Casio PB-100

The iPad…. Well I have to start this story a little while ago. Let’s say about 27 years. In my hand is my first (self bought) computer. Model PB-100 from CASIO. It’s a calculator with Basic dialect and all of 588 bytes of RAM. For me it was sheer amazing. I had 12 bytes output. I could conquer the world!!!

Not quite. In a certain way though yes I could. This little machine was about 12mm high, 16.5cm wide and 7.1cm high. It ran on two flat lithium batteries. If I’m not mistaken CR3202′s and they lasted for ever. I COULD take it everywhere and I pretty much did.

Of course 588 bytes quickly set an end to the unlimited potential. Causing me to go down the route of bigger and more desk bound computers. The flexibility was gone but a lot of power was gained. Nonetheless I missed the days of moving around with my computer. As a little side note the PB-100 is still in use today by my father. It’s still working well after 27 years!

Apple Newton MP2000

Years and years later, when laptops already roamed the trains, planes and office lobbies, I still missed the easy portability of that calculator. It was just always there. This was the time when the PDA revolution started. In succession I had a Apple Newton MP2000, a Psion Mx5, and several Palm devices. As a PDA the Psions were top. The Symbian/EPOC OS making all the difference. The one I did regret most selling though was the Newton. It was just leagues ahead of the competition.

Anyway for all the goodness of those platforms the input methodology was their biggest flaw it was always a compromise. Battery times were good though. What killed them all in the end were two things though:

1) the Internet. The graphical and display requirements were just too much for the processing power of these small devices and the displays were too small.

2) Connectivity to the outside world. All needed some syncing software via serial cable/USB and if you had multiple PCs you were in deep trouble.

I also have to admit here that I actually don’t like notebooks and laptops. I can’t really put my finger on why though. I had quite a few in my time also including MacBooks but they jut don’t give me the portability I want. They are to big to be truly portable and too small to replace my desktop (mainly screen size that is).

Finally Apple gave us the iPhone. I have a 3GS and that immediately changed the way I communicated and what I did on the go. I must contend I am a iPhone power user of sorts. Few games but a heaps of SSH, VNC, RDP, networking Apps stuff. I also like the absolutely brilliant way it converges calendars and email. This was the first time I was really all round happy with a mobile device…..if it weren’t for the screen size.

Psion MX5 PRO

And this is where the iPad now comes in. It is the right size, weight, power class and also very important; it doesn’t do too much. There is still a space for my iMac in all this. But it allows me to be productive on the go (like now), do my email and my surfing. It also streams video quite nicely so I can use it as a sort of TV.

The iPad certainly doesn’t do away with the iPhone. It is much more complementary. I wish Apple hadn’t locked the communication between the two devices down that much. I went for the 32gb option with 3G. The middle path between space and mobility. So far that looks a good decision.

So, my experiences…. Well my first experience was short lived. After about three hours the screen suddenly gave up mid flight. Very annoying that. So I rushed into town the next day and got it exchanged *phew*. So now I am on iPad v2.0 all going well so far. Let’s start with the down sides.

1. Aluminum can get REALLY cold! But that’s rather due to our bad insulation in our house.
2. Where’s the camera?
3. Keynote doesn’t allow the use of a clicker (yet)
4. No iOS4 (yet)
5. WordPress WYSIWYG editor don’t work
6. The USB power issues it has
7. Where is the calculator?
8. Where is SMS?

But all in all these niggles are minor. The good is that it’s absolutely awesome! After searching for decades this is the mobile device I always wanted. It gives me the flexibility without the bulk. The virtual keyboard is great. Little excursion on that… I can type nearly as fast on this thing as on a keyboard. The reason is probably that I never learned to 10-finger type. I still need to look at the keyboard. My hand movements to keys is random at best but it’s not slow. From the iPhone I’m used to not needing a tactile response and I actually find the glass that Apple uses nice to touch. Another cool side effect is that you can type easily in the pitch black.

Anyway… Oh yes, perfect device. The iPad like the iPhone follows the same principle of being more of a window on your data. So your emails and calender are just aggregates of your real services like Gmail or Exchange. So the iPad actually doesn’t save your stuff locally. This, in the age of Cloud Computing, is a good thing. Our data is ever more on-line. The need to have it locally is evaporating quickly.

