Harrow's is supposed to serve an amazing chicken pie.
124 Main St, Reading, MA
Two places in Cleveland Circle. Pino's and Presto's. Pino's is the original established in 1962, Presto's was established by a former employee. Supposed to be a rivalry between the two. Pino's is more traditional.
There's a new pizza place in Nashua started by an israeli guy that is supposed to be a NY style slice.
The NH chain that people from the Manchester area mention is Sal's, which has a lot of locations. I had a pie from the Nashua location by the mall, and it was not that amazing. New franchisee I reckon.
Over in Pennsylvania, Alen suggests we check out the Pizza Capitol
My favorite place is currently Sichuan Gourmet in Billerica, MA.
For a taste of Hong Kong on Southern New Hampshire, there's South Garden in Merrimack, which also serves Dim Sum items on the weekends. It's OK. They have radish cakes, which is what I get the taste for.
Heard that Gitlo's serves good dim sum! Thanks Bridget!
Looking for yummy Banh Mi! Yummy Express - 21 Branch St, Lowell, MA seems to be a likely location. Also, the Saigon Market in Nashua (maybe Manchester too) has Bahn Mi has them at 11AM on Saturday only.
Phantom Gourmet is the one I know about, but concentrations in NH favor The Hippofor showcasing local restaurants of interest. I wouldn't have known about all the activity in Milford without it.
]]>`This program only supports one U3 drive removal. Exit the program and unplug extra drive then try again.`
Since there was only one U3 thumb drive plugged in, I was somewhat at a loss why this was the case. I went to the SanDisk Driver Page to download the stand-alone removal tool, but it too failed. I figured it was just crap software, and then I realized that the error message was misleading. The de-installer actually is saying that it can only deal with one drive at a time. If you have a Compact Flash Card Reader installed, or any removable USB disk device plugged in, you need to remove it. Otherwise, the de-installer gets confused and refuses to run.
Removing the digital storage card reader (it's built into my monitor, so I forget it's there) solved my removal problem. I did this by going to the Safely Remove Hardware taskbar icon and ejected the offending disk drives.
I like to keep my data on a separate drive. As I formatted my entire BootCamp partition as NTFS for data robustness, it is READ ONLY to MacOS. I eventually want to run Parallels, so it would be good to have my data on a separate drive. I tried installing Acronis Disk Director 10 under XP, but the partitioning scheme used on the Mac is newer than what's used on XP; it's nicely documented here as part of another article. After looking around for partition resizing utilities, I came across this article about diskutil, the built-in partition tool for MacOS X, now adding resize support. I'm about to try that, after purchasing and installing Parallels.
And here's another nice reference on one person's experience using diskutil
Ok, after re-installing MacOS X to undo the partition madness, then updating, I tried running BootCamp Assistant. It promptly told me that I couldn't run it. It installs a BOOT MANAGER to allow windows booting. So I'm going to nuke the other partitions and see what happens...it INSISTS on being the one to diddle everything together. Annoying.
So I had set up the 250GB disk as 60GB Mac, 60GB Windows, and the remainder for DATA. I used Disk Utility to delete the Windows and DATA partitions, leaving the 60GB Mac partition. When I ran Boot Camp again, it saw ONLY the Mac partition, not the empty space. Hmm.
So I loaded up Disk Utility again, and doubled the size of the Mac partition to 120G. I then ran BootCamp Assistant again, and choose DIVIDE EQUALLY. This, I believe, locates the Bootable Windows Partition within that first partition in a way that will make the system bootable.
Upon reaching the Windows XP installation area, I was troubled to see that the unpartitioned space I'd left was nowhere to be seen.
So I started again. This time I used Brad-X writeup on the process, which was similar to the MacWorld article in its material, but coupled with the previous insight made me realize there was something special about the resizing process itself. In the process of resizing one of the already-partitioned disks, I think this somehow preserved whatever structures needed to be preserved. This is purely a guess though.
On following the resizeVolume, I made sure I had the right partitions in the right order: Mac, Data, and Windows. The Windows partition, according to what I read online, HAD to be the last partition. I believe this is a physical layout requirement. The new partitioned showed up (yay) when I launched Windows XP Installer (holding down the C key to force boot the CD-ROM). However, the Windows drive was going to be D, and Data would end up as C. This bugged me from a convention standpoint, so I aborted the install and rebooted Mac OS X. I went into Disk Utility, deleted the Data partition, and rebooted back into the Windows installer. This time, I saw only the C: drive assigned.
