Snow Leopard 64bit kernel mode and VMWare Fusion.

Looking around on the internet I discovered that by default Snow Leopard boots into 32bit kernel mode (I wondered why I wasn’t getting any incompatibility issues) and to force OSX to boot into 64 bit kernel mode you need to hold down the 6 & 4 keys on startup.

I tried this out and it worked I confirmed this by going to System Profiler and checking whether 64 bit kernel mode extensions were loaded.

I thought cool maybe 8GB RAM will work now I have booted into 64bit mode but I wanted to try out all my critical applications first because theres no point having 8GB RAM if I can’t run any of my programs.  One of my most critical applications is VMWare Fusion which threw the following error message when I tried to open it.

Looks like VMWare doen’t support 64bit OS X yet so I won’t bother trying out the extra 4GB module yet as there is no point if I can’t run VMWare.

Installed Snow Leopard and still 8GB not supported

As an update to my blog post yesterday I have installed OSX Snow Leopard today and retried my MacBook with 8GB RAM and still no joy.  Think this is ridiculous from Apple and they should release a statement to say whether 8GB of RAM will ever be supported on these machines or not.

Looks like I’m sticking with 6GB for the time being anyway.

8GB unstable using OSX Leopard on my MacBook Pro

I bought a MacBook Pro in December 2008 and at the time Apple was saying that 4GB of RAM is the limit on these machines. Then mid 2009 Apple released a revision of the MacBook Pro that supports up to 8GB RAM. Since the architecture of the systems are the same I thought I would purchase a 4GB module and upgrade to 6GB RAM.

This worked perfectly, I got a well needed performance boost on my machine and as I run Windows constantly in VMWare Fusion this helped out a lot.

So being brave I ordered another 4GB module hoping that 8GB should work fine, I installed the module and booted up, so far so good. I looked at system profiler and 8GB of RAM showed up and both module had an OK status. After about 60 secs the machine froze, I rebooted and tried again, same thing. I took the RAM out and made sure it was seated properly and tried again, same thing.

So my conclusion is that OSX Leopard doesn’t support 8GB of RAM on my late 2008 MacBook Pro. I’m eagerly awaiting Snow Leopard and hoping that this addresses the issue if not then I’ve just waste hoping that 8GB should work fine, I installed the modules and booted up, so far so good. I looked at system profiler and 8GB of RAM showed up and both module had an OK status. After about 60 secs the machine froze, I rebooted and tried again, same thing. I took the RAM out and made sure it was seated properly and tried again, same thing.

So my conclusion is that OSX Leopard doesn’t support 8GB of RAM on my late 2008 MacBook Pro. I’m eagerly awaiting Snow Leopard and hoping that this addresses the issue if not then I’ve just wasted 270 pounds. Nice

Trying to run the VS 2010 CTP Virtual PC image inside VMWare Fusion on Mac OSX

I wanted to try out the latest CTP of Visual Studio 2010 but the CTP comes in the form of a VPC 2007 image which meant I had to run it inside a virtual machine. Not a problem in most cases but I already run all my Windows applications inside VMWare Fusion and this got me wondering how Virtual PC 2007 would run inside VMWare Fusion if it would run at all.

The answer is sadly no, I got the error message below when trying to boot up the VM. Looks like I’ll have to natively boot Vista to try out the VS 2010 CTP, no big deal but would have been kind of fun to run a VM inside a VM. Oh well.

My new aluminium MacBook Pro finally arrives

On Tuesday my shiny new MacBook Pro finally turned up and I set about installing and setting up everything I need to begin using it for work and play. Unfortunately I’ve been struck down with the flu for the last few days so getting everything installed and running has taken much longer than it should have, but I seem to be there now.

I thought I would share some photos and my initial thoughts on the MBP and hopefully give people who need to run Windows some piece of mind.

Ok so let’s start with the screen, at first I thought a glass screen would be too reflective but it really isn’t, the LED display is so clear and bright that there are no problems at all. My second reservation was the trackpad and how it would work with Windows under bootcamp. I can safely say that the experience is even better than it was on my previous MacBook, with the addition of Tap to Click and being able to assign a corner of the trackpad for right click it’s just much better than before and a joy to use. I’ve heard some people say that the experience is terrible and scrolling is useless but I don’t find that at all. I had to adjust the scrolling increments from 3 to 1 but that’s it.

I installed Vista Ultimate with no problems at all, all the drivers worked straight away, again people have been reporting that the drivers don’t work etc but they most definitely do. I then set about installing VMWare Fusion 2, I previously used Parallels but decided to switch, and I’m glad I did because VMWare seems to be a much smoother and faster experience than Parallels, also I find Unity a much better experience than Coherence.

Below is a photo of Vista’s experience index on the following spec:

• 2.8 GHz Intel Core 2 duo
• 320GB Serial ATA 7200 RPM
• 4GB 1066MHz DDR3 SDRAM
• NVIDIA GeForce 9400M + 9600M GT with 512MB.

