In the years before Xcode and Mac OS X, there was CodeWarrior, an IDE and compiler of legendary speed. It has since fallen by the wayside, but you can bring back old Macintosh development memories with this humble Metrowerks style folder icon, ready to paste onto any project to give it that classic Geekware feel. Download Now
If you’ve formatted a bootable hard drive on an Intel Mac (or have perhaps been tinkering with the wholly unsupported Leopard OSx86…) and later decided to put the drive to use under Windows XP, you might find that you’re unable to format the disk, with Windows Disk Management claiming the device is a “GPT Protective Partition.” You can’t format it, partition it, or even assign it drive letter. What gives?
The secret is that the GPT scheme protects itself from being read and possibly erased by utilities or operating systems which aren’t able to correctly interpret it. Until just recently, I wasn’t aware that a filesystem even had such a capability. I was under the false assumption that a utility running externally of the drive in question could always format a detected disk, no matter the filesystem in place. I doubt it could withstand the raw formatting power of DBAN, but it was enough to befuddle Windows XP.
How can the GPT scheme be undone? Typically, software that can create it can also destroy it. In my case, Leopard’s Disk Utility application was able re-partition the drive as follows:
Once the partitioning is complete, you’ll be able to format and use the drive under Windows XP, Mac OS 9, or any other system incapable of comprehending GPT Partitions.
New RAM!
Whenever I get a new stick of RAM for my Mac or PC, I’m always eager to just plug it in and start using it to its fullest, but having worked on hundreds of computers and encountering dozens of bad memory modules has convinced me that thorough testing a must. While off-the-shelf PCs can run a copy of the free — and very handy — Ultimate Boot CD tool to perform RAM tests, Macs are a little bit more complicated in this respect. If you’ve purchased AppleCare for your Mac, it comes with a bootable TechTool Deluxe disc, but you’re otherwise left to your own devices when it comes to hardware issues.
A Note About Single User Mode
Fortunately, with a little preparation right now, you can boot your Mac into Single User Mode and do a complete RAM test in the future. While you can run the necessary software in a fully-booted system, I recommend doing testing in Single User Mode where there are far less programs loaded in memory, and less chance of an important system component getting corrupted if your machine freezes or kernel panics — common symptoms of bad memory. A modified Mac OS X boot CD would be ideal, but that’s another post for another day!
Software Setup
The testing setup isn’t terribly complex; I’ve taken the liberty of putting together an installable package which will put the Memtest utility and its man page entry in your /usr/bin/ and /usr/share/man/ folders, respectively (if you wish to put them elsewhere, you can always just extract the contents of the .pkg with Pacifist). Memtest is a Unix command-line program that does the memory testing, and is the Mac equivalent of MemTest86.
Memtest Usage
To run memtest on a new memory module, first shut down your computer and install the new chip. (Some helpful guides for doing this can be found at iFixit, if you’re unsure of the exact steps.) Ensure the chip is firmly in place, close up your machine (or don’t, if you’re a pessimist), and power it on while holding down the Command and S keys to force Mac OS X to boot into Single User Mode. Once you see a black screen with white text, you can release the key combination. After all the system logging is done scrolling past, type memtest all 2 to test ‘all’ memory ‘2′ times. Two passes should be enough to detect any blatant problems, but I wouldn’t hesitate to let it run for hours on end if I suspected an intermittent memory problem (memtest all). When complete, you should be greeted with “All tests passed” if your new RAM is in good condition. If your system locks up or freezes indefinitely during the test, you may have a bad memory module on your hands.
Since its release, I’ve been a fan of Jan Van Boghout’s VLC Icon Overhaul, preferring the dark video icons to QuickTime’s slightly modified generic document set. Part of the challenge of publishing a Mac application is coming up with icons that stand out against the rest of the system while still retaining the standardization that users expect, and Jan’s add-on makes VLC-playable files easily identifiable without introducing any confusion about their type. I’ve taken the liberty of creating 512×512 Leopard size icons for each format VLC can play, ready to drop into the application’s contents and use. Download the set here (full size preview), and follow the same instructions to install them. (Note that I haven’t built a large VLC application icon — something I may do soon.)