Upon all the files being copied over, the computer restarted. However, it booted into Mac OS X. I went to Preferences / Startup Disk, and to my relief saw the Windows drive was now an option. However, the system booted with a DISK ERROR on the Windows side.
Gah! What we basically need is to have (1) Bootcamp apply its magic partition handwaving, which means it has to be involved at some point to make the system changes while (2) sticking the Windows partition at the very end of the disk. The DATA partition will be in the middle. I tried various things of splitting the DOS partition, but BootCamp does strange things to the partition table. The workaround, however, is to not worry about the DOS side...make the MAC side big enough to contain both the data and itself, and after bootcamp is installed THEN you shrink the Mac partition and format the data partition!
Well, I tried it, and it doesn't work.
One difference I noticed in the instructions, on a more careful reading, is that the partition adjustment was done via the Leopard CD's Disk Utility; that is, booted from CD. That makes sense, as it's tough to work with an active partition that is also the startup disk, as magical as this new resizeVolume command is. The other thing that might be a problem is that if you change the partitioning on a disk, the reference numbers also change, and these are hard referenced in a file called Boot.INI on the disk. So, editing THAT may be necessary as well, but since the disk is NTFS, OS X can't touch it unless.
SO before I start this again, I'm going to use WinClone to back up the partition onto a USB drive I have. This is a shareware app for Mac OS. Incidentally, there's a very good description of what BootCamp does to the partitions on the WinClone site.
Ok, that didn't work...again. UNMOUNTABLE_BOOT_VOLUME error flickered briefly on a blue screen before the screen winked black.
I recall back in the late 90s, when I was moving from Windows 95 to Windows NT Workstation 4.0, of having some woes reconfiguring my system for dual boot between the two, and I had to edit the BOOT.INI, a hidden system file.
I noticed that the Startup Disk dialog for Mac OS X had something called "Direct Disk Mode", which turns your computer into a firewire drive. Heck, why not? I put the Mac into that mode, and then plugged it into my PC, which CAN. And this worked! I edited BOOT.INI manually, bumping up the partition number, and we are working. Whew.
]]>I had a devil of a time reproducing my standard windows drive setup on a new MacBook Pro 17":
C:\ for Windows and Applications
D:\ for Data
It's good to keep your data separate from the applications because it's a lot easier to back up. This is also a defensive move, just in case you have to reinstall the operating system, you can just nuke the entire C:\ partition and not worry about losing important data, assuming you keep your work on the DATA drive. You can relocate My Documents to the D:\ drive too with a simple right-click on the icon, which moves it from the default location on C:... but I digress. Let's get cracking!
My ideal setup, with a dual-boot Mac OS X / Windows XP system would be this:
Looks simple enough, but oh man.
I figured that it would be easy to install Boot Camp and then add a second partition for my data. That turns out to not be the case AT ALL: The Boot Camp Assistant utility, which prepares your Mac for installing Windows, will not even run if you have anything that doesn't look like "One Big Fat Drive with Mac OS X on it and Nothing Else."
While I haven't done a detailed investigation as to why, my impression is that there no technical reason for this limitation if you know two things:
When you restart the Mac, hold down OPTION to choose what device to boot. This allows you to boot the right operating system or installation CD at the right time. Normally Boot Camp assistant does this for you.
If you add a new partition after you install Windows via Boot Camp Assistant, it will no longer boot. The reason why is because the partition numbering has changed, and since the Windows boot process needs to know the number of the partition, it can't figure out where to find itself. The solution is to fix the number manually. I did this by putting my Mac into Target Disk Mode to turn it into a firewire drive, then mounting it on a second Windows PC to edit the critical C:\BOOT.INI file directly.
At first, I thought that Boot Camp Assistant was writing some kind of special disk signature to the disk partitions, or installed some kind of boot manager that did something to make Windows XP work properly. As I reinstalled---then broke---Windows XP for the 5th time while trying to add the second partition, it occurred to me that this may not actually be the case, but I have not verified this.