I’ve now shown the iPad to a few people and the response is phenomenal. It’s like a no-brainer selling this thing. Switch it on, 50% sold and use it for 30 seconds…sold. This is the kind of device most people didn’t know they have been waiting for. The use is next to instinctive, no explanation necessary. Even ardent Apple nay-sayers are sold on it. Oh and I just wrote the last two paragraphs easily on the bumpy bus. Even a netbook would have been awkward in this situation. My only problem is that I am now getting motion sickness.

So in all, I definitely see this device as a milestone in computer and interface development. I am convinced we will look back on it like we do now on the first Macintoshes. It is also a much more revolutionary device than the iPhone. Where that was evolution of a concept this is revolution. The whole expectation of how personal computing is understood will change. Maybe it won’t be Apple selling the most devices in the end but neither did the Macintosh but it still was a revolutionary product (btw has someone already hacked an iPad into a Macintosh shell?).

Have a look at the iPad if you have some unused €£¥$ lying around! Don’t if you don’t. The temptation is just too big.

I won’t go into detail about what was said and done because the website has a good Wiki where you can read-up on what went down. I hope all the scribes put up what they have. There should also be some audio tracks up there soon. This post is mainly about me posting some rough & dirty pics. AND of course to rave about how AMAZINGLY GREAT this unconference was. Lots to take home and brilliant people in attendance!

Thanks again to PJ and Jeff for helping us do our own conference! Great stuff!

Starting us all off To CITCON (speak KITKON!!!! VERY IMPORTANT!)

So…..what’s on the menu

Lively discussion

Now this is what I call OFF TOPIC

CI tools and the pro’s and con’s

2010 and WeekendTesting is gaining traction. In the process of getting involved I was confronted multiple times on how I could NOT have a twitter account. So in order to see what the fuss was about I re-activated twitter a couple of weeks back. Mainly for the whole testing scene thing.

This was during the same time the ugly FaceBook-privacy monster reared it’s head. So the motivation to look for an alternative communication channel was high.

After a few weeks of being tested-twitter-tester here’s my verdict: AWESOME!!!!

I have learned more about testing, test-tools, methodologies in about 3 weeks than in the last year (OK, I do exclude that dice-game-thing with James B. from that)! Twitter is like a huge meeting/melting of minds machine. I love it.

Unlike FaceBook it is focused. The 140 chars is annoying but extremely helpful in concentrating thought and communication. FaceBook is personal and tends to be mostly bla-bla. Cool for catching up with mom but not for debating testing or communicating information quickly. FaceBook is a wasteland when it comes to progressing your subject at hand. Twitter is the opposite.

I am encouraging the uptake of twitter as a tester. It helps the trade, it helps your know-how. FTW

Oh and my twitter account: @Oliver_NZ

The knee-jerk reaction would be to call it “automated exploratory testing” or “exploratory test automation”. Sounds good and without much ado we could put that into a test strategy/plan of some sort. But… what are we really saying? Just put yourself in the shoes of an unexperienced project manager or line manager. I could see a converstationlike the one below:

Tester: “We will be doing automated exploratory testing!”

PM: “Cool! I like that idea. …hmmmm… so you mean after some test scripting we can get rid of all those testers! Wow! Double cool!”

Tester: “No, no”

PM: “Getting confused here. Alredy wrote here ‘decrease test effort by $50k’.”

Tester: “That’s not what I said. I meant….”

PM: “So no automated exploratory testing?”

Tester: “No. What I meant was….”

PM: “On a different topic altogether,….”

Testing is really great in choosing terminology that misleads non testing people in not getting it. This being one example.

What we want to say is that exploratory testing can use automation to facilitate the process of exploring. In the wider sense automation is just one part of our “bag of goodies” that we carry around. It is a powerful and sometimes inevitable tool but it does neither exploring nor testing. All automation can really do is checking (check out Michael Bolton’s blog on checking vs. testing http://www.developsense.com/blog/) and supporting manual testing.

