Why OS X?

Why am I interested in OS X? The answer is probably not something you hear from most people —it’s the terminal.

Wha?! Yes, you heard me, the OS X terminal is what a modern shell should be, and Windows ought to be ashamed its command prompt that’s lacking basics such as tab completion for commands. I do a fair bit of sysadmin work and programming, so the console is a rather huge part of my workflow. Being UNIX-like, OS X has rsync, which is something pretty much unavoidable if you’re doing any sysadmin kind of work. I can’t understand why Windows still lacks a built-in delta-based diff backup/sync tool. Robocopy is great, but it’s just not the same. But I digress. This post isn’t about why, but how.

Pre-installation

First of all, Lifehacker has a useful, albet simplified guide to installing OS X Lion here. It’s a good start, but you’re going to have to branch off to the OSx86 wiki and tonymac’s forums now and then.

Most guides, the Lifehacker one included, assume you already own a Mac and starts off guiding you on how to create a bootable OS X Lion USB stick using Unibeast. Unibeast is an OS X only software, so that’s not going to be very helpful if you don’t already have Macs sitting around. And if you already have a Mac, I honestly don’t know why you’ll want to venture into the world of hurt that is installing OS X on non-Apple hardware. It seems if you want to install OS X, you need a Mac, but if you have a Mac, why would you need to install OS X? Sounds a little like a bit of a catch-22? Here’s where virtualization comes in.

Running OS X Lion as a VM

Windows 7 Hacker has a very well written and detailed post about getting OS X 10.7 Lion to run in VMWare. I managed to get it running on my first try. If you just want to fool around, and have no intentions of using OS X for anything serious, you’re probably fine with just using the VM. However, since the VM does not have graphics acceleration of any form, window animations are choppy, and any apps that rely on OpenGL will fail. Not a pleasant experience.

Now that you have OS X running in an VM, you’ll want to follow step 2 of Lifehacker’s guide. You can access USB devices connected to your computer through the VM by using the ‘USB pass through’ feature of VMWare. With that done, you’re ready to install on real hardware, also known as entering the world of hurt.

Hell and High Water

Depending on what hardware you have, things may or may not work. I went through countless reinstalls and various hardware configurations before finally settling on one that worked. I initially used a Asus P5K motherboard, but I couldn’t for the hell of me get the Attansic L1 Ethernet driver to work, even going after through various kext. The nVidia 7800 GT card also refused to play nice. Eventually I switched over to a Asus P5G31D-M board, and I managed to get things working after using the MultiBeast installer (from tonymac’s site) to install EasyBeast, Lnx2′s Realtek network kext and VoodooHDA audio kext. The onboard Intel GMA3100 graphics that came with the board wasn’t recognized, and I swapped it out for a nVidia 8800 GT card and that worked out of the box. I was able to output my monitor’s native resolution of 1920×1080.

You might what the hell are all this ‘kext’ things I am talking about. Kext stands for Kernel Extensions, which you can think of as being drivers on Windows. If you’re keen on reading more about the underpinnings of OS X, I highly suggest checking out http://www.puredarwin.org/. I happen to be taking an Operating Systems class this semester so it was a highly interesting read for me,

Post-Installation

I took two whole evenings (the second of which extended to 4am) to get the whole set up working. I’m very pleased with how it turned out. The first thing I tested I was if YouTube worked. Flash and GPU acceleration has always been something that was iffy with unsupported setups, but I’m pleased to report that it worked just fine streaming 720p and 1080p videos. Despite so, one caveat was that GPU decoding for x264 videos didn’t seem to be working, but the E7400 CPU was able to hold up, albet at about 50% load for a 1080p video.

Xcode works and I was able to run the default project in the iOS simulator, so this is a viable platform for iOS development. Chess and Rail Maze, both OpenGL based games were working. It’d seem at this point that all the basic functionality are there. I connected my iPhone and iPad and iTunes was able to pick them up. Also, the App Store works.

