I have been away from the Hackintosh community (and the 1525 community) for some time now, as updates have been easy and I haven’t had to do any DSDT modding or replacing of a larger number of kexts on an update to update basis, but I knew 10.6.8 in preparation for Lion was not going to be just your normal update.  So, I went out and did my reading… Hackintoshin’ is all about “community” and it’s this community and the many sites together that all compliment one another and create the community as it is.  I suggest EVERYONE visit them all and READ, READ, READ!

I want to thank and give FULL CREDIT to Slice (for all his offerings to the Dell 1525 community, especially for the modded DSDTs), the Voodoo/Chameleon crew for the massive number of updates between RC3 and RC5!, Nozyczek for all of his super hard work supporting the 1525 and the various updates for Snow, and lastly Jomijoy.  Between visiting InsanelyMac, nozyczek’s site, and reading the comments from Jomijoy at MacYourPC, I was able to gain enough information about what had taken place in my “down time,” and what was expected and needed for the 10.6.8 update.

When you get to 10.6.8 and realize how much of the OS and what is needed is now vanilla, it will blow you’re mind.  The 1525 is getting closer and closer to a “real” Mac everyday with all of these peoples’ hard work and experimentation.

I’m providing here the steps needed to get to 10.6.8 and have your HackBook Pro 1525 running better, booting faster, appearing generally more snappy, and being more “native” than it ever has been before!

Step 1:

MAKE SURE YOU ARE UPDATED AND RUNNING IN-FULL ON Snow Leopard 10.6.7 *AND* that your Dell 1525′s BIOS is at A17 (not A16 or A15, etc.) The BIOS must be at A17 as that’s what Slice’s modded DSDT was created for, and it’s the only way to guarantee that things will work as they should.  And, of course, you should have performed a FULL SYSTEM BACKUP prior to any of this!  I am not responsible for you killing you machine, you solid install, etc., etc.

Now, you might say you have a problem as you can’t update the BIOS (EXE) in SL, and you’re right. But, if you have access to a Windows machine, here:

Download ‘Bootable USB Drive Creator Tool 1.0′:

http://www.softpedia.com/progDownload/Bootable-USB-Drive-Creator-Tool-Download-179880.html

This will allow you to image FreeDOS or MS-DOS to a USB stick and have it be bootable right into that OS.

Dell’s A17 BIOS Update, while appearing as a Windows app, will also run in DOS, so let’s download that at:

ftp://ftp.us.dell.com/bios/1525_A17.EXEs

This is the latest A17 BIOS image for the 1525. Copy this to your newly formatted DOS-based USB stick. Put the stick into the Dell, power on, and hit F12 to select the Boot Menu. Boot from the USB stick. After getting into DOS, type ‘dir’ to ensure you see ’1525_A17.exe’. If you do, you’re ready to update the BIOS.  If you don’t, then you did something wrong. Repeat the above steps.

At the DOS prompt, type (don’t type the ‘A:>’ or whatever drive letter, just what comes after the ‘>’ sign):

A:>1525_A17.EXE (and hit Enter)

The BIOS should be flashed to A17 within a minute or so.  When done, continue on. If you have issues where the app reports that you must be on AC power or have the battery plugged in, and you already do, then at the DOS prompt, type:

A:>1525_A17.EXE /forceit (and hit Enter)

This will bypass the warnings and flash the BIOS anyway.

So, let’s carry on…  Now, you should VISIT:

http://sites.google.com/site/nozyczek/home/hackintosh/how-to-install-snow-leopard-10-6-8-on-dell-inspiron-1525

… and READ — and, READ AGAIN!  Since we’re not doing a complete reinstall, you will need to utilize only a portion of nozyczek’s instructions and tools.

Step 2:

Backup your old trackpad.prefpane in /System/Library/Preference Panes. Copy it to your Desktop or somewhere so you have a backup.