So I’d suggest something like “tool-supported exploratory testing”. It clearly defines action and scope. John Bach (@jbtestpilot) commented that the dash based names were not so ideal and I do tend to agree. For the moment though I’d see it as the only really viable option bar something completely new (like Bionic testing, Remote control testing – thanks John).  I personally would love to have an acronym like ETX. I have so far failed at finding the long version for ETX though.

What this discussion has sparked in me though is to think twice about the terminology I use. The pitfalls are plenty and easy to fall into. So my advice to testers is to start caring about what you call things. It might propell your testing into a favourable direction and do away with the constant need to correct mis-conceptions.

Thanks James, Michael, Ben (Simo, @QualityFrog) and John for a great twitter session!

So I started looking for a new pair and to my surprise discovered Sennheiser was nice enough to have brought out a new model. The PX 100 II’s.  They have had a slight or not so slight update around the edges. I think the main things are:

• Broader and tighter headband
• One-sided cable with other ear cable going through headband
• Updated speakers
• No more case (but a nylon bag)

After searching the Internet there were lots of reports either way. Some said the sound was too basey, others said the sound was great. So after a couple of weeks of listening to them I think I can add now my own analysis.

1. The sound is slightly different. In my opinion better and still the stellar PX 100 sound. A+
2. The single cable connect thing is an absolute godsend! Just for that I’d buy them. No more feeling for the three dots to know where left is A++
3. I like the firmer headband. It’s better when listening lying down and it feels much more sturdy in general. A+
4. Downsides…..none.

Looks again like I’m a fanboy. I didn’t really set out to be one, being very cautious because of the different reports. In the end they just blew me away as the original PX 100′s did at the time.

One week later my old headphones turned up and now I have both. So far haven’t touched the old ones. The II’s are just so much more convenient and easy to use. I know that sounds like an odd thing to say about headphones but Sennheiser made them so much more usable. I am very thankful I did end up buying these even though the old ones turned up again. I am even thinking of selling my old ones because I can’t think of where I’d like to use them anymore.

So there you go. My fanboy endorsement for the NEW Sennheiser PX 100II’s.

The objective was here:
http://groups.google.co.nz/group/software-testers-new-zealand/browse_thread/thread/6cbee3a6fb040310

The raised bugs can be seen on http://bugrepository.com – project WTANZ01

The transcript is here: WTANZ Session 01 18-04-2010

As you can see the session was very lively and we had a really good attendance for a first time Weekend testing session. We pretty much kept to the time-frame of 2hrs.

The goal was to test the mortgage calculator on Sorted.org.nz. This is a popular website in NZ to learn about finances and things like retirement amongst others. From the word GO everybody really dug their heels in. One of the first insights was that there seems to be quite a big discrepancy when comparing results between various interest calculators. We really didn’t quite get to the bottom of that but it was interesting that a simple seeming thing can have so many “interpretations”.

Further testing quickly showed the obvious. This website has NO validation checking but….. it doesn’t fall over either. No matter what you threw at it it would process the results. Never mind if the answer was correct. For details see the raised defects.

The testing then focused on usability more general usability and browser testing. This might have all been  bit much for one session but nonetheless there were some good learning points to take home (check from log time 19:25 onwards).

The discussion after highlighted that in such a high pressure testing situation most used the ET path. Some ideas around planning were done and shared with some good insights. I’m sure everyone could take something home from this.

All in all great fun and great sharing. It all made my facilitation role so much easier

So after all the butterflies I’m glad it all went well and we’re all looking forward to Marlena’s session in a fortnight.

Also have a look at Ram’s blog entry that gives even more detail on what we did.

Cheers & till next time!

Oh, you probably won’t know what Weekend Testing (WT, http://weekendtesting.com) is! So let me explain… This WT stuff was “invented” in India and is spreading the globe. The aim is that Testers learn from other testers while using their skills. So the low down is, at a certain time on the weekend and undefined number of testers meet on a Skype chat and a facilitator then poses a task/mission. The testers go and do their stuff for an hour and then come back and discuss what they did and why.