And here are some photos of the machine itself:

All in all the MacBook Pro is an excellent piece of kit and I have no regrets at the moment in spending just under 2K on the machine.

Ordered a new 2008 MacBook Pro

I’ve been thinking about getting a new laptop for a while now and having been immensely happy with my current MacBook I immediately sat up and took notice when apple released their new range of MacBook and MacBook Pro’s. I went to the Apple store to take a closer look and had my reservations about the new glass screens being too reflective and the lack of a mouse button hindering my windows work.

So I went off and started looking at alternatives, now it will be primarily my work laptop so that means running Windows Vista, I didn’t want to lose OS X for my day to day stuff like photos, videos, surfing etc because I love using OS X but if I found a better laptop on the market I would definitely have dropped Apple all together.

I didn’t put a budget on a laptop and was willing to spend as much as I needed to get the best laptop out there, I searched Dell, Sony even custom built laptops like Alienware but I just couldn’t find anything that got me excited so I kept putting it off and revisiting the Apple store even now and again contemplating what to do. I had decided that Apple was still the way to go and was at first looking at the 13″ MacBooks because I liked the portability. However I’m mostly working on site without an external monitor so thought a 15″ with higher resolution might be better, and the weight and size of the new MB Pro’s had dropped which made it a more portable machine anyway.

Also I have been running my windows applications in Parallels lately from my Boot Camp partition which has been a great experience even on my current 2.0GHz, 2GB RAM MacBook, and thought a beefy MB Pro could only make that experience better.

So last Thursday I made the jump and purchased a 15″ MacBook Pro which I’m currently waiting to arrive. The spec I purchased was:

• 2.8 GHz Intel Core 2 duo
• 320GB Serial ATA 7200 RPM
• 4GB 1066MHz DDR3 SDRAM
• NVIDIA GeForce 9400M + 9600M GT with 512MB.

This configuration comes with a nice profitable price tag of £1,952.01 which is far too expensive for a laptop in my opinion, but I wanted to get the best machine I could so I suppose this is the price you pay for premium quality. I know many people won’t agree but that’s life.

My only reservation is this is all brand new hardware and I have heard there may be some problems with Boot Camp drivers but there are mixed reports on this and will save my judgement for when I have tried it all out myself.

Will follow up with a post when the machine arrives.

Downgrading iPod Touch 1.1.2 and installing iPhone apps

This Christmas Santa brought me a nice 16GB iPod Touch which I’ve been after for a while now. Out of the box the iPod Touch is brilliant it does everything you would expect of an iPod and more, however the geek in me wanted to see if there was any third party applications that I could install. After searching around the net for a while I came across http://jailbreakme.com which basically installs and application that allows you to download and install third party apps straight from your iPod Touch. Great I thought but there was one problem, my iPod came out the box with version 1.1.2 of the firmware and wouldn’t allow me to install the AppSnap application.

After more searching around I settled on the fact that I needed to downgrade my firmware to version 1.1.1 if I was going to jailbreak the iPod. There is a way to upgrade back to firmware 1.1.2 after jailbreaking your iPod but I didn’t see the point as there wasn’t much difference between the two versions plus I read a few places that certain application wouldn’t work with version 1.1.2 anyway.

Below is a step by step guide on how to first downgrade your iPod Touch to version 1.1.1 then install Mail and Maps apps from the iPhone, bear in mind that this is not supported by Apple and I will not be responsible for any damage that happens to your iPod. Also the restore WILL ERASE everything on your iPod and restore it to it’s factory settings.

One more thing to note is this step by step guide is being done on a Mac so certain steps may be slightly different for Windows, but any half tech savvy user should be able to make it work on Windows.

My iPod Touch looked like this out of the box, as you can see version 1.1.2 of the firmware is installed.

• The first thing you need to do is to download firmware 1.1.1 to your computer, the file is around 150Mb. You can get it from here: http://appldnld.apple.com.edgesuite.net/content.info.apple.com/iPod/SBML/osx/bundles/061-3932.20070927.p23dD/iPod1,1_1.1.1_3A110a_Restore.ipsw
• The next step is to connect your iPod Touch to your computer with the USB cable.
• Open up iTunes if it’s not open already (I’m using version 7.5) and on the main iPod screen hold down the Option key on Mac and click Restore. You should get an Open File dialog from which you can select the 1.1.1 version of the firmware you downloaded earlier.
• iTunes should now extract your firmware and begin restoring your iPod, follow the on screen instructions and wait until your iPod is fully restored and shows back up in iTunes with version 1.1.1. Don’t worry if the restore errors just keep trying it and it will eventually work. After your iPod is fully restored you should see the new firmware installed from the settings -> about menu.

• On your iPod open Safari, navigate to http://jalbreakme.com , scroll down to the bottom of the screen and click Install AppSnap. Safari should now close itself, the application should install and the iPod should then restart itself.
• Once your iPod has restarted you should see an extra application on your springboard called Installer. From here you can start installing third party applications direct to your iPod.