Step 3:

Download:

10.6.8 Combo Update from Apple’s Site:

http://support.apple.com/kb/DL1399

nozyczek’s Dell 1525 10.6.8 Autoinstaller (Note, if you have a 1440 display on your 1525, download the other Autoinstaller!):

http://cl.ly/7wpJ

Step 4:

Run the Apple 10.6.8 Combo Update Installer (DO NOT RESTART when the Installer completes)… You do and YOU’RE TOAST! Leave the finish dialog up and ‘Restart’ button pulsating!  Then, leave this alone until directed…

Step 5:

Rename the /Extra folder on the / (Root) of your Snow Leopard volume.  Do NOT delete it.  You will need to pick pieces and parts from this copy to place and/or edit into a new /Extra folder that will be created in the following step.

Step 6:

Place nozyczek’s Dell 1525 10.6.8 Autoinstaller folder on the desktop and run it. (Again FULL CREDIT goes to nozyczek for such a KILLER script! And, for taking into account all that is handled in Slice’s new DSDT vs. what kexts are now needed in the /Extra directory! All of you will be amazed by what few kexts are now required!)

Here are the steps as to how (… if you’re no good with the cmd line):

Start Terminal (located in ~/Applications->Utilities->Terminal)

Type:

sudo -s <enter your password when prompted>
cd ~/Desktop/hackintosh*
./installer

• Select the drive you wish to install to, i.e. your Snow Leopard volume
• Select the “i” option and hit Enter to start the Autoinstaller
• Then, just sit back and wait for the installer to finish
• Hit ‘q’ to Quit at the end and terminate the Terminal session

When done, run ‘Disk Utility’ and ‘Repair Permissions’ on the SL volume you installed to.

Step 7:

Now return to the 10.6.8 Combo Update dialog and click the pulsating ‘Restart’ button.

Step 8:

Your 1525 should boot into the OS without issue.  But, you will not (maybe) have Wireless support and the Trackpad prefPane will need updated.

Step 9:

Install your former IO80211family.kext from your old /Extra folder (Remember, the one you made the backup of?!) using KextUtility or KextHelper. This will replace any version that might exist in S/L/E. (Note, I did not need to do this as Apple brought back the driver for Broadcom chip in the Dell 1505N WLAN mini-PCI card in this version.  It was there in 10.6.5, and disappeared for 10.6.6 and 10.6.7, only to reappear in 10.6.8.   Nice!  Here’s to hoping it’s in Lion as well!)

Step 10:

Copy the trackpad.prefpane you made a backup of to in /System/Library/Preference Panes.  Replace the one already existing.

Step 11:

Again, run ‘Disk Utility’ and ‘Repair Permissions’ on the SL volume.

You’re done!  You should now have a fully operational 1525 at 10.6.8!   And, You will notice that amount of custom kexts required is down to just a few!  Amazing work from the community!  Sleep now appears to be native!?  Slice’s DSDT has limited the amount of required kexts even more.  Refer to nozyczek’s site (link provided) and go to the bottom to see only what kexts were applied on top of Apple’s.  Things just keep getting better and better!  I have A LOT more research to do to see exactly what has been done in the past year or so, but progress has no doubt been made!

Past these steps, (and you don’t need to do as I did, but…)  I updated Chameleon from nozyczek’s r1088 to r1095, added the Chameleon RC5 PrefPane which makes customizing your com.apple.Boot.plist a dream (me, I use it just for reference; I still edit mine via TextMate), and corrected my Yukon2.kext binary to reflect the correct MAC address of my internal NIC (instead of the default 00:11:22:33:44:55 — a couple of these defaults on the network and things are likely to get a little confusing depending on your network set up).  I also brought back my custom theme and a few other simple and cosmetic com.apple.Boot.plist items to “make things as they were,” so to speak.

Note, I only posted this here so that everyone that enjoys OS X on a 1525 could benefit.  The more consolidated information for the 1525, the better.  Although, you all should be visiting all of the sites mentioned to do your OWN homework and give your own thanks.  It’s only fair to all of people that helped provide you all of this good stuff.  I you wish to share this, feel free to do so, but just give credit for the compilation.

This said, I hope this guide helps some of you out!  Good luck!

With all the fun I had on this one, I’m diving in again and will be attempting to get Lion going within the next couple of weeks.  With the progress I’ve seen and being that at 10.6.8, we’re prepared for Lion, I can’t expect that we all won’t be able to be enjoying Lion on the 1525 in the near term.  I will post anything eventful to the other sites as I find and figure things out.