The success has been quite phenomenal so far. There are three chapters in India and one in Europe. Because the time zone differences are quite extreme for us here at the other side of the globe there was a need to start our own chapter. So….

18th April is the first session
6:30PM New Zealand time and
4:30PM AUS time (east coast).

For more details have a look here: http://marlenacompton.com/?p=692

I started using Ubuntu in earnest with 8.04 and 10.04 will mark 2 years of using Ubuntu at my work desktop. I am a Mac fanboy but in the office I have the choice Windows 7….well that is about the only choice. I decided to go rouge and run Ubuntu way back when. It works quite well for me in conjunction with CrossoverOffice. There are definitely nigglies and I wouldn’t suggest running it at work if you’re not IT savvy. Running it as home OS is a lot simpler because you are not dependent on Microsoft back-end services.

Anyway 10.04 is about to drop on us and it is a LTS release (Long Term Support) which is nice. It has lots of new cool features and the design has improved a little too. So have fun using it!

So my civil duty it is to tell my fellow new zealanders about www.bookdepository.co.uk. It’s like Amazon but it has a distinct advantage…..FREE GLOBAL DELIVERY!!!! Now that is music to a Kiwi’s ears. No more waiting until you have US$150 worth of books to order from Amazon. Get them in your post box for the price of a book. And that price being that what the book really costs – before our kind bookstores put the gold-lining on the price.

Bookdepository has a very good selection of books and is sometimes even cheaper than Amazon (depending on exchange rate). The fastest delivery (and we have already had dozens) is 4 days with 5-6 being the norm. The longest was about 2 weeks. Every book is sent separately so books that are not in stock don’t delay books that are in stock.

All you bookworms out there rejoice and order to your hearts content!

This will cause more kiwi $$$ to go off-shore and will force our bookstores out of business. But…see it from the positive side. You’re doing the country a service. You are supporting the upward trend of literacy and abolishing these ridiculously high retail book prices. Let’s force them to re-think what they are doing.

Oh and… Mr. Key you can probably save a whole lot of tax-$$$ if you start ordering schoolbooks from overseas

I have checked out the alpha and beta releases and they look spectacular. Definite improvements over 9.04. I’m also very interested in the advancement of the server side with cloud computing being the big new thing.

It costs about $370 to get a certification and another $125 every year plus a 3-yearly retest at $170 to remain certified. That is $1165 for 5 years or $2130 for 10 years. And that’s only certification. No courses to train and no materials.  Just imagine spending that money  on books! I think they’d teach you a bit more than the cert ever can. You can even specialise on your topic and not be over generalised.

Once you’ve read those books & invested the time to understand them you can’t tell me an employer won’t take you. By that time you should be a real expert in your field. Nobody will have charged for a piece of (unbound)paper and the know-how gain is all your doing. It gives you an immense sense of accomplishment. You’ll still go to training courses and conferences advancing your know-how. If that is not what you’re doing already I’d guess you shouldn’t consider yourself an interested expert in your field anyway.

I do agree that it is difficult for companies to recognise a good employee/candidate. It takes proper screening and good interviews with intelligent questions. The certification organisations  try and convince you that their cert gives you the assurance of quality and standardisation. Well….do they compensate for losses if that is not the case? If not, what is the use? Have I checked that the certification complies with the standards of my company? If not, are my standards wrong? Will that person then fit my company?

I think certifications (I do exclude product related certs here!!)  are  just an easy way out for companies employing people. They think if the cert’s there they can go and blindly employ. Of-course it is ideal for recruitment agencies and managers. You can rest assured that you’re promoting someone good – yeah right! So employing is: Person is alive – tick, has a CV – tick, can spell IT – tick and has the right certs – tick. Done. An employer that does that will only get my services if I’m really desperate (and even then I’d rather not). For all involved parties it is good to remember that employment is a two-way road. The candidate chooses the company as much as the company does the candidate.

I like to be challenged and prodded in an employment process. No cert is ever going to save me from curve-balls in real employment meetings. Only my know-how and education will (and education can be obtained by several means not only the institutionalised way. See www.buccaneerscholar.com for more detail). What an employer is/should really be looking for is engagement and interest. Without those you have a working drone (which sometimes could be what you really want but most of the time not). Where is the cert qualifying engagement and interest?

