you believe that vista was not released with an admin tool kit? at all? You could force an install of the 2003 tools, but they were unstable and buggy. Luckily a short while back, this was “rectified” by the RSAT installer that was released shortly after SP1. I went ahead and tried to install it today, and was happy to see that it went through without any errors. Then I tried to use it. Nothing. The add-ins don’t show up in mmc… there is no admin tools folder added to the start menu. The admin tools folder in control panel still is missing all of my admin tools. great. So I go out… rerun the installer. Now it tells me that the installer in not applicable to my OS. WTF! Fine… I go and install the old buggy 2003 r2 tools. Vistas bitches about it… but swallows it anyways. But… when I try to go load the mmc? No go… “MMC cold not create the snap-in.”

Time to once again… delete my vista install… I’ll try again in two more years.

So.. here is your test. What does each sentence below mean? What does each button do?

and plugin…

I'm sure I could come up with a word for it. Lets see…

 Crap

 Useless

 Painful

 Imitation of an artificial flavor? 

I have used other dynamic playlist systems for years. I even have had some fairly good luck doing it within itunes with smart playlists. The solution that apple has come up with makes no sense. I cannot understand what their goal possibly could have been. They state that they use my meta data from my library to figure out what else I might want to hear… So… why the fuck would the system give me playlists full of songs with ZERO playcounts… and 1 star ratings? 1 star means don't fucking put it in my play lists… not, "Hai I LUV ths SoNG!!!" <sigh>

With pandora and the other good systems being squished by the record companies, I guess we have little hope. 

Dell Deals For EqualLogic – Forbes.com

If you hear a faint sobbing in the distance. It's probably me.

Equallogic has been one of the two pillars of success in my department. The combination of VMware and Equallogic has been amazing to watch. But in all reality. Any decent iSCSI system would have achieved the same results. We were onef their first customers, and have been very happy with their hardware. But we will not do business with Dell. They still owe us money for not honoring our warentees on hundreds of machines.

I have another meeting with Compellent on the 19th. They seem to have taken equallogic a step further.

Why oh why could they have not been bought by hp or EMC?

Ballmer: Microsoft will power the mobile devolution

Someone should let him know he is too late. And devices that can use this won't be out for another 8 months… at least… wow.

Microsoft’s System Center Mobile Device Management SCMDM 2008. Rolls of the tongue huh? In another demonstration as to why marketing cannot be allowed to run amuk, Microsoft has once again developed a fully branded letter and word jumble. Since it's from microsoft… it must have microsoft in the title. They are also pushing system center hard at the moment… so it has to be there to. Mobile is a key marketing term for the windows mobile division… they probably tried and failed to throw windows in the title. Of course we can't forget the year. Without adding the year… how will people know they need to upgrade!!! Gotta have that churn. Why would you want to run any thing from last year?

It's just too simple to name applications what they really are.

We having been using VMware here at work for quite a while now. We have the full setup, and it all works really good. But we have had a very annoying problem with VMware convertor for some time now. It migrates virtual machines to ESX server from Virtual server just fine. Also handles Physical-toVirtual great as well. But after you get the VMs on to your ESX box, and you want to reconfigure them, or move them back to virtual server, you can't. You get this error "unable to determine guest operating system". After search the forums and such, we found little advice. But a small line at the bottom of a discussion board on a third party site had the answer. "unplug your usb drives". What? Bullshit. That can't be it. I took a look around my computer, and sure enough I had a USB floppy plugged in. I removed it and tried again… It worked.

So. If you use VMware convertor… UNPLUG YOUR USB DRIVES BEFORE RUNNING!

I got my iPhone for work back in june for a few reasons.

• I really wanted a touch screen ipod.
• I wanted a video ipod with a larger screen.
• I wanted portable email on my phone.
• I wanted a phone that didn't suck.
• I needed to test out our new external mail system at work.

You can see that none of these issues were related to cost. Good PDAs cost tons. My last ipaq was almost $700.00. A 400 dollar iPhone was no big deal to me. Imagine my surprise when I  went over the phone bills with my boss, and discovered that comparable service through verizon on our Q's was almost $120.00! I currently pay around $70.00 for my service.  Over the lifetime of the service, this really adds up and more than covers the added cost of the device it self.

I'm really confused now about why people are claiming the iphone plans are expensive. Maybe they should double check their overages.