During the last week of April, Microsoft released four updates for Windows 7 x64. They rolled in like normal. I selected all of them and let them do their thing when I was planning a reboot, assuming they would want one. They did. They performed some “configuration” prior to shutdown displaying some text prompting me to this effect. And, when restarting, Windows paused again, running more “configuration” against the new updates. After a few seconds, I was prompted with, “Failure Configuring Windows Update… Reverting Changes. Do not Turn off the Computer.”

Of course, when the machine came back up, I logged in and the same updates were there, wanting to get applied. I tried again. Fail. I tried one by one. Fail.

The update packages in question are:

• KB2515325
• KB2522422
• KB2492386
• KB982018

All four of them will just keep repeating the installation, posting identical entries in the Event Viewer-> Windows Logs->Setup

You might see something similar to:

• Package KB2515325 failed to be changed to the Installed state. Status: 0x800705b4.
• Package KB2522422 failed to be changed to the Installed state. Status: 0x800705b4.
• Package KB2492386 failed to be changed to the Installed state. Status: 0x800705b4.
• Package KB982018 failed to be changed to the Installed state. Status: 0x800705b4.

The System Log entries are:

• Installation Failure: Windows failed to install the following update with error 0x80071a90: Update for Windows 7 for x64-based Systems (KB2515325).
• Installation Failure: Windows failed to install the following update with error 0x80071a90: Update for Windows 7 for x64-based Systems (KB2522422).
• Installation Failure: Windows failed to install the following update with error 0x80071a90: Update for Windows 7 for x64-based Systems (KB2492386).
• Installation Failure: Windows failed to install the following update with error 0x80071a90: Update for Windows 7 for x64-based Systems (KB982018).

Again, manual updates failed, so I looked for all of them in the ‘Microsoft Download Center’ and was able to download a self-contained (*.msu) update for each one. Using these, I was then able to install each, individually, in order, rebooting after those that prompted me to. After a few reboots, all was well and Windows Update no longer showed any required/optional system updates. I can only think that the update cache or downloaded updates were corrupted or being installed as a batch where one might have had dependencies on the other. . . Not sure.

Downloading the MSU and installing each manually will correct the issue. Here are the links for the four updates in question:

• KB2515325 Windows Update Package
• KB2522422 Windows Update Package
• KB2492386 Windows Update Package
• KB982018 Windows Update Package

I’m sure there are other fixes out there, maybe deleting the contents of the update repository (c:\windows\SoftwareDistribution), etc., but the above worked well for me. Hope this is some help to you also — for those that might have found their way here.

So… I was getting sick and tired of having to convert my videos (and RAW photos when I had to pull an impromptu slideshow for the family) on the PC/Mac and copy them to a USB stick, just so I could shove the drive into my 47″ LED Vizio to play them back. Now while the flash USB-in for video, photos, and music is an outstanding feature on the Vizio, the TV is still somewhat finicky in what formats it will decode. This applies to video, audio, and photos. Yeah… yeah… I have a UPnP DLNA client built into my DirecTV box, but I don’t think it has seen any development in years, has been stuck with a Beta label long enough outlast Google’s products, and frankly works about 50% of the time. So, it’s really not any solution at all to the “get content from my PC to my TV” problem.

Then, along comes Apple’s AppleTV, 2nd generation box (or puck). I wasn’t too enthusiastic about the little black piece of plastic as it was purely designed as a hobby by Apple and was nothing more that another device that allows iTunes rentals and purchases, helping Apple pad their pockets with yet more of peoples’ hard earned cash, as if the iPhones, iPads and associated AppStore aren’t enough?! In this form, it wasn’t anything that excited me to much, although it did get those iTunes purchases off your PC and to your TV. That was nice. But, then good things happened… Apple not only developed a great little piece of hardware, but made the fantastic choice to run iOS on it as well. This opened the device to a whole bunch of intelligent and creative hackers, hackers that could retool their other iDevice efforts and put them straight into practice (for the most part) on the AppleTV2. And, given a few months, they did just that. They not only jailbroke the thing, but started coding applications for it like the mad, up all night, energy drink fueled crowd they are. The little puck that could(n’t), could now do a whole lot more than it was ever originally designed to do!