When I have people apply for a job that have an ISTQB certification for example, there are two groups that  I can discern:

1. Those that have been dragged there by their companies (and have never thought about what they are doing)
2. Those that aren’t good testers and need something that will give them a foothold

I have yet to meet someone who has taken the exam that admits to stand behind the ISTQB certification. I am guessing the same thing will happen to ITCP. Certs in my opinion are actually a qualifier for mediocre abilities and/or a disinterest in my profession. If I’m good then a certification is an insult to my abilities. If I’m not a cert won’t help me to become better it will just show that I’m as good as any other of the thousand cert-Joe’s out there. I’d be better advised to do something spectacular, amazing and outright creative with my time. No matter what it is as long as it has some relevance to my job and I can speak to it. It will get you the job.

So why do these organisations not make a course with an exam and stop calling it a certification? Then everybody who thinks this course is a good idea can take it  and those that don’t can stay away without getting a stigmata? By pushing it as a certification and even going down the path of trying to make it mandatory it just plainly looks like an IT-Tax…. I wanna work in IT so I have to pay $$$ and we’ll do an examisomething so that it has a hint of legality – yeah right!

Maybe someday someone will change my mind but I doubt I’ll ever warm up to certification. Remains the hope I won’t be run out of town anytime soon.

“A simple hint for the new Quicktime X player. Clicking the fast forward button increases video playback speed to 2x, then 4x then 8x. 2x, however, is a bit fast to watch a video.

To increment by .1x, hold down Control and click fast forward. I find 1.3x speed works well, and is very watchable. This also works for reverse.” (link)

Thought I needed to share that. Saved my day today!

What had happened was that I had tried an apt update/upgrade (something like automatic updates on Windows) on my Ubuntu 8.10 server. It didn’t go quite swimmingly. Nothing new because my installation was a little wonky anyway. But as I restarted the machine it would not let me boot anymore. I was getting an immediate kernel panic. *shock*

So I did what I wanted to do a long time ago anyway (and was now forced to do) – upgrade my system. From a good friend I got an old 2.5″ 20GB HDD to replace my USB stick with that was running my web server. Not that the USB stick was a bad idea or anything but there’s the odd thing that is made easier by having a hard drive. I chose a 2.5″ model as I still am quite stingy when it comes to power use.

So I tried installing Ubuntu server 9.04. That failed due to whatever reason. So I installed Ubuntu server 9.10 Alpha 6. Very courageous here! …which went all fine.

It was nice to see that the USB stick was not all lost and could be read by the OS. So after installing some needed packages it was necessary to install my WordPress site (i.e. this site). Now that would be a challenge I thought. Not quite so….

1. Copied the WordPress directory,
2. changed the mySQL password in the wp-config.php file,
3. copied the apache2 site config files,
4. created the WordPress database I used for my site,
5. imported the database from my weekly backup file via phpmyadmin
6. and restarted apache2.

Voila, here is the site! Easy as. *phew* …. *PHEW*

So after the initial shock it took me less than 24hrs to recover my site. There’s still quite a bit of detail work left but that I can tackle at a slower pace. Impressed by both, Ubuntu and WordPress here. And of course my lucky stars that I could still read that USB stick. I think now it’s time for regular full backups of my web server!

Now that Snow Leopard (Mac OS X 10.6) came out Rebecca and I decided to invest in the whole Apple product range we use. Meaning that we needed new versions for the OS, iWorks and iLife. We have 3 Macs so the family package (5 licenses) is the way to go.

This package costs NZ $479 in the Apple store. In the US it costs US $229. Google tells me that that equates to about NZD $330. Ok….so what’s the $109 difference ($41 is sales tax)??? That is definitely a bit much for postage. So this is pure additional profit! For what? Living in NZ??? Is this the living-happily-in-NZ-tax??? I honestly feel conned by Apple. And I certainly wasn’t going to stand for it. So here’s the trick on how to save lots of dough….

