Eric Santiago

Netbook undergoes a OSX change - Part 2

So after being able to successfully load Mac OSX on "my" MSI Wind U120-024US, I had to take inventory and see what did and did not make the transition.

First order of business was to upgrade the Bios from .10C to .10F. MSI does a great job of getting you lost on its website. (I suspect Engrish may not be the native language of the web team. ) In any case, I finally tracked down the latest bios and , even better, the user manual .

This post gave very clear instructions on updating the 120 Bios. Creating the bootable USB drive for DOS was simple enough having had practice creating several by this point. I copied over the three files from the download and rebooted the Wind. On my first attempt I got "ERROR: Bios has no flash information available". According to MSI's FAQs that error is asking you to plug in the power cord. Because an message reading, "Please plug in the power cord" would be confusing. I did that and it worked on the second pass.

Next, I wanted to upgrade the OS to 10.5.7. I knew I might be pressing my luck but I pushed on anyway. The update itself went smoothly. After rebooting, the mouse and keyboard didn't work, but I expected that from some of the posts I had read. I hooked up my USB mouse and keyboard to install the necessary drivers. (BTW if you write your system password to a text file on the desktop prior to the update you can save yourself the need for the keyboard by just using the mouse to copy and paste when prompted for it.) Of course I made a huge mistake and used the 10.5.6 'Everything You Need 'package from the main wiki page. DON"T DO THAT. Installing the mouse/keyboard drivers and Realtek wireless worked. But, when I got to the part about updating the video ktext, I rebooted to a grey screen with funky black lines all over the place. More Zebra than Leopard. (That's a Mac pun, kids.) 

Well, I solved that mishap by hitting the "any" key (A 'lil tech support humor here. This is as funny as it gets, folks.) during the darwin boot screen, entering -x at the boot options prompt. This got me into safe mode and I was able to delete the ktexts I had installed and then restore the originals which had been given a .orig suffix. That's two hours of my life I won't get back.

Take two; I was able to find a package with all the relevant drivers for 10.5.7 on this post. Again I pressed my luck and decided to select the options for Realtek Ethernet and the Trackpad despite some allusions to issues by both the author and several posts. Living on the edge here. After getting caught in an endless reboot cycle, I realized that might not have been a good idea. Safe mode didn't work this time. So I booted into single user mode using the -s option at the Darwin prompt. Then I used the instructions here to delete the RealtekR1000.kext. If you get the read-only error like I did use the mount -rw -a command suggested in the first comment of that thread.

Take two point five; Ok booted successfully again. Now time to review the update items and see what does/does not work.