Present day… All it takes is $99 and some time and you can have a very nice little media streamer that works in conjunction with Macs/PCs and a whole slew of OS’s. It all starts by jailbreaking an out-of-the-box Apple TV 2. Installing nitoTV is the first step. In the past, installing nitoTV involved first jailbreaking, then some tedious SSH’n and terminal commands, but today, Greenpois0n (RC6) is all you need. Not only will it perform an untethered jailbreak, unlocking Apple’s grip of the device running firmware v4.2.1 (which you should update to if the unit you purchase doesn’t have it installed by default), but the latest release will also install nitoTV right onto your little black Apple puck. There are numerous other custom jailbreaks out there for the Apple TV 2, and all have some differences, but Greenpois0n makes it really easy to get moving along once installed.

The good stuff…

Okay, so the puck is jailbroken, nitoTV is installed, now what? Well, XBMC (XBox Media Center for Apple TV – Info), of course. Quick instructions…

Plug your Apple TV 2 in, boot it up, and SSH into the device. Then, reference: http://wiki.xbmc.org/index.php?title=Install_XBMC_on_ATV2

I’m not going to go into a lot of details regarding how to get things installed and set up, but the lins above have about every piece of info you could ever want to make your ATV2/XBMC experience a dream. When you’re done picking one of many different skins, getting things set up and customized, you’ll be able to stream almost every video and audio codec known to man, organize your video, audio, and photo libraries, and present this all on your beautiful, large HDTV. You can also set up playlists for those family slideshows I was speaking about earlier.

Note, once set up, regardless of the skin used, ‘Weather’ will function when set up for your local, however, no weather condition images will be displayed. These were not included in the build or nightly builds, I believe to keep the package size small. However, if you wish to enable them, they can be harvested from the Mac edition of XBMC and installed via SSH to the Apple TV’s filesystem. Credit goes out to whoever created these, but to make things easier on you, I broke them out and packaged them up. You can download them right here: Apple TV 2 XBMC Weather Images

Once downloaded, unzip, SSH into the ATV2 and place the /128×128 and /64×64 sub-directories in: /private/var/mobile/Library/Preferences/XBMC/temp/weather

Restart ‘Lowtide’ via nitoTV or reboot the ATV2 and when accessing the weather, you will now have nice images to match your local weather conditions.

So, long and short of it, if you wanted or were looking for a solution to get content from your PC to your TV, look no further. $99 is hard to beat, and with little effort, this small puck can do as much as or exceed the capabilities of many dedicated media streamers out in the market costing twice as much. And, it does so in a beautiful way. Don’t forget either… Even with the addition of the XBMC side of things (and this is far from the only customizable app that can be installed), the device still retains its original Apple functionality, allowing you to stream your entire iTunes audio library, play Netflix ‘Watch Instantly’ titles, YouTube clips, and more.

I can’t recommend it enough! Please feel free to leave comments and/or ask any questions… I will try and field them as time permits.

In recently updating my Dell 1525 Hackintosh to Snow Leopard 10.6.3, when installing Chameleon 2 RC3 (or RC4, for that matter), I noticed when booting that I’d get a quick flashing debug message stating, ‘efi_inject_get_devprop_string NULL trying stringdata‘.  The message was fine, it didn’t make the install fail to boot or not work.  Things operated exactly as they should, however, being the perfectionist, I didn’t want to see it.  So, I set about trying to figure out what it meant and how to get rid of it.  After much searching, there really wasn’t any one good — EASY — solution. . .

The Dell 1525, when loaded and configured correctly for Snow Leopard, doesn’t require any ‘device-properties’ string injection, which is great and makes things much easier when installing to this particular machine.  Chameleon, being the excellent bootloader that it is, allows for this; and, many platforms require usage of it to work and operate correctly.  However, when the Chameleon developers compiled up RC3 and RC4, they inadvertently left the debug message noted above being shown on boot regardless of whether or not you were booting verbose or quick and quiet.  And, for the 1525, the message means nothing as the platform doesn’t require any injection, so it’s just completely benign debug output logging.