Go to Amazon US and get search for Mac OS X there. You will find the family pack advertised for $199 (!!) or even less. Get it shipped to someone you know in the US and then get them to ship it out to NZ. Voila, you just saved $100+.

Apple is a cool company and I love their products and will keep on buying them but if they think they can fund cheap US sales by conning the rest of the world then their outa luck. I think this should even get investigated by the commerce commission. Wonder who I write to there…

Over the next year I predict that I will need another 2-6TB of storage to cope with added data volumes (I intend on starting to film in 1080p resolution which is about 4GB for 15min of video). Currently the largest available drives are 2TB at a cost of about $300. The issue is not with the drive itself though. It is about how and where do I connect the drive to the network.

External USB/FW drives are too slow for real use (they are OK for incremental local backups though). So the remaining solution is some kind of NAS. My HTPC/Mac (see below) will fulfill that function. It is attached via 1Gbps Ethernet and has six drive bays available and a large power supply. The unit already sports a 250GB boot drive and a 1.5TB data drive.  The issue is that with that all the SATA ports on the Atom board are used. So the next drive will have to be attached to an extra SATA PCI card (which will have to be Mac compatible).

The new Snow Leopard also supports wake-on-use. That means the machine will wake on access of a drive. Currently I still need to wake it manually via WoL. Remains to be seen when Snow Leopard (10.6) will be “available” on the Intel Atom boards with all needed features supported.

The issues I have with data in my private home start to mirror what has been happening for quite a while in the datacentres. Not only does that mean I need ever more technical know-how at home to cope but it also means that something like the solution below gets interesting.

http://blog.backblaze.com/2009/09/01/petabytes-on-a-budget-how-to-build-cheap-cloud-storage/

This is of-course too large for private use but it does solve some of the issues you might encounter when building your own NAS.

One other thing that is hugely annoying in NZ is the lack of broadband flatrates. This effectively prevents you from performing sorely needed and large off-site backups. Currently I solve this problem by storing a USB hard drive off site. This HDD contains a copy of the most important data that I have (by no means all the data!).

So, what have you done for your backup today?

Matt Mansell’s (DIA) talk about Growing Great Test Analysts contained one comment that really struck a chord (not that the rest of the talk wasn’t excellent). He said (my own interpretation) that calling us testers is really putting down our capabilities and our profession. Instead we should make a point of calling ourselves Test Analysts. We ARE analysts and good testing is learned the hard and painful way. We are not monkeys or Business Analysts in sheep’s clothing.  I am as guilty as are most. I will in future make a real effort in using the proper term of  Test Analyst. It is a small but vital step in the right direction.

Stanz 2009 fltr: Julian Harty, Karen Johnson, Lee Copeland, James Bach

And the above really highlights what Stanz is all about. We go there to get reminded that we are in a testing profession. The speakers entice us to learn more, to read more and to get off our complacent derrierès. The 2009 Stanz definitely had the right set of speakers for this. I again enjoyed the quasi familiarity of the event. I doubt there are many places in the world where the attendees and speakers can get so up-close and personal to exchange ideas.

The effects of the recession were visible but that was to be expected. Even so I’d say the attendance was good and it was nice to see all those familiar faces again and meet some new ones.

Who knows, 2010 might be the year I switch sides from listening to talking. We’ll see…..

[Update] With the upgrade to 10.5.8 the sleep mode breaks. There is currently only a fix for Voodoo kernels but not the plain Vanilla ones. Very annoying this is. Maybe I’ll have to re-install.

[Update 2] I have re-installed to 10.5.6 because that gives me sleep and Atom 330 Hyperthreading. I’ll then wait & see what Snowleopard brings…

You’ll have either 5,10 or 20GB cap. So that only means that you’ll reach your download limit on the second of each month and not the fourth! What is it with peoples craze for speed? It’s the same stupidity as with the fiber-optic cable to the curb. We don’t need any of that if we’re going to d*ck around with these outdated data caps. What needs to go is the Telecom bottleneck-monopoly of the Tasman cable (Kudos to Kordia for wanting to install that 2nd cable).

If we had free market conditions on the international data highway we’d have no caps, it would make sense to up the bandwidth and private companies would invest in infrastructure.