Feeling pretty good about myself, I went out and bought a Belkin Bluetooth dongle, F8T016 to be exact, along with an Apple Wireless keyboard, and the setup worked out of the box. The Apple Wireless keyboard is surprisingly comfortable to use, which surprised me. After using a Filco cherry mx blue, I was worried that other keyboards would feel inferior. It didn’t. The response of the keyboard was good with a decent amount of tactile feedback. The keys were also spaced apart just right that I didn’t have an issue touch typing on it. However, I did feel lost without the insert/home/end/page up/page down keys associated with a usual keyboard. I select lines by doing shift-home and shift-end a lot when writing or coding, and losing them feels like it hampers my productivity. One other complain I have is that for the price tag of S$98, it could have at least come with backlight, but I suppose Apple wouldn’t have been able to maintain the form factor with backlighting.

Windows and OS X side by side

So that’s how my setup looks like currently. I’m going try to do most of my work on OS X for the next couple of days and see how it’s like. Like I said before, I’m loving the terminal already. I’ll do more comprehensive testing in the upcoming days and report back.

In the midst of Google’s company acquiring spree, which saw YouTube and many other startups being added to its portfolio, Gmail accounts morphed into something of a more generic Google Account, giving access to other services such as Docs, Spreadsheet and so on. Initially, Google Apps for Domain had the same feature set as one would get with a regular Google account. During this time, a plethora of features were rolled out to native Gmail offering, but not the Google Apps version of Gmail. This was when Google App users, many of who were paying customers, started to feel as if they were second class citizens within the Google ecosystem. Google Apps continue to lapse behind in features when the now defunct Google Wave was rolled out and no support for Apps was included.

Then came the Google Apps transition in 2010/11 that was supposed to bring more features and timely updates to Google App users, matching up to the regular offerings from Google. This came with a huge caveat. Google Apps was now on an entirely different infrastructure and it forced users to create ‘personal’ accounts for services such as YouTube. I now have two accounts to juggle, and despite the multiple sign on feature, going back and forth between accounts is less than seamless.

Yesterday, Google+ was unveiled with Google Apps support purportedly coming somewhere in the hazy future. Over the years, Google Apps has gradually shifted from being the cream of the crop to being a walled garden within Google itself, frustrating those who wants both end user and enterprise offerings of Google. The online service has become just as fragmented as the Android platform itself.

Unlike Microsoft and Apple, both of who have a clear direction of where they want to be headed, with Office 365 targeting the enterprise sector and iCloud for individuals respectively, Google seems to be mired inbetween.

Turns out what I was missing was a proper headphone amplification. The PC350 has an impedance of 150 Ω, while normal headphones usually have an impedance of between 20 Ω to 50 Ω. Higher impedance implies higher resistance, and hence, more power to drive the drivers. The plus side of a high impedance driver is better control – sharper and tighter sound.

Last week, while shopping at SLS, I picked up the Xonar DG because the built-in headphone amp caught my attention. At $69, it was cheap. Getting an external headphone amp would cost just as much, if not more.

I usually run a Audio Technica ATH-A900. For the record, it’s the most comfortable set of headphones I’ve ever owned. The trouble is that it doesn’t have a mic, and being a gamer, voice chat is important for me. I’ve gotten by with MacGyvering a mic on to it, but it picks up too much background noise. The PC350s on the other hand, have an excellent noise cancellation boom mic.

I plugged my PC350 in, configured the headphone amp settings for > 64 Ω, and boy, it sounded like a completely different pair of headset. The low frequency response is strong, tight and accurate. I loaded up The Witcher 2, ran the escape from the dungeon level, and each footstep and echo came out crisp.

I take back what I said about the PC350 being an overhyped headphone. It doesn’t have the comfort level of my ATH-A900, but the sound quality is certainly comparable, plus it has a mic, if that’s your thing.

I kept getting that error message while trying to perform updates on Ubuntu using through apt-get. It didn’t matter if I were using the command line version, or though the Package Manager GUI. Following the error message would be an IP address.