One solution to get rid of the message was to recompile Chameleon 2 RC3 or RC4, changing the ‘printf’ that displays this debug message all the time to a verbose logging message so that it only displayed when booting verbose.  Well. . . Recompiling the whole bootloader was way more effort than I wanted to get into just to get rid of some cosmetic “blip” that was annoying when booting.  Still, I wanted the message gone!  So, I came up with the following fix. . . which seems to work fine for me, and should for any other Dell 1525 Hackintosh user out there that’s not using device injection (and, you shouldn’t need to on the 1525), but that is using Chameleon 2 RC3 or RC4.

So, a quick and dirty way of getting rid of the message. . .

Download and launch EFIStudio (Google it up and download it.  It’s a great utility to have even outside of this post…) and look for your Ethernet adapter through the ‘Select Device’ combo box. Click the ‘Add Device’ button; you will see some hex output in the lower window of the dialog that presents.  Copy this string by selecting it or just use the ‘Hex String to Clipboard’ button.  Then, we need to add the following code to your com.apple.Boot.plist in /Extra off the root of your Leopard/Snow Leopard volume.  The code you need to add should look like this:

Of course, the string variable you use for ‘device-properties’ should be your own (and not formatted as the above is), or in other words, use whatever was returned to you from EFIStudio.  It might be the same as the above, might not.  Either way, when you’re done adding this, save the file.

When you next reboot, you’ll notice that the debug message is now gone and you’ll have a nice, clean boot, absent of any debug output — as you’ll satisfy the bootloader, giving it something other than the NULL injection it was complaining about.  I tested the above fix — or better, work-around — for a while and from what I found there are no adverse effects to using this method to get rid of the debug boot string.

After initially installing XP and transitioning it across multiple platforms over the years (not to mention all the SP updates on top of that), I found the other day a few low level, boot time devices that were failing to load or ‘Start’ correctly (i.e. Code 24 marked with an exclamation point when viewing Hidden Devices->Non-Plug and Play Drivers in Device Manager).  Now, many of these were devices that were no longer even installed in the machine, so the fix for them was easy, uninstall them.   Many of these were former drive and/or RAID controllers.  While uninstalling them however, I noticed that PartMgr, an integral part of the Windows OS, and an important one as it controls how Windows communicates with all of your partitions, was still sitting there with an exclamation point, and an error that stated that the driver couldn’t start, was not present, etc., etc.  When looking at its Properties, things became even more confusing as the Driver tab was telling me that the driver/device was started at boot-time, however was still stopped, not present, and failing for whatever reason.  Searching the Internet, I came across a lot of people that have run into this issue, but not one that actually got the issue corrected.  Being that re-installing Windows, doing an “in place, upgrade” was not an option, I dove into the issue and got things fixed up.  For those out there that might run into the same, here’s how to correct it. . .

I’ll take it you know you have the issue.  If you’re not sure but with high disk usage, probing around your file system and having Explorer lock up or do strange things, you might want to check.  To check, reference how above using Device Manager.  Remember, you must ‘Show Hidden Devices’ via the ‘View’ menu.  Once identified, here’s the steps…

• Access REGEDIT (you can run this from the ‘Run’ menu, located within the Start Menu) and locate the following key:  HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Class\{4D36E967-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}
• You will notice in the right-hand pane a ‘Name’ of string-value, ‘UpperFilters’.  This name should have a data value associated with it.  This data value should be a string of ‘PartMgr’.  Ensure this exists.  If it does not, add it.
• Now in REGEDIT, navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\PartMgr    This key should have a ‘Enum’ subkey.  Click on the ‘Enum’ subkey.  In the right-hand pane, you should see a list of every drive you have located in the machine.  If you do not see all of your drives, you now know why things broke down and the driver started to fail at boot.  When I first accessed this key, all that was present was the main root key, ‘Root\LEGACY_PARTMGR\0000′.
• If the ‘Enum’ key appears to not match what drives you know you have in the machine or is empty, it’s time to have Windows re-enumerate all of the drives in the machine.
• To re-enumerate the drives is easy…Simply delete the ‘Enum’ key located under ‘PartMgr’ and reboot.  When the machine reboots, it will re-enumerate all of your drives and add them back to PartMgr’s service key.  When this is done, the driver will now know what hardware its controlling and it should start and begin doing its job correctly again.