But we have a Telecom controlled monopoly so nothing happens and now taxpayers have to cough up $1.5bn so that we can get some cables in the ground only to find out that they won’t solve any of our issues.

So go Telstra! 100Mbit will not really bring us any advantage. Give us a flatrate and keep it at 10Mbit!!!

As a result they lost my business as I have now ordered directly from Apple (which I would have done anyway if I had anticipated that they’d sell it too). It’s even $30 cheaper from them.

So Apple has come through again and Vodafone proved it can’t really come to the party. The sad thing is Telecom isn’t an option either they’re just as pathetic. Wonder when we will really get a choice in this country.

As I said in post 1 I got my first inspiration from here:

http://www.osnews.com/story/21564/Building_a_Hackintosh_Apple_Can_t_Sue_You_

Basically the interesting part being able to use the standard OS install. I pretty much followed the instructions on that page. But here I’ll also give some additional hints that might make your life a little easier.

So with a USB stick, a freshly burnt boot-132 CD and the Mac OS X Leopard DVD (10.5.0) I ventured to my new Atom powered sleek SilverStone Mac (or do I call it a PC?). Before I started though I had deleted all partitions off the hard drive so that the Mac OS X installer would not have any issues trying to delete Linux or Windows partitions. This I did with a Live boot CD running Ubuntu 9.04. The Partition Editor under the System menu did the trick.

That done I inserted the boot-132 disk and started the HTPC. As promised it came up with a prompt and after exchanging the DVD the new OS was happily installing. Note to partition the drive correctly before installing though.

The install took about an hour. Create your user & stuff and you’re ready to reboot. You will still need the boot-132 CD to start into your partition until you have installed the bootloader Chameleon.So reboot now and see what happens.

*TaDa*

You have your first OS X start! Probably you’ll only see a 1024×768 resolution but that’s 100% OK.First install the 10.5.7 combo installer from Apple. You might run into a system crash when you reboot. This is due to problems with hyperthreading (HT) on the Atom CPUs. This is probably due to the processor not being interpreted correctly but I did not yet figure a way of fixing that. Maybe someone out there has a clue. To get it running you therefore have to turn off hyperthreading in the BIOS.

Now start executing all those steps in the link above. You’ll need to install Chameleon, Kexts and the other goodies. One thing the documentation sort of misses is the fact that you manually have to set the Mac OS partition to be active if none of the tools has done that for you. Details for this can be read-up here.

Should you have more than one partition the boot manager will also come up every time to ask you where to boot from. If you don’t want that read up here how you can change on the boot loader. For me it were the entries…

<key>Kernel Flags</key>
<string>rd=disk0s2</string>
<key>Timeout</key>
<string>4</string>

…in the com.apple.Boot.plist file.

One thing to note with the Intel D945GCLF2 board is, that the Realtek NIC is not fully 100% supported and the above description does not mention that. Get the Kext from here and install it with the OSx86 tool. All networking now works like a charm.

Finally repair disk permissions and install

If you have done all of the above you should be able to recreate this screen:

The important detail being…

If you do have the good fortune of having a SilverStone case with a display you will now need to get the display to work. the easiest way I found is by using the linked installer for LCDproc from here:

http://www.insanelymac.com/forum/lofiversion/index.php/t83598.html

I also recommend Plex for the movie experience (or just stick to FrontRow for now). Perian is also a valuable asset to have for those video codecs. XSlimmer (see below) can also help with cutting down the space used by applications a bit.

The set-up has now been running a couple of days and I’m very happy. Two things remain to be done:

1. I need to get 5.1 audio to work. So far no luck (or figure out a way for the on-board digital out to work)
2. Find a way to activate the buttons and volume controller from the SilverStone case.

Although the latter is not that important to me. I’m content and am totally amazed at how well this has worked. The Atom is also a lot faster than I would have expected. It probably isn’t as fast as a Mac Mini but then I wouldn’t have expected that but it is a heck of a lot faster than my 1.42Ghz Mac Mini I had before (even with a 250GB 5400RPM drive upgrade!).

So the experiment was a success and I can now attack the final little nigglies.