The error message misleadingly suggested a network problem and I tried fiddling around with my wireless and wired adapter. It was strange because aside from apt-get, I wasn’t getting any connection issues at all. Looking around Google mentioned something about a bug in apt-get due to partially completed install previously. The solution was to clear the cache by issuing the following command:

sudo rm /var/cache/apt/archives/partial/*

Thanks Ubuntu for your cryptic error messages!

Soon after, it came to my attention that there was a rather inconsistent high-pitched sound emitting from the laptop, which bothered me enough to start investigating. It didn’t quite sound like the creek of a hard disk, nor the whirl of a fan. I pressed my ear around the chassis, listening as I went, until I zeroed it in, at about the center of the laptop. Curiously the only component that I could think of as being there was the processor. But a processor emitting sound? That’s just crazy talk. Or is it?

It turns out, after searching around Google and reading threads on forums with similar complains and lots of skepticism from people who claim not to hear it, or maybe, they just can’t hear it, during to the difference in hearing abilities across individuals, the sound did indeed originate from the processor.

An article on Dell’s site explained it quite clearly. Quoting from the article itself,

The noise has been isolated to the processor’s power circuit and is only audible when the processor is in C3 (clock-stopped) power state. In this state, the computer is in a low-power mode designed to reduce chassis heat and extend the battery life. The changes to the components in the processor’s power circuit are caused by a phenomenon referred to as the Piezoelectric Effect. When a specific voltage is applied to these components, they begin to resonate producing sounds that fall within the range of human hearing (15 – 20 KHz).

C0 to C3 are power states of the processor, with C0 being the default functional state, and C1 through C3 being in various stages of power save. Simply put, the performance of the processor is scaled down in preference of a longer battery life.

To check the validity of the explanation, I launched Battlefield: Bad Company 2 and entered into a game, and sure enough, the noise was gone. Exiting it and waiting for a few seconds brought it back yet again.

With the cause of the problem uncovered, my next course of action was to disable the various power saving modes. Unfortunately, the BIOS settings on my laptop are minimal, and the option was nonexistent.

Trying a rather radical approach, I removed the ACPI-related drivers and rebooted. These drivers help expose hardware configuration and power management settings to the operating system so that they could be software-controlled. Sure enough, I can now run on battery without the annoying high-pitched buzz. However, the flipside to that was that the function keys no longer work, nor the screen off feature associated with closing the lid. Quite an unacceptable compromise. Resigned, I installed the ACPI related drivers back.

I didn’t fully comprehend what the Piezoelectric Effect was, neither did I manage to stop the annoying high-pitched sound, but at least I rest assured that my laptop isn’t about explode on me, or that I am going crazy.

The trouble arises when I start doing online purchases with my credit card while on these VPNs. It must look pretty suspicious to someone over at VISA, seeing as to how purchases originating from Germany, Sweden, and the United States are all using the same card, and hence, tripped their fraud detection mechanism and shutting down my card. I wish there was some way I could explain the above to the customer service agent when I called my bank up this morning, but I don’t think I could have put it in way that would make myself be understood and encourage them to lift the fraud protection.

So here I am, waiting to be issued a new card, and wanting to blame the fraud detection algorithm for placing too much weight on IP geolocation. Then again, who could have thought?

In FTTH networks, fibre cables are run all the way down from the service provider and terminated directly into the consumer’s home. In HFC networks, although the backhaul comprises of fibre cables, they’re terminated further away from homes, and coaxial cables take over this last mile instead.

I first noticed the new cable installations nearly a week ago. Closer inspection of the markings revealed that they were indeed fibre cables, and the huge rolls of them lying around on the lobby suggested large scale deployment. Conversing with the technicians who were responsible for them confirmed that.

A few days later, these units begin to appear on the landing of every pair of home, which I can only surmise to be FTTH termination equipment.

Although these cables do not seem to be carrying any form of data at this point in time, they are perhaps the most important groundwork ever done for Singapore’s next generation broadband network. Last mile equipment is usually the hardest and most expensive problem to tackle, but it seems to me that we have solved that already.