So, that’s all there is to it.  It took a while of digging and referencing other “running” machines to understand what the problem was, but in the end, as you can see, the fix is incredibly easy.  After I corrected things, the random issues I was having with Explorer locking up and permanently hourglassing when trying to delete and/or rename files went away.  Boot times decreased.  And, overall things seemed much better with the health of the machine.  Of what research I did, I saw that many people seemed to experience this when installing Intel’s Application Accelerator on hardware that didn’t necessarily support the installation of the software (Nice install Intel!).

Anyway. . . hope this helps some of you out there that might come across the issue.

I’ll keep it short and sweet… The W² Software dudes have been hard at work addressing people’s problems, adding functionality, and just plain making Random Playlist Creator with Genres a whole bunch better than it was before. An app barely alive… We rebuilt it… We had the technology. We had the capability to make the world’s first bionic playlist creator. Better than it was before, Stronger, Faster… (Queue in the theme music now.) It’s grown one whole version number, 1.0 to 2.0. Amazing. It’s got to be better then, right?!?

Go download it and try it out. It’s the perfect app for making those random playlists to throw on your player of choice. So, when you’ve reached that point where you just don’t know what the hell to listen to, but you know you don’t want to listen to some genre(s) or artist(s), look no further… Download this and stop hitting that track forward button all the time.

Peace, out!

Just happened by Microsoft’s new map, driving direction, satellite, close-up geographical image deal, website, thingy today. They’re really trying to compete and one up ‘Google Earth‘ — which has been out for a while now and is pretty damn impressive in its own right. Got to say that Microsoft is doing a pretty good job! Google was able to get some pretty clean satellite images of most all areas of the United States (and World), but are missing out on a lot of areas — where their gamut of satellites haven’t yet taken “super detailed” images. One of Google Earth’s best places, in terms of image detail, is Cambridge, Mass. (It has something close to a 6 in. resolution — or something crazy like that.) Check it out, you can make out people on the sidewalks!

I thought that was cool until today when a work associate showed me the competition, Microsoft’s Live Local site. Damn! This site has some seriously close-up, detailed imagery — not to mention providing maps, driving directions, and satellite views. But, the super detailed stuff I’m not even sure how they did (technically), as you can get down to the ‘Bird’s Eye View’ which has up to a 20 yard resolution and is in 3/4 perspective! Google Earth has the ability to change perspective, but it’s a “faked,” flattened view. Check out Meg and the Kid’s crib from the Microsoft site:

(It’s much more impressive larger — on the site.) But, nutty! Again, no idea how they are getting these types of images. I don’t know of any kind of satellite that is producing these things. Check out your address and see what your neighborhood/house looks like to a bird (make sure to click on the ‘Bird’s Eye View’ on the left, top of the frame). Technology wars… The wars are going to produce some pretty neat things for us masses over the years.

If you haven’t by now heard of Wikipedia.org by now or, at least, checked it out, it’s about high time you did. I have never found something on the Internet to be so useful, practical, and relational than that of Wikipedia. Well, Internet Movie Database comes in somewhere not too far behind (they get props in that I’m a movie buff and all), but a movie database is not really going to provide much “practical” knowledge. But, I do know a hell of a lot more movie trivia now, so you’d be advised to keep me away from the pink categories when playing Trivial Pursuit.

I went off on a tangent there, but then that’s what the Wikipedia is all about. You go to look up something — even the most obscure stuff and 99% of time you’ll find something. When reading about a subject, you’ll be given a thousand (okay, well maybe not a thousand) links to other subjects directly or sometimes not so directly to other subjects. Sometimes a simple reference turns into an hour long study session. In that time you might have learned three or four things you didn’t know the previous day.

I think I heard it put best as…

I think perhaps Wikipedia is one of humanities greatest achievements.

