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Upgrading the MBP Hard Drive

By | 11 April 2009 | Technology | 1 Comment

For those of you paying attention, I have been having a difficult time with my laptop lately. I think that it is finally starting to buckle under the constant load I put on it. For the past couple of weeks I have been getting frequent “beach ball of death” lag cursors popping up while doing fairly mundane tasks. Sure, the program always comes back to life after a couple of seconds, but it makes the interface feel unbearably sluggish. A while ago I was planning on upgrading the hard drive to a 7200 rpm drive when Snow Leopard came out.

Unfortunately, after clearing out some system caches and various other troubleshooting techniques I noticed that some of my applications started crashing for no apparent reason. This annoyance forced my hand, so I went out and picked up a new drive today, since I am planning on putting a fresh install on it.

I picked up a Seagate Momentus 320gb drive to replace my fujitsu 160gb drive. This was the first time I have ever taken this computer apart. But, I have taken apart Apple laptops before so I knew the entire process was going to be a nightmare. Boy was I right.

I started taking the thing apart with microscopic screw drivers, and it did not take too long before I hit a road block. Apparently, they slipped in a couple of “T6 Torx” screws, just to fuck with you. My Torx screw driver set only went down to T7, so I had to make a trip to the hardware store to pick up another one. The guy there didn’t even know they make Torx screw drivers that small. So, I was left on my own to canvas the “hand tools” isle. Eventually I found what I needed, and of course it cost $6.99.

When I got back at it with the correct tools, things went fine for the most part. I did not the fancy plastic tool for remove the tape and what not, but I found a new play card worked just as well. Eventually, I got the old drive out and the new drive in, then went through the painful task of putting everything back together. And, it only took 4 hours, 28 minutes, and 32 seconds (compare that to the 9 minutes, and 12 seconds it took my to replace the hard drive in my dell laptop a year ago).

Once everything was back in place, I put in my Leopard install disk, and attempted to install the os. No dice, need to “repartition” the disk as “GUID” so I pulled up disk utility and did so, no problem. After that, the installer seemed to go on its merry way. I came back several minutes later to find the install finishing up. Then, just as it was getting ready to reboot this huge error log pops up, accompanied by an alert box stating something to the effect of “OS X unable to complete installation.” Fuck.

After that I went ahead and rebooted the machine, and the cursed setup wizard popped up, so in theory it may have worked. I wade through that piece of shit and get to the desktop so that I can reboot and attempt to install again. This time I flashed the PRAM and NVRAM (just incase some nasties were trapped in there from the previous drive). And now, I am in the process of zeroing out the drive to make sure it is properly writable. When that finishes I’ll attempt the installer again. I’ll post an update after my next round with the vile machine.

UPDATE: It took a little over an hour to zero out the drive, but I assume that helped since I started the installer again, and when I returned my laptop was sitting on the welcome screen. So, it must have installed, and rebooted on its own. And, I assume the errors would have have blocked that.

I went through and installed updates, and most of my apps without an issue. Unfortunately, the Adobe CS4 installed errorred out. I am pretty sure this was just some kind of permissions conflict when I copied over some of the application support files from my previous drive. After running the CS4 cleaner to dump the conflicted files the installed finished successfully. 

I didn’t install everything I had on there before, as I don’t really need everything that was on there. So, I’ll try running “lite” and see how it goes for a while.

Upgrading Firmware on the Kindle

By | 7 April 2009 | Technology | No comments

Today, I was trying to figure out how you’re supposed to upgrade the firmware on my Kindle2. I guess it isn’t something that they want people to think about, so there isn’t much information about it. Thus, I will share with you the answer I finally discovered.

By default, firmware upgrades are forced pushed, so you shouldn’t have to do anything, just make sure the following conditions are true:

  • You have wireless turned on (and are somewhere where you can connect to whispernet)
  • Your Kindle is in sleep mode

And, for those of you like me who are not will to wait for magic fairies to upgrade your Kindle, just head to the following url to get instructions to do it manually.

Kindle Manual Updates

Microsoft Hates Web Developers

By | 26 March 2009 | Technology | 3 Comments

I officially squandered and hour of my life updating my xp install under vmware fusion, and fiddling with ie to get 6, 7 and 8 all working along site each other so that I might have the displeasure of testing websites in all fucking three of the browsers.

After getting all the versions of ie installed, I took the new ie8 final out for a test drive. And, low and behold it still sucks, not surprise there though. I love how they don’t care about standards, and just keep introducing more fucking bugs for web developers to deal with. I can’t wait until the next site that I have to add yet another ie version specific stylesheet to. I mean seriously, I have one file for every other browser on the planet, but I expect to have to have three stylessheets just for ie.

I am seriously considering instituting a $1,000 surcharge to make sites ie6 compliant, but it seems absurd to me to devote such a huge portion of project development to debugging issues for a single, very obsolete, browser. Am I wrong? In the not too distant future I plan on modifying this site so that ie6 users are sent to a static page with download links to modern browsers, they will not longer be able to get to the actual blog and send me annoying messages about rendering quirks.

If you are viewing this post in internet explorer: what the fuck? Get with the program, and drop that piece of shit.

I could site here and rant about how awful internet explorer is, and how it takes years off my life, but it is getting late and I really should be sleeping, not venting. But, I won’t let that stop you from venting.

Anyone reading this is more than welcome to post a comment expressing their hatred for internet explorer. Any version is fair game, as they all suck.

Windows 7

By | 11 January 2009 | General, Technology | 2 Comments

I finally was able to get a copy of the Windows 7 beta (with key). I’ve installed it in vmware fusion to get it a spin. After playing with it for a little while here are some observations:

  • Appears to be more stable than vista
  • Has a more consistent look than vista
  • Loosy goosy interface isn’t as good as windows 2000.
  • Seems to be a bit faster than vista
  • IE8 renders this site correctly
  • IE8 is very unstable (tabs crashed and reloaded about ever 15 seconds and it kept “not responding”)

Symfony 1.2

By | 11 December 2008 | Technology | No comments

Recently, symfony 1.2 was released and I have to say it is quite wonderful. I started following symfony when symfony 1.1 was under development. I didn’t really like many of the things done in symfony 1.0 so I had passed over it whenever I was working on a new project.

But, symfony 1.1 began to introduce many great new feature, such as their object oriented form system that makes building forms much easier. Several other internal changes made it reasonable for me to start looking into. Unfortunately, nothing is perfect, and there were some annoyances in 1.1 that prevented me from using it as much as I would like. Fortunately, symfony 1.2 took care of many of those issues.

One of the nicer things is the new admin generator that uses the new form system. I hated dealing with the old system in the admin generator in 1.1. And, another nice thing was the inclusion of task configurations, so I no longer need to reference an application when I am executing a task (it was very counter intuitive).

The only gotcha that I experience was with the plugin system. Since they revamped the plugin manager, you are now required to define what plugins you want loaded in the project config file. In the past everything in the plugin directory was automatically loaded. Once I figured that out I was off the races.

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