Upgrading my MacBook hard disk

I took out the old disk, removed the shield with the TORX screws (unusual screws, luckily I had a friend with some of these), abnd inserted the new bigger drive. On boot up, my MacBook displays a flashing folder icon with a question mark.

?

So, I inserted the Leopard DVD and it boots. I go through the wizard for installation and get to the point where I need to select where to install. According to the wizard, there's nowhere to install it.

?

So, I try the disk utility. No new disk appears... then there it is. I erase it, try the install again. This time the disk appears in the where to install it display. How bizarre! Why not offer the option of erasing at this point rather than dumping the unsuspecting user with a blank screen, making him think he may have a dud drive?

So, get MacOS installed. I get stuck in the network page where it keeps asking me the wireless lan details. There seems no way to get out of this page. Eventually it connects to my hidden network (I'm guessing I got the password wrong, shame # isn't on my UK keyboard). Finally, it boots, and asks if I want to restore from back, including Time Capsule. I select that option, plug in the drive with Time Capsule on it, and restore my backup.

After restoration, it's MacOS 10.5.4, not 10.5.6. Curious. So backup doesn't include system files. Also, Xcode is missing. So backup excludes certain items. None of this is mentioned on the minimal setup for Time Capsule.

It was a smooth operation, however, with flaws.

Oh Leopard, where are thy spots?

I upgraded my MacBook to Leopard.

Oh dear.

It feels slower and wireless is broken. Gee. Thanks Apple!

It seems the issue with wireless is well known - still no solution from Apple as yet. So, when I switch it on, I have to use Assist to get my wireless up and running. Tedious.

UPDATE: Seems rebooting the router helped, along with clearing out the keys. Also mail was broken but deleting the configuration helped there too.

Spore patch 3

With the latest Spore patch, they've released new limbs for creatures:

Spore!

I read about Spore a while ago. I've played Sim City several times and liked it, so spore was interesting. I tried the Creature Creator trial and liked it, so I bought the full version of the creator. That led to buying a prerelease version of spore and downloading an encrypted version early.Spore was released last Friday (with a few server hiccups), I've been playing it ever since. It's addictive. So far I've found the cell stage the most fun.

Herbivore...Carnivore...Omnivore...

Omnivore is the most fun of the three types - you get to suck vegetables or other creatures. The expressions on them is very funny - the eyes bug out and all the frills etc. stretch out as if horrified. The sound effect is of you sucking noisily on a straw!

Once you evolve your creature starts to develop further - here's the omnivore at the creature stage:

Even in the cell stage you get an editor - here you can rearrange parts, pull off parts to replace them or add new bits and bobs to make your creature more adaptive to its environment. Here's the omnivore in its latest phase (in tribal):

As you play the game, more stages open up and you can jump in at those points (cell, creature, tribal, civilisation and space), or you can let your character evolve through each stage on the way.

After the cell stage, creature stage didn't strike me as that wonderful for a while - until I saw my own creatures I'd created in the creature editor appear as giant versions in game with 1000 points and terrorising the neighbourhood!

Audio Units

Trying to get around the Apple developer documents is a nightmare. There aren't hyperlinks to keywords so you have to switch back to the index; subjects aren't discussed in great detail - how to use AudioUnitGetProperty etc. Even Microsoft's documentation is more complete than that! Wow! Way to go Apple!

VSTi and AU

Last time I tried to create a VST host, then bolt Melody Mine on the front of it... well, it didn't really work. That may have been due to using Delphi to create everything (Delphi doesn't do so well with floating point exceptions). Now that I'm using C++ with wxWidgets, maybe it's time to try again.

Meanwhile, playing around with Audio Units on my MacBook seems so much easier that VST + ASIO on Windows! I've modified my keys application to use the Apple Synthesiser, so I may try the same with Melody Mine (which uses Port MIDI - this requires an external synthesiser to make any sounds). That may mean I drop PortMIDI and use my own classes to talk directly to the MIDI API on Windows and AU on MAC.

Facelift

A facelift for Melody Mine - replaced the song grid with a custom grid of my own. Editing with it is much easier.

Exporting MIDI

Ported the Windows only code that writes out MIDI to a cross platform version for the Mac. Seems to work on the PC.

Switched to PortMIDI

I switched my midi output to PortMIDI - got it working on the PC and fixed an annoying bug. Took a while to get past build issues on the Mac but got that working too, though the setup is not as simple as the PC.

Melody Mine now has Lua scripting...

Here's a short Lua script that truncates notes in a pattern in my MIDI editor, Melody Mine.

function TruncateDuration(duration)

local i, index, note, dur
local pattern = GetCurrentPattern()
local count = GetNoteCount(pattern)

for i = 0, count - 1 do
note = GetNote(pattern, i)
dur = GetNoteDuration(note)
if dur > duration then
dur = duration
end
SetNoteDuration(note, dur)
end
end

TruncateDuration(24)

Melody Mine V0.53

Melody Mine (Windows and Mac versions)

(images copyright © 2007 Pete Goodwin)

MacBook

My laptop was getting old - a 700MHz Celeron. It wouldn't run Windows XP but did run Ubuntu. Never could get WPA wireless to work on it though.

I thought about getting an Apple MacBook, even more so since they had an Intel version out. So, I bought one before Christmas. It's like Linux but with a desktop and decent applications.

The "finder" application seems to be the worst part of it - a bit of a mess, I think. The Wireless network seems to have issues too but I think I've got that working now.

Firefox and Thunderbird all work on Windows, Linux and Apple - why use anything else?

(Today I'm using IE7 due to an issue with Firefox and Blogger)