… and, I have to agree, if not just to piss off FatKidd, who is highly suspect of its Wiki (Wiki carries it’s own definition — look it up!) nature. For some, the architecture is just too open. Anyone can add, edit, or modify the content of the “encyclopedia.” Yeah, you can imagine that with this being the case, there has to be a lot of false, inaccurate crap posted. Well, not really. For every one person that posts crap, another comes along and corrects and/or deletes it, so in the end, it all balances out. And, for a company/site with only 3 permanent employees, it really is a remarkable achievement. Check out the founder’s personal appeal and explanation of the site:

Jimmy Wale’s Idea of the Wikipedia

So, use it, support it, and see why it is becoming one of the most visited, talked about sites on the Net. And who said a combined effort from the people of the world couldn’t produce and organize something so successful and practical — and not have to be managed by some higher authority, other than themselves? Gives me signs that there’s hope for this world yet — maybe — it’s possible — kinda…

UPDATE – Jan. 20, 2006

As I said, Wikipedia can be one of the greatest resources or one of the best places to confuse, mislead, liable, or slander. It’s the people of the world that must police each other. There have been some good stories recently. Must share them (they told me it was good to “share” when I was young):

• Wikipedia Science 31% “less accurate” Than Britannica’s
• There’s No Wikipedia Entry for ‘Moral Responsibility’
• Wikipedia Editing Hobby Goes Nationwide — in England

So, pros, yes… cons, yes. Will evil ultimately triumph good — or visa versa? Who knows. But, it’ll be fun to watch. Research suggests that the site’s contect continues to just get worse and worse (as in more inaccurate) by the day. But, at present, Wikipedia sure beats the hell out of the ‘World Book Encyclopedia’ I had to use as a kid in the 80′s — even if it led me to have a few of my “facts” wrong on my “The Capital of Oklahoma: Oklahoma City” paper I turned in in 5th grade.

Guess it comes down to a personal choice. Use it, knowing you’ll need to confirm most of what you inquire about. Or don’t, and loose all that knowledge — good or bad — that you could have otherwise filled your brain’s gray cells with.

So, I go up to the in-laws place for Christmas, having a good time — someone asked me about my photos and wanted to see some. I told them I had a bunch out on this web site. So, I go over the computer, sit down, type in my domain, hit enter and, Wow! My site got the hack job put on it!

… Site Butchered By [g00n] MurderSkillz …

What a nice Christmas present! You know, there’s nothing that says Christmas joy like an unborn fetus being knifed from its hacked up mother’s womb by a couple of ugly ass, half decomposing, skeleton dudes all covered in blood. Butchered at Birth. Like that one too! But, nothing says “love” like:

Ohh, the joy of being “Pwned”. I ran a trace route on the IP and ended up somewhere in some Slavic, eastern block, gray sky shit-hole where the kids are obviously depressed, angry, and have too much time on their hands.

I guess I should have taken note and heeded the call when WordPress said it was imperative that you update to version 1.5.2 due to security issues. Oh, well… I like living on the edge. It took me all of five seconds to fix things. To put it another way, it probably took them a lot longer to put up their shitty page and tell me to “take a seat” than it did for me to throw it all away and return things to normal.

Oh yeah, forgot all about the person that was waiting, watching for me to show them pictures.

They think I’m really weird now. But, what else is new?!

Feeling sensitive and creative, I decided to try my hand at writing a plug-in for WordPress. I wrote a small, simple plug-in to parse Slashdot’s RSS feed and return the top headlines. You can specify the number of headlines to return and whether or not to return the headline description with each headline. The headlines are returned as links, so you can click into them to link to Slashdot’s full stories. It’s a nice plug-in to throw into your sidebar (or wherever) — after all, news for nerds is stuff that matters! Here’s a sample of plug-in in action:

Slashdot.org Headlines

You can download the thing here. My PHP skillz are what you would call – slim to none! So, if the code is messy and not very logical, don’t blame me. I’m working on it. At least the thing works. Hope some of you find the plug-in useful.

This is an entry built on irony and coincidence. I must have seen something yesterday morning that triggered me to strike up a conversation with a work associate of mine about those big posters made up of thousands of tiny pictures — the ones that kind of remind me of Chuck Close paintings, which look something like this:

We talked about them for a bit and both said we’d look for some software we could use to create them. It all died there — we both forgot about it past that conversation.