• Video - Booted to 800 x 600 but a quick check of the display pref pane showed options for 1024 x 800. Awesome.
• Network - Wireless still worked from my previous install. The Realtek RTL8187SE wireless drivers are also included in the MSi WindOSX86 Upgrade Pack v1.5. The wireless app pops up on every boot which is annoying. I used the Auto-Close for Realtek app suggested on the OS X post install tweaks and fixes post and that seems to have resolved that. As mentioned previously, Ethernet driver was a total bust. It turns out that the first driver package installed the RealtekR1000.kext driver to the location /System/Library/Extensions/IONetworkingFamily.kext/Contents/PlugIns/ which is for a retail install. The correct location is /System/Library/Extensions/. So essentially I had the same driver in two seperate locations. Booting into single user mode and deleting the first one fixed the errors and got the ethernet working perfectly. More details in this post.
• Battery - The guage appears on the toolbar as expected. Calculates percentage and time albeit slowly. Fully charged with a 6-cell battery estimate was 3:50 battery life. I tried the VoodooPower app suggested on the aforementioned post and didn't see any significant change right away. However after comming out a sleep mode the battery guage showed 5:30. That's almost too good to be true. I left it on for a while and noticed issues with hiberate and random reboot requests. Went into single user mode and deleted the kext.
• Sleep mode - Closing the lid puts the notebook into sleep instantly and hitting the power button brings it back just as quickly which is where my Windows laptop falls woefully short.
• Audio - Integrated speaker works fine. Headphone did not. I had success with Chud/Audioee4Wind from the post install thread but I hated having to use script and swtiches to slect between the external speakers and headphones. VoodooHDA works much better and switches between the two automatically. You'll need to uninstall Audiee4Wind and delete the AppleAzilla.kext prior to installing it. Getting the external mic jack to work took a bit of fiddling with the settings in the Voodoo pref pane. I used the following; (Setting the recording level seems to be the critical piece. Other settings refine the quality.)
• • Speaker: PCM 100%, Speaker 100%, Mic 100%, IMix 25%, Recording Level 80%
  • Mic: Speaker 100%, Mic 100%, Input mix 25%
• Camera - Need to hit Fn + F6 to turn it on. Had no luck with CamTwist. ManyCam worked like a charm with Skype. You have to set ManyCam to start on boot and set the camera in Skype preferences to ManyCam after it loads.
• Trackpad -Worked fine after running the 1.5 upgrade pack. I decided to try installing Two-Finger scrolling but the mouse was nearly unusable afterwards. It did scroll, but only down and not up and even that took pressing rather hard. The cursor twitched and jumped all over the place. I made some attempts to use the FFscroll pref pane to tweak the settings (hard to do with a disfunctional mouse) but it never seemed to save the changes and half the time would not open at all. I'll leave that to braver souls than I.
• Key Mapping - I wanted to use the windows key as the command key. System Preferences > Keyboard & Mouse > Modifier Keys. Changed Option Key to map to Command and Command Key to map to Option. Now I can Windows + C to copy and Windows + V to paste. Maybe I'll find a little sticker to label the key better.
• Bluetooth - I don't know if this even comes with my model nor do I have anything to test it with.

Final Impressions: Getting this Mac clone set up took quite a bit more effort than I originally anticipated. Ironically, all this command line bios-changing driver error fixing blue screening reminded me of setting up a Windows machine. Which was not necessarily a bad thing. I learned quite a bit more about the Mac OS. I think with today's computers being much more like sealed devices, people learn less about what is under the hood and make these things work. I remember when my dad bought one of the first PC's. We turned it on and the screen blinked a cursor at you. It took my brother and I days to get just DOS running. These days computers are like cars; everyone knows how to drive, but they pay some guy big bucks just cause he knows how to change the wiper fluid. Not that I mind. I'm complaining all the way to the bank.

Netbook undergoes a OSX change

My girlfriend got a shiny white MacBook several months ago and I've been seriously sweating it. (I'm borrowing it right now) For one, it turns on in the time it take my crappy laptop to inform me that its from Dell. Don't get me started on trying to get XP to hibernate/sleep. I just leave it on 24/7 to save myself 30 minutes of "Loading..." hell each morning.

So when she decided to get a Netbook for her monthlong stay in South Africa, I jumped at the chance to make a mini mac clone. So I 'persuaded' her to buy a MSI Wind 120 after doing some Google research which cited that as one of the models well-suited for 'hack-a-mac'.

Working in the SAaS sphere for a few years now, I haven't done the whole fdisk, bios, etc thing in a while. Luckily there were a lot of posts on the MSI Forums to help.

I started by purchasing a 4GB USB drive, downloaded MSIWindOSX86.iso from the Pirate Bay, and started following the instructions at http://wiki.msiwind.net/index.php/Bootable_Flash_Drive_for_OSX_(using_a_Mac) 