ANYWAY, here is what worked for me, pulled together out of several articles I found on the internet (see the OLDER NOTES section at the end of this article for the links).
Before you start, you'll need a firewire cable that will connect to a PC running Windows XP or Vista. You'll need this connection to edit a file in your Windows XP installation to fix a booting problem. You'll also need a Windows installation CD and a Mac OS X Leopard Installation DVD.
Here's what worked for me:
You're starting with one partition called Macintosh HD, which you first must prep for Boot Camp using Boot Camp Assistant (BCA) in the Utilities folder of your Mac OS X install. You will be asked how big to make the Windows partition. For my 250GB disk, I wanted my Window and Mac partition to be 70G, with the remainder devoted to the D:\ drive.
You'll be asked to choose what kind of split to make between the Mac side and the PC side. The first step will be to size the Windows partition to (using my example) 70G. The Macintosh HD partition will be 180GB (250-70). We will create the data partition in a later step. Go ahead and click continue.
After repartitioning the drive and creating the BOOTCAMP partition, BCA will prompt you to insert a Windows installation CD. Go ahead and install Windows XP or Vista. I installed Windows on an NTFS partition (choosing Quick Format NTFS in Windows Setup to prep the partition). After that was done, I installed Boot Camp drivers from the Mac OS X Leopard Installation DVD.
With Windows installed on your Boot Camp partition, you're ready to now create the DATA partition by using the 'Disk Utilityprogram on the Mac OS X Installation DVD. Boot the DVD (hold down OPTION while restarting), then choose the installation language and continue until you see the TOOLS menu appear. This is where you'll findDisk Utility`.
With Disk Utility, I resized the Macintosh HD partition so it was 70G, which left the 90GB or so left as unpartitioned space. Select the hard drive from the list at the left of the screen (not the partitions, but the entire disk) and click the Partition tab. On this screen you'll be able to drag the bottom of the Macintosh HD partition. Choose it to be as close to 70GB as you can (or any size you like), and click Apply to make the change. The display may be slightly confusing afterwards, with the Macintosh HD partition appearing in the middle of the partition list, but ignore that.
Still in Disk Utility, select the UNPARTITIONED SPACE and create a new FAT32 partition in it by using the drop-down menu. This will become the new DATA drive. I used Disk Utility to ERASE and NAME the new partition as DATA. Apply the changes, then quit Disk Utility.
I then rebooted into Mac OS X on the HD. I did this by choosing "Start Disk" from the TOOLS menu. If you try to boot Windows, you'll find that it will give you an error about not finding a disk. We're going to fix this by editing a system file, BOOT.INI, to allow Windows to find the disk again.
To start the editing process, put the Mac into Target Disk Mode. I did this by going to System Preferences and choosing "Start Disk", and selected Target Disk Mode. This will reboot the Macintosh and make it appear as a "firewire hard disk" that you can connect to with another PC.
Why doesn't Windows XP boot? It's because the number of partitions on the disk has changed from 2 (Macintosh HD and BOOTCAMP) to 3 (Macintosh HD, DATA, and BOOTCAMP). Windows XP's bootup procedure refers to the number of the partition when it starts, so we need to update that information in the secret Windows XP BOOT.INI file. By putting the Mac into Target Disk Mode, I can mount the Mac on a Windows XP PC through a firewire port, find the BOOT.INI file, and manually edit it. If I'd left my Windows HD partition as FAT32, then I could have edited it from Mac OS X, but since my boot partition is NTFS I need to edit it from another Windows XP computer (NTFS is read-only in Mac OS X, FAT32 is read and write).
To edit the BOOT.INI file on my PC, I opened the volume with the Windows installation on it in Windows Explorer. It's a hidden system file, so you have to go to TOOLS > FOLDER OPTIONS > VIEW, check the ADVANCED settings for show hidden files and folders, and uncheck Hide extensions for known file types and also uncheck hide protected operating system files. After you do that, you should see BOOT.INI. Just make sure you're not editing the one on your PC...you should be editing the one on your Macintosh, mounted as a Firewire drive.
You'll see something that looks like this in your BOOT.INI file:
[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /NOEXECUTE=OPTIN
When you added that new DATA partition, you renumbered them. What used to be partition (2) is now partition (3). So you have to update the (2) to (3), save the file, close it, then safely unmount the disk.