Later that night, sitting on the couch with Meg, I looked over at her while she was reading ‘Cooking Light’ and noticed that she had just flipped a page in the magazine that had one of those “posters” on it. I asked for the magazine and sure enough, there was one of those images. So, now I remembered what I wanted to do earlier that day. I began my quest. Having no idea what they were called, I searched Google for an hour with no luck. I was just about to give up when I happened by some kid’s blog where he was explaining how to make posters from your digital camera shots. The posters were nothing like the collage images I was looking for, but the kid’s site was interesting. I read some more of his content and clicked a link to take me to some of his previous posts. And, what was there? – a blog entry discussing a Mac product used to make ‘photomosaics’. Total luck, as my Google search had nothing to do with what I found. But, I knew the word to search for now.

After searching for ‘photomosaic’ for a couple of minutes, I found the product I was looking for — Mosaic Creator. This app is one killer piece of software. I have to hand it to the guy who wrote it; he threw about every possible feature imaginable into the thing. And, after using the app for some time (the thing kept me up late), I realized not only how feature rich the thing was, but how complex the math had to be in order to create a detailed image out of 30 thousand other tiny images. I’m sure there are some intense calculations going on — which is pretty easy to determine by the fact that a 3GHz CPU stays maxed for ~2+ hours in order to create one of these things.

Features — the thing takes a target image of whatever you give it and offers you the ability to represent it as ASCII art, text art, or a photo-mosaic. In addition to that, there are another 100 or so parameters you have control over — cell size, duplicity, etc. There are enough controls to fine tune the app to create exactly what you have in mind. Cool stuff!

Here are some samples from my first trials:

Original Image

Photo-mosaic Version
(Click image to check out larger versions)

This gives you an idea of what I was trying to figure out how to create and now what you can also use. I need to look through all my images and try and figure out which one would be a good one to use as the source image for a 20×30 poster. The poster sized image was what I had originally started to look into this for. Making a family portrait out of family pictures, a wedding portrait out of wedding pictures. . . there are some killer contextual images you could make. I thought it would be neat to make a large image, as not only are they “cool,” but you could stare at the image for hours just trying to make out all the other images within it.

Anyhow, I’m one step closer to that big ‘ole cool image on my wall. . .

A work associate and myself have started a small shareware venture — W² Software. . . Well, not really a venture, but a webpage with some software we created and a donate button. (Get it, donate button. . . meaning, send us cash! ) The software was mainly born out of our needs for some small, utility type apps — apps we couldn’t find anywhere out on the Net. After creating a couple of them, for our use only, we felt that they might also be useful to others. Thus, the webpage was born. Over the next couple of months there will be more apps added — they are in progress. For now, the primary app is a Random Playlist Creator. When generating a playlist with it, you also have the option of being able to exclude specific genres based on the mood of the playlist you are trying to create. You can read more about it on the software page. Check back to the page from time to time to see what other cool utilities we add. I’ve littered the apps on the shareware pages on the Net. We’re hoping people download them and find them worth while.

Okay, for those of you in the video world, there is an open source application that, if found, will become the backbone of all your video processing. That app is, AviSynth. I found this app many years ago and shelved it. It did what I needed back then — putting frame numbers on each individual frame — but was thin on other functions. Well, recently going back to see where it was and what it had become, I was simply blown away. This is one of the finest applications I have ever seen written for a PC. There are a lot of video applications out there, but very few actually do things correctly. AviSynth allows you to get down to field based operations. You can convert PAL to NTSC — maintaining the temporal/spatial ordering of the fields by repeating fields, telecine film content into 29.97fps video, motion comp deinterlace content, process video for encoding with advanced pre-processing filtering, etc., etc. And, all of this done in a way where the final frames are handed to other video applications, DirectShow, etc. as AVI frames. In other words, you can take a DivX file, a MPEG file, whatever file, process it with AviSynth and hand the resulting frames to any application that understand how to parse an AVI. Incredible! Anyhow, if you are into advanced video stuff, check it out. You won’t be disappointed! I assure you!