Now your iPod is open we can begin installing the iPhone apps. Currently only the Mail and Maps applications work on the iPod so i’ll show you how to install these.

• You need to download the iPhone apps from here http://rs75.rapidshare.com/files/61867543/iPhone_1.1.1_Apps.zip to your computer. Once downloaded unzip the files to a folder on your machine.
• We now need a way to transfer these applications to your iPod we do this by using an SFTP client from out computer. On the Mac I’m using Cyberduck which is a free download.
• On the iPod we need to install OpenSSH which allows us access to the iPod file system, OpenSSH relies on the BSD Subsystem package so we first need to install this on our iPod. Open the Installer app on your iPod and goto Install. Click All Packages and scroll down to BSD Subsystem. Click on Install and wait for the package to be installed.
• Now we have the BSD Subsystem installed we can install OpenSSH so do the same as above but scroll down to the OpenSSH package and install that.
• Open up Cyberduck or whatever SFTP client you are using and connect to your iPod’s IP address which can be found by going to Settings -> WiFi and clicking the little blue icon next to your wireless connection. The username and password you need to use is: username = root, password = alpine.
• Now you have an open SFTP connection to your iPod you can begin copying the iPhone files across. Start with copying the GMM.Framework folder to /System/Library/Frameworks/
• Now copy the Maps.app to the /Applications/ folder.
• We now need to open an SSH connection to your iPod so we can alter the permission settings for Maps.app. If you’re on Mac simply open a Terminal window and type

  SSH [enter your iPods IP address] –l root

  You will be prompted to enter a password, enter alpine and press enter.

• Now enter the command:

  Chmod a+x /Applications/Maps.app/Maps/

  After a restart the Maps application should now work.

• Now to install Mail you need to copy MobileMailSettings.bundle to /System/Library/PreferenceBundles/ and MobileMail.app to /Applications.
• Now to set the permissions for Mail we need to SSH onto the iPod again and run the following command:

  Chmod R a+x /Applications/*

And thats it! Now you should have Maps and Mail running on your iPod plus be able to download some great third party apps from the Installer application.

Mac OS X Leopard

So last Friday Apple released it’s latest and greatest operating system entitled ‘Leopard’ to the UK market. I am fortunate enough to have a brand new Apple store open literally ten minutes from my house and this meant I could jump off the train after work Friday and go purchase a copy.

I was in and out of the Apple store in minutes and made my way home to spend my Friday night installing Leopard and Vista (how sad). I opted for a complete reinstall of both OS X and Windows Vista, I always do a clean install of operating systems just because you hear so many horror stories about upgrading.

I shared my hard drive space equally this time between Windows and OS X this is because I knew I would be using Vista alot and last time I barely left enough space to install Visual Studio.

Anyway I backed up all my files to an external drive and went to remove my bootcamp beta partition only to find that the beta had expired and I couldn’t do anything with it. This was slightly worrying but I hoped after installing Leopard I could remove partitions created with the beta which was exactly what I did.

It took me no more than 30 mins to completely install Leopard and about an hour to install Vitsa, mainly because I only have an upgrade version which meant installing XP first.

This time when creating a bootcamp partition you don’t need to create a driver disc as all the Windows drivers now come on the Leopard disc. I installed all the drivers and was happy to see that my iSight now works in Windows and I can now finally use it with Windows Live Messenger.

I stayed up until 3.30am reinstalling all my software onto Vista (Visual Studio, SQL Server etc etc) and I’m now up and running perfectly.

As far the improvements in Leopard go Im really happy, the whole OS seems to have had a slight performance increase and I love the new dock. I havn’t had much time to delve into every improvement but I’m sure I’ll find some nice new features as I work with it more and more.

For anyone wondering whether they should upgrade or not I would say unless you really want to be running the latest version then there not much you need to be worrying about. I mean, to me there is not enough new stuff to make a compelling argument for upgrading, most people (like me) will be upgrading to just try out Leopard and have the latest OS so to be honest theres nothing to lose sleep over.

Learning Objective-C

Since buying a MacBook I have been telling myself I need to get involved with a bit of Cocoa and learning how to write programs for OS X this involved learning a new language – Objecttive-C.

I already have a good grasp on C/C++ and Obj-C is basically just an extention to the C language so I thought it wouldn’t be too hard. I must admit I have taken to it pretty well, and can see the advantages to less strongly typed languages.

I had to get my head around the new method calling syntax which is very similar to smalltalk and the notion that you should think of object orientation in a different way but it’s always good to open your mind up to different paradigms.

Obj-C takes a different view to OO in that instead of always ‘subclassing’ objects you should create new ones and ‘cosume’ existing ones. This is common with less strongly typed languages as far as I can gather and it’s more about what objects know about other objects rather than an inheritance chain that is more common to strongly typed languages.

I bought Cocoa Programming for OS X from amazon because the Apple documentation is more for reference than learning. I’m nearly half way through it in a couple of days so I would definately recommend this book very highly if your looking to learn Cocoa.

Anyway hopefully I’ll be able to post up my first real Cocoa program soon.