1. Using the MacBook, popped in the USB key
2. Open Disk Utility app
3. Click on destination USB
4. Click on Partition
5. In Volume Scheme pull down menu select 1 Partition
6. Click on Options
7. Radio Button Master Boot Record, click ok
8. Format Mac OS Extended Journaled
9. Apply
10. When the formatting is complete, click Restore
11. Mount the WindMSIOSX86.iso image (that means double click on it for us less Mac-literate) it will appear on the left sidebar of the Disk Utility now
12. Drag the mounted WindMSIOSX86.iso to the ' SOURCE ' section
13. Drag the usb drive partition to the ' Destination ' section
14. Check ' erase destination ' click ok. Restore to USB will take about 10 minutes or so...
15. Download the latest Chameleon EFI

OK the last step took me quite a while. Most forums mentioned the Chameleon DMG and direct you to the Developers site. But all I could find was the source code for the latest stable version 1.0.11 not the compiled package. I tried the 2.0 RC1 package but it kept stalling at the message "Writing Package Receipt. It took some searching to finally find a copy at FilesTube; Chameleon-1.0.11-installer.dmg.

1. Double click the chameleon dmg to mount it, run through its prompts and install it to your flash / usb key - this makes it bootable.Make sure to change the target because it will default to your Mac's harddrive.

Now you need to prep the MSI Wind. I didn't want to delete the recovery or windows partitions in case things went south. Luckily the Wind came with three partitions, recovery, OS_Install, and a third empty partition. I ended up creating a Ubuntu live bootable from a spare 1GB drive following the suggestion on this post; http://forums.msiwind.net/viewtopic.php?f=32&t=4701 and then deleting the third partition. I tried going through the next step leaving the space unpartitioned, but I couldn't get past the select a destination step in the Mac OS installer. So I went back and created and unformatted primary partition.

1. Plug Flash / USB key into msi wind, boot from it (either change in bios or hit f11 for boot menu) 
2. Run through the installer till you get to the select a partition screen. You'll see the recovery partition and windows partition with red exclamation marks on them meaning you can't use those. Open the Utilities menu and open Disk Utility. From here you can erase the unformatted partition and format it as  Mac OS Extended Journaled. (You may in fact have been able to delete and format the partition in one step saving yourself the previous boot from Ubuntu.)
3. Close the disk utility. You should now have a new partition without the red mark and that you can select.
4. Click next till you get to the install button. Before clicking that click the Customize button. Expand the options until you see Kernel. Uncheck that option. (I don't now why but a bunch of post mentioned this. I think it has to do with making your os able to handle updates)
5. Run the install. It should take a few minutes and reboot your Wind automatically.

Now when my machine rebooted, I got a HFS+ error. Now the last post I cited suggested using Ubuntu to fix the boot flags. That didn't work for me. I ended up using the suggestion here

1. Boot from bootable flash drive back into macosx installer
2. Open Terminal from the Utilities menu
3. At the command prompt type

fdsk -e /dev/rdisk0
flag 3
update
write
quit
reboot

1. All 3 partitions will show in darwin bootloader, with osx the default.

Success!! My wind booted to Mac OSX with the gloriously satisfying intro movie. The next steps are to make sure everything works. Already I'm seeing some issues with the wi-fi. I'll post more as I figure it all out.

Google saves me from certain death

I was visiting Toronto this past weekend and spent a nice sunny day touring Toronto Island. I'm having a lovely time and I see a long row of hedges with a sign near an opening. Sure enough it turns out to an entrance to a maze straight out of The Shining. I'm game, so I go in meandering through the twists, turns, and dead ends. But, after 15 minutes I'm getting bored, hot, and attacked by mockingbirds left and right. So, before I start seeing any twins and rivers of blood, I whip out my trusty blackberry and bring up Google Maps Mobile. I get a fix on my location and start following the directional arrows to freedom.

Winning Combo for Non-profits: Salesforce + Google Apps

Google and Salesforce announced a new product today joining two of the best web-based tools into one suite. Check out this video for an overview of Salesforce + Google Apps, http://www.google.com/a/help/intl/en/admins/video/salesforce_video.html

At my former non-profit, I loved that Salesforce did not require an infrastructure to support. I kept eyeing my problem-prone Exchange server thinking, "Now if I can only get rid of you." Google Apps was a possibility but the migration was daunting and it didn't integrate with Salesforce as Outlook does. With the added value of integration, the payoff for migration becomes that much greater. Especially when you take into account that both Google and Salesforce offer product donations to 501c3 non-profits.

