Alright, I'm writing this little trick I've found, because I bumped into that problem this weekend and couldn't find anyone one line who found out how to fix it. I hope it's useful to a few people! Winclone is a free piece of software for Mac that allows you to create a bit-for-bit image of a windows partition and save it to a file that you can use to restore your partition in case you have problems with it. It was discontinued a few months ago, but you can still find it and it does the job really well. Except that, if you make an image of a partition that has errors in it, it won't be able to restore it. When you try to do so, it will first run a filesystem check on the image, and the log will show errors, which looked like that in my case:

This are pictures from my first origami (well, aside from planes and boats...). Took a few hours, but it was worth it. It's made of 30 folded pieces of paper (15x15cm), assembled without glue or staples or paperclips or anything, just paper :) The easy part is the folding. Assembling is nerve wrecking. The structure is surprisingly stable and looks pretty cool, apart from the holes in the middle of the flowers, which are probably not supposed to be there. It would also have been better to use nice coloured paper rather than my notebook. But it's a good first attempt overall :)

After my rant about iTunes and how to get rid of it under OSX, here is a second post about another problem I was having. Basically, I needed cgkit 2.0 to work under OSX, but it's only available as a binary package for OSX 10.4, and I couldn't find any help on the web as to how to compile it for OSX 10.6 (Snow Leopard). I found that the easiest way to get it to work is with the MacPorts version of Python 2.6, which has its advantages and drawbacks, but hey, now I can run my code. So here is how I got it to work. I may have have omitted some details, so please ask if that fails.

First, you're going to need to install a few packages from MacPorts, including of course Python (after you've installed MacPorts itself, but I'll skip that...). Open a terminal and type the following command:
The "+python26" ensures that the boost_python library will be compiled, which is crucial for the rest. Now, if you've just installed MacPorts, go watch a film, play outside, take your girlfriend to a nice restaurant, whatever will keep you busy for 2 or 3 hours. The good thing about MacPorts though, is that it will probably go smoothly.

You have to make sure that the python executable that you've just installed is the default one, and not the one that comes with OSX (you don't want to mess that one up, so better not use it at all). Type
It should return

I recently bought my first Mac, a lovely MacBook Pro 13'', and have been using Window 7 on it pretty much ever since I've bought it. Sometimes I think it's really a shame though, because some features do work a lot better with OSX, notably the battery lasts significantly longer. A few things really annoy me in OSX though. Some of them are just habits, some are truly inherent to the available software, and one of those last ones is iTunes.

I really can't stand iTunes. It's slow slow slow and can't just play your files as is. I don't want to depend on iTunes, so I don't want to use its file management system. Of course you can tell it not to modify your music library, and that's what I tried first. I started by importing my mp3 collection. My files are nicely sorted in an directory imaginatively called "mp3s", then <artist>/<album>/<tracks>. If I tell iTunes to scan my "mp3s" directory, it found something like 10% of my music. It only works when I give it the whole list of artists subdirectories instead. Took me a while to figure that out, and it makes no sense. How hard can it be to implement a recursive scan? Then it takes something like 2 hours to import everything, and doesn't keep an eye on changes in the file structure, so I have to manually import or delete tracks that I add to or remove from my library. Plus it can't play Vorbis encoded files by default. Hey, Vorbis has only been around for 2 centuries after all. That thing really pissed me off, so I looked for alternative software, and it turns out that there's only one that's still being developed, and that's Mozilla Songbird.

I was very pleasantly surprised with it. It does exactly what I want almost out of the box, and is very customisable. It can use my music library as is, and automatically keeps track of changes. Also it needed about 10 minutes to import all of my music, including Vorbis files. It can also manage your files the way iTunes does if you want that, but not by default. And it supports addons, in the same way that Firefox and Thunderbird do. It's multi platform, and with addons you can customize it for each of them. And this is what I did for OSX.

First of all, surprise surprise, I installed Songbird. You can get it here.

Then I wanted it to display track info through Growl. There are 3 addons available for that, but none of them actually works. One of them, called "Notify me", doesn't support the current version of Songbird (1.4.3 as I'm writing this), but it turns out that some guy managed fix that. It's not on the official Songbird addons website, but it worked out of the box for me. You can get it here.

Last but not least, you might want to be able to use the media keys of your keyboard to control playback. There again there's an addon, which you can get here. Problem is, pressing the play/pause key will start iTunes, and you can't turn that off in Snow Leopard. One trick to prevent that is to start the Quicktime player and let it run in the background. It takes little memory and no CPU, but still I don't like the idea. But then I thought, hey, if I'm not going to use iTunes anyway, I may as well get rid of it. It turns out that Apple themselves tell you how to do that, here. That solved the problem in a very clean manner.

And that's it! I hope that can help a few people :)

I went to the last (sig) Breakpoint demoparty this year again in Bingen am Rhein, near Frankfurt, in Germany, the largest pure demo party (i.e. no gaming involved) in the world. Over a 1000 people, 1.75 light years of cables, 3.45 gazillion lines of code and 2 nuclear power stations were used. Really cool demos of course, but not quite as good as last year, in my opinion. However, there was definitely the nicest PC demo I've ever seen, Agenda Circling Forth, by Fairlight/CNCD, who won the contest (unlimited size). And I've taken those two panoramic pictures of the event:

I've decided to transfer my website from wordpress to google sites, as it seems to better suit my needs. Let's see how long it takes until I change my mind again.