If you DON'T do this and try to boot Windows, you'll find that it crashes with the "I'm sorry, we couldn't start up Windows. Do you want to start in Safe Mode?" screen. You'll also see a flicker of the BLUE SCREEN OF DEATH, which flashes an UNMOUNTABLE_BOOT_VOLUME error so quickly you won't have a chance to read it. This was the hint that the BOOT.INI entries were incorrect; this used to be a problem for me back in the Windows NT days when I would create dual-boot Windows systems. Some things never change.
If you're lucky, everything has worked just fine
There is one irritating side effect of adding the Data drive after installing windows: it has been labeled as drive E:\ instead of drive D:. This is a personal preference of mine, and it can be rectified by going into Windows XP's Disk Manager control panel (under Computer Administration) and changing the assigned drive letters. However, there are some side effects, like being unable to mount that drive in Target Disk Mode afterwards. Oh well. You can leave it alone if you like.
The research for this article is contained in Mac OS X Boot Camp Background Research. You'll find the links and informational nuggets that I harvested to create this guide.
]]>I stumbled upon Australian Sarah Dillon by following a comment back from one of my posts, and I really liked the open voice with which she writes on her blog. I have no idea what kind of translation she does, but I'm leaving a note to myself here.
I know Matt Alt through my buddy Alen. Together they founded the mighty force that is ToyboxDX, one of the first and most personality-laden Japanese Robot Toy sites on the Internet. Matt and his wife Hiroko run a translation company out of Tokyo (I think), and Matt himself loves to write about culture on his blog. He's interested in working on original story concepts too, I believe. His writing always gives me a lift.
Propellerheads Reason is very stable and responsive, which is unusual for music software. Most music software is very crash-prone. I haven't really used it for more than a day (and this was version 2.0), but it didn't crash or choke.
Adobe AfterEffects never seems to crash, ever. The last version I used extensively, though, was version 5.0. Adobe Premiere, by comparison, seems to crash if you breathe on it the wrong way. While they are different programs (AfterEffects is a compositor, Premiere is a NLE), the functions have grown together. I should really just buy AfterEffects and use that for everything.
Google Picasa is a nice piece of photo browsing software, not bloated, and snappy. The way they organize and filter photos is a little weird, and I find it difficult to use to actually organize files, but for viewing it's pretty cool. The UI is slightly clunky in operation, but compared to Adobe Photoshop Elements it is by far the better program. Photoshop Elements feels like it was designed by a committee of database engineers. I was just checking out Picasa Hello, their image sharing chat client, and have come to the conclusion that the company knows how to write good code and can a clean-looking UI, but they could do more work in the visual logic department...it's just slightly off.
uTorrent is a BitTorrent client for Windows. I had previously been using Azureus, which is a giant do-everything client that requires Java. Which makes it HUGELY BLOATED. uTorrent is the exact opposite: 215KB total size, single executable. It apparently does everything I need, without the crap advertising that Azureus now includes with every installation.
DeluxePaint was my favorite paint program for years, and in my mind still is the best example of a tightly-integrated orthogonal toolset I can think of. Photoshop has never gotten this right when it comes to bitmap editing.
My favorite word processor growing up was easily WordStar, running under CP/M on my Apple II w/ the Z-80 card. The reason was the 'control diamond' which allowed navigation around the screen without your hands leaving the home keys position; as a result, writing and editing was very fast compared mouse-based programs. The arrow keys on keyboards are really there to make functions clearer, not faster.
You can see some photos of the bag to carry all my stuff around. I've taken this bag to South by SouthWest (SXSW), carrying around about 25 pounds worth of gear:
With the optional backpack strap accessory, walking to and from the convention center (about an 8 minute walk) was not bad at all. Even better: when it rained, I could drape my light windbreaker over the bag to shield it from rain. I could have optionally used the included Rain Shield, which is a waterproof covering you can put around the bag. I'm not sure how it would work with the shoulder strap though. The back pack attachment is definitely worth it for hands-free carrying of heavy gear.
I've lately brought the bag with me to San Jose. It fits nicely under the airplane seat, has plenty of pockets.
The build of the bag is a little lighter than what I'm used to, but I'm pretty happy with it.
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