More info on Google apps for non-profits.
More info on Salesforce for non-profits.

Any startup or grassroots org without legacy systems shouldn't even think twice about a platform like this. No equipment. Low cost implementation. Free licenses.   

http://www.salesforce.com/products/google/get_started.jsp

RIP: Sony Dream Machine 1983 - 2008

Most people find it comical that a career technologist like myself is not the gadget geek one would expect. Case in point; I bought my first iPod, (in fact, my first digital music player) today. To compliment my shiny new Nano, I also purchased an iHome IH9B6 to play tunes out loud. An added benefit; I can wake up to a different alarm than the one I've heard for the last 25 years.
    It is with some sadness that I replace the Sony Dream Machine (Model ICF-C10W) that was given to me as a birthday present two and a half decades ago. In an age of planned obsolescence, it is amazing to have a personal connection to a electronic device that you have had since childhood. I'd like to think that my new iPod will last that long. Somehow I doubt this.
    Honestly, I'm less surprised that my teenaged clock radio works than the fact that it has its own web page. Thanks to AudioIdiots.com for helping me date myself.

Google stops riding the subway?

Maybe with all its money, Google has turned its nose on NYC subway travel and opted to take a car service instead.

When Google Maps first came out a big request among New Yorkers was the lack of markers for subway stops. So there was great excitement when, in February of 2007, Google added subway stations to New York City maps. By great excitement, I mean the city stopped, said "Cool.", and continued rushing to wherever it was going.

Recently, I've moved so I'm taking a bunch of lines that I'm not familiar with. I use Google Maps regularly and noticed something. The stations are still there, but the train lines are missing. Now this is such a subtle change that I wasn't even sure that they had been there in the first place. Then I asked a few friends, who felt relieved in realizing that they were not only ones going crazy wondering.

The above image shows what Google Maps used to show; station and lines. Now see below.

Where are the subway lines?  As any New Yorker can tell you knowing a station's location is near useless without knowing what lines stop there. Why the change? I haven't been able to find any announcements from Google thus far.

For now, I'm forced to rely on Hopstop.com, and a great recent find, the subway map at onNYTurf.com. If anyone can shed some light on this mystery, please do so.

Update 12/15/2007 - Google didn't remove the train lines as much as hide them. Clicking on the station will give info on the lines servicing that station. Doh.

The 'Get Directions" links give driving directions only, but perhaps there will be links to Google Transit (Thanks, Tom) in the future. Though that service does not yet include New York.

Salesforce and MediaWiki sitting in a tree, Q*U*E*R*Y*I*N*G

As I've mentioned in previous posts, I use MediaWiki as an intranet for my non-profit organization. It's been a great way to document our implementation of Salesforce. 

With a number of users creating their own reports, I was looking for a way to document all the custom objects and fields we have. Moreover, I wanted it to dynamically update when future changes where made. So, I started playing with PHP and the Salesforce API as I've done for other useful widgets we use. Using the describe call, I was able to start retrieving that meta-data with a lot more detail than I expected.

The harder part involved shoehorning the standalone php code into the proper format of a MediWiki extension. After getting over that learning curve, I started getting ambitious and added a query option to the extension so end users could retrieve records using their own select statements. While writing queries using the api is bread and butter stuff, it was an interesting exercise to write code that could accommodate a user defined query. Normally, the select statement is hard coded as are the output fields. In this case, I had to write code that could handle any number of fields at runtime. Moreover, it had to handle queries that could  potential reference multiple objects and use varied notation styles. After a number of trials using string parsing, I was able to come up with a half-way elegant solution looping through the Sobject arrays. It's funny what makes geeks proud. **pats self on back**

So after cleaning it all up and commenting the hell out of it, my baby is ready for the world. Version 0.1.0 of the Salesforce/MediaWiki Extension took its first steps today. Make your Papa proud.

