What if…?

So, the Windows 7 Beta came out a nice while ago, and it’s only recently that I’ve got it to fully work with my Mac as a Virtual Machine through VirtualBox. A couple of the main issues I ran into when I first installed the OS was that I couldn’t get internet and I couldn’t get sound. Now that I’ve fixed these problems, the whole OS is pretty much running fine!

Getting your internet up and running is a fairly simple process, but took a while for me to figure out, as it required some hackery. Open up the settings for the Windows 7 VM you have, and open the Network tab. For the first adapter, enable it by click in the checkbox, and then change “Adapter Type” to “Intel PRO/1000 MT Desktop (82540EM)”. Next, make “Attached TO” be “Host Interface”. This makes sure that the internet that the Intel adapter is receiving is the same as your built in adapter. If you want to use your built in AirPort, make sure “Host Interface” is set to “en1: AirPort” (Note, “en1″ maybe be different on your machine. Just make sure you select the one that says “AirPort”). If you want to use Ethernet, select the one labelled “en0: Ethernet”, and also make sure that the “Cable Connected” check box is checked. You can then continue this process for the other Adapters.

Next, we need to get sound up and running. This was a little trickier, as, even if you setup the settings properly, you have to do some stuff on the Windows side. In the “Audio” tab of the settings, “Enable Audio”, and then make sure the “Host Audio Driver” is “Core Audio”. Then, set the “Audio Controller” to “ICH AC97″. That’s all we can do on the Mac side. Save the settings, and boot into Windows 7. Now that you’ve booted into Windows, you need to download the ICH AC97 driver, which can be found here. Go ahead and install that. Make sure you have the latest version of it after you’ve installed it by going into the Control Panel > Hardware and Sound > Devices and Printers > Device Manager. Once the manager opens, expand the item labeled “Sound, video and game controllers”. The Intel AC’97 Audio Controller should be listed. Now sound should be working.

If you want to get things like “Seamless Mode” to work, when you’re booted into Windows 7, go to the “Devices” menu item, and click “Install Guest Additions…”. It’ll mount the additions as a CD. Before you run them, you need to edit the installer’s properties to run in Windows Vista compatibility. In the Windows Explorer, right-click your Disk Drive, which has the Additions “DVD” in there, and click “Open”. Now, if you’re running in 64-bit mode, use the one with “amd64″ or “x86″ tacked on the end, depending on what processor you have. Otherwise, use the normal one labelled “VBoxWindowsAdditions”. Right-click on whichever one, and click “Properties”. Click on the “Compatibility” tab, then in “Compatibility Mode”, make sure the dropdown says “Windows Vista”. Now, go ahead and run the installer. Once that’s done, Seamless Mode should work, as well as other features.

Yay, Happy New Year, and all that jazz. We were supposed to get an extra second, but I didn’t notice it. I’m not even sure what I used it for…

Let’s see, what else…? Well, I’ve got a couple of new projects to complement the ones already in existence. They’re mostly Mac apps. Come to think on it, they’re ALL Mac apps. More info on them soon. One of them has a HUGE memory leak (using over 500MB at one time >_<), which I’m looking into.

Everyone knows that IE 7 is bad. I mean, with all the people using it, it’s so bad it’s good! I mean, seriously, it sucks. I tried using it at school yesterday, and it quit “unexpectedly” on my, and then I had to restart it cause it froze.

Now, on top of that, ANOTHER IE7 hack has been exposed. This hack has the potential to steal your personal data or even compromise the system. Yikes. Definitely something I don’t want my web browser to be doing.

Point in case: IE is a terrible browser. It just is. There’s no way to get around it. It displays web pages wrong, is easy to crash in HTML, and now has all these security issues. I already think twice about using IE, so I’ll definitely have to think a third time about using it.

Apple released Mac OS X 10.5.6 yesterday. That means, in the last 14 months, Apple has pushed out 6 updates to the original release of Leopard since October of 2007. That’s about one new update every two months and ten days. Apple released Leopard when Tiger was at version 10.4.10. We’re four releases away from our .10 version of Leopard which equates to about 5 months time, landing us in May of 2009. If my calculations are correct, Snow Leopard should be released in that time frame. Or, Apple could decide to do something new, and completely throw off my calculations, and I’ll be totally wrong. Guess we’ll know in five months time. But what do I know? After all, the first version of OS X (10.0) did only have three versions to it.

I’m not really feeling that good right now. Monday I had an upset stomach, and was throwing up a lot, and, Tuesday and today, I my stomach gas felt a little queasy, too, which isn’t fun at all. I even took a two and a half hour nap after school yesterday. I don’t take naps. At all. I really sandy feeling good then. There has been some stomach bug thing going around at school (41 kids were out sick yesterday), so I wonder if what I have is related to that. I dunno. I just hope I feel better soon.

Good grief, it was sleeting just a while ago. In October. During fall. I mean, it’s cold, but it can’t be THAT cold. Whatever, it was still cool to see.

I got my iPod Touch yesterday. I am loving it so far. This is one of my favorite Apple products. Definitely a great platform for writting apps for. I already have plenty of ideas, I just need to start coding them. Anyone up for some sort of Star Trek LCARS app for the iPhone? That would be a fun one to play around with. Combine that with some sort of tricorder app, and you could do do some wicked stuff with it! But, that’ll have to wait; I have other app ideas that I want to work on first.

I finally got around to ordering an iPod Touch! It’s currently on it’s way from “Reno, NV”, and should get here on Wednesday. And while it is the previous generation, it’s an iPod Tocuh non the less. Now I can REALLY test my software.

So, I’m working on a new iPhone application called “iNewsReader”. It’s going to be an RSS reader for your iPhone, but going to be….different than NetNewsWire for iPhone.

A lot of people have been complaining about things with NetNewsWire, like the inability to add feeds on the phone, the bugs that they’re having with it, lack of organization (like, it auto sorts alphabetically for you), and slowness.

My goal is to try to fix, or better yet, not even have these problems

Wow, I’ve really not posted to this in a while! Okay, so I have the domain “jasoncmartin.com”, but there’s nothing really there, just a “we’re not ready yet” message. I’ll probably put up a WordPress blog to replace this one… Again.

Other news, I’ve gotten serious about iPhone application development. You’ll like what I’ve got coming. Let’s just say that both of my projects have something to do with web technologies. That’s all I’ll say.
In other news, School is hard. I have chemistry first thing in the morning. But journalism is in there, and that’s a fun class. I can get away with taking pictures all class. xD But, it’s taking away from other things, like MyBB development, iPhone development, and the like. Oh well.