Category: Work

Adventures in Portland

Skyline

I’ve returned from Portland, intact if not a little tired.  Portland is a beautiful city, with a lot to see and do.  Their downtown area is about the same size as ours.  Two things struck me as very interesting.

Nice Coat

First, the city is by far the cleanest city I’ve ever visited.  I don’t recall seeing any trash on the street.  It actually appeared as thought everyone in the city pitches in to keep the place looking nice.  Yes that is a homeless man walking around in a sleeping bag.  They all stayed to themselves in the city and didn’t bother me at all.  In fact I was quite impressed by their age.  Most of them were younger people.

Isengard

Second, everything is larger than here in STL.  The sidewalks are twice as wide, the buildings go right up to the edge of each block, and speaking of city blocks, they seem to be larger as well. I think this has to do with the city being so far west. They just have more space to spread out!

The conference went well, we were the last presentation to go (for the day and the entire conference!)  We had a good turn out of about 50 people, all of them were paying attention to us the entire time.  

The next Fall SIGUCCS conference will be next year in St. Louis.  I encourage anyone working in higher education & technology to attend.  I plan on writing another paper for next year myself.

I’d talk more but I’m tired and need to get caught up.  The rest of my photos are embedded below and can be found on my flickr set.  Josh has some photos up on his flickr as well. His take on our adventure can be found on his blog (Parts 1,2,3,4,5)

How to Zen an Intel Mac Part II

This is a rough draft, I just wanted to get something up ASAP. More details to come.

UPDATE: See the post How to Zen an Intel Mac Part III


All credit goes to Jeff Abernathy, Ameer Abdelmalek, Corey Webb and Queanna Jones. I just sat around and watched HD Movie Trailers in a Parallels Virtual Machine. 😉

To make things quicker you will need more than one Mac.
One to image with windows from your Zen imaging CD
One to serve the image you just created
One which will be your target Mac you want to have the dual boot set up on.
Once you Create your Windows image you can reuse that on multiple dual boot macs.

Creating the Windows image
1) Stick your Zen imaging cd in your mac and install the zen image, just like you would on a PC. This will wipe everything and make your shiny mac a Windows only machine. With our setup the Windows partion is on partion(1). This is bad. EFI/GUID wants Windows to be on the 3rd partition. This is why just installing windows from an intall cd works while just imaging that zen partition from the imaging cd does not.
2) Once imaged, don’t restart it!
3) Boot into Target Disk mode
4) Use NetRestore Helper to create a master disk image of the drive. I would save this as something informative like zenbase.ntfs

Create the OS X image
1) If you have a base image you use to deploy over multiple machines, image the target mac with your image.
2)Install and Run Bootcamp to create your partitions

Install the Windows image
3)Use NetRestore Helper to restore the zenbase.ntfs image to the newly created windows partion.

Fix the boot.ini
1)boot off of XP SP2 disk and run bootconfig /restore

a good boot.ini will look like this:

[boot loader]
timeout=1
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(3)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(3)\WINDOWS=”Microsoft Windows XP Professional” /noexecute=optin /fastdetect

See that partition(3) part? That’s the kicker.

If you fix the boot.ini before creating the .ntfs file, then you only have to do it once, instead of at every deployment. This could be done with a WinPE CD or by bringing down an add-on image with the right boot.ini in it. Unfortunately, Linux mounts the NTFS partition read-only, so editing it at the command line is not an option. – Corey Webb

Monday Passed

Monday came and went. I spoke to Apple and I think things went well. I attempted to sell myself to the job, and over all I walked away feeling like I was honest to myself and to the person I was speaking to. A friend had mentioned that I shouldn’t pass on this oppertunity, as they may never consider me again in the future. I wonder how true that is…

After answering all the questions about myself I got passed on to the next person in line. So now I have to wait for a phone call from the person who would be my boss if I were to be hired. Ich bin Nervous.