Note: Don't post requests for troubleshooting here. Add them to the MediaWiki page, http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Salesforce. Thanks.

Google Checkout vs Paypal for online donations

Recently, Google announced that is making Google Checkout free for Non-profits to collect donations. The two keywords "free" and "Google" collectively spurned a slew of emails from all the NGO listservs I subscribe to. Naturally, I was interested but being the cynical New Yorker I am was more inclined to read the fine print before getting up on that bandwagon.

Google is waiving transactional costs for donations to Non-profits using Google Checkout. However, the fine print is that the offer is good until 2009 after which fees are charges at a "low 2% + $0.20 per transaction". In other words, not free. Ok. So, its a generous albeit short-term offer. How does that  compare to PayPal, another low cost service popular among small and mid-sized non-profits? Paypal uses the following sliding scale;

Monthly Sales	Price Per Transaction
$0.00 USD-$3,000.00 USD	2.9% + $0.30 USD
$3,000.01 USD-$10,000.00 USD	2.5% + $0.30 USD
$10,000.01 USD-$100,000.00 USD	2.2% + $0.30 USD
> $100,000.00 USD	1.9% + $0.30 USD

So even post 2009, Google Checkout is certainly cheaper unless you tend to get a lot of dot-com millionaires sending you $100k donations via your website (not likely) or have a very high volume of smaller donations (a nice problem to have). So it seems for larger orgs, Paypal may scale better.

Now we come to functionality. Both Google and Paypal offer cut and paste code for creating "donate now" buttons, customizable transaction pages, and  API's. However, from what I can gather Google Checkout requires that donors create a Google Account. That might not seem like a big deal, but the fact is not everyone wants to and when people are giving you money you want to make that as painless a process as possible. On our site, we inform potential donors that they do not need a Paypal account to use our donate button to address any reluctance up front.

Unfortunately, I think Google might be more interested in gathering personal data and "upselling" people to it's other services (Gmail, Google Apps, etc) whereas PayPal is satisfied with the transaction fee. That's just my opinion, but  personally I prefer the pseudo-anonymity of Paypal's service. Most retail sites now offer an option at checkout for creating an account or just doing a one-time purchase. Only after using a retailer a few times might I feel inclined to trust them with my personal info. Same might apply here.

I'll probably end up having both services on our donation page and let the donors vote with their dollars.

1983...

I was particularly aghast at a recent NYT's article; China Enacting a High-Tech Plan to Track People.

Starting this month in a port neighborhood and then spreading across Shenzhen, a city of 12.4 million people, residency cards fitted with powerful computer chips programmed by the same company will be issued to most citizens.

Data on the chip will include not just the citizen’s name and address but also work history, educational background, religion, ethnicity, police record, medical insurance status and landlord’s phone number. Even personal reproductive history will be included, for enforcement of China’s controversial “one child” policy. Plans are being studied to add credit histories, subway travel payments and small purchases charged to the card.

Scary. Essentially, the State seeks to have a birth to death record of every citizen's activity. Before you say "that can't happen here", remember the US federal government's push towards a national ID card. How easily does this digital id then become a RFID tag implanted under the skin? No need to swipe it then. You'll be tracked as you move around the city. I hate to sound like an alarmist, but as any technologist will tell you, all of this is well within the capabilities of current technology. Note to self: renew ACLU membership.

Helpful AntiVirus Tool

So, often trojan/worm/malware programs will disable your internet access to prevent you from updating your virus definitions or using any of the online scanners out there. Stinger, by McAfee, is a very helpful and free stand-alone virus scanner. This is a good tool for doing a single scan of your desktop when you suspect something might be amiss, but should not be a substitute for AV software that can prevent infections in the first place.