Depressed by the hissing sound from M-Audio Firewire Solo

I spent almost the whole night (from 9 - 11 pm) trying to figure out why the heck there's hissing sound coming out of the M-Audio Firewire Solo when the volumn was high, and whether there's a way to get rid of it.

Result: no solution. No matter what arrangement I made, like changing cables, using a mix panel, nothing works. And the same problem happens on both the Mac and Windows side.

I guess I just have to either live with that fact, or buy a new amp that support S/PDIF cable, especially since my MacMini also support S/PDIF.

Sleep mode and Kore

Last night, I was trying to setup Native Instruments Kore and then some Kore instruments on Windows 7 OS running on Mac Mini. I encountered 2 set of crazy problems that caused me hours last night.

First it was the Kore problem. I used Kore Player before, and it worked great, but I don't like the idea of activation. So I grabbed "Native Instruments Kore v2.0.1 VST RTAS" and installed it. The installation went OK, but when I started using the Kore 2.1 update, I got error message saying that the Sound file location is invalid and it prevented the sound files from updating (and installing). Sure enough, when I fired up Kore 2, most of the sampling sound were just not available. Worst of all, it also prevents me from installing other Kore instruments. So I have to uninstall all the Kore 2 stuff.

I then tried using Kore Player, and it seemed to work pretty well.

After a good night sleep, I finally aware that I forgot to install the SOUNDS PACK of Kore 2. Maybe that's why everything go south. So I'll will give Kore 2 another shot tonight.


Another crazy thing is about the save mode in Windows 7 on MacMini. I fell into sleep while installing a Kore instruction. When I woke up this morning, I found that the light of MacMini was on, but there was nothing on the screen. Moving mouse, pressing keyboard and even pressing the power button didn't seem to bring the machine back to life. So I had no choice but hard reset the machine. The machine booted up properly on the Mac side. But then I realzied one thing: the external harddisk was GONE. But when I checked the external harddisk, it seemed to be working fine. My theory is that Windows put the external hard into sleep but couldn't managed to bring it back up. So I restarted the external harddisk and then found it showed up properly on the Mac side. I rebooted to Windows, but foudn that Windows startup got stuck at initial loading screen. So I rebooted (to Mac and then to Windows), and this time I pressed F8 to get into option menu. I tried starting the machine in Save mode, but instead the machine spent a while doing something and then rebooted. Interestingly, this time after I tried boot from Windows again, it success.

So in order to save me form headache, I:

- Disabled power off harddisk
- Never put machine into sleep
- Still leaave turning off monitor option

I am still having my machine running at home right now, which, hopefully, when I get home tonight, it will still be running quitely.

Don't ever share one iTune library by two environment

Sometimes you have to try something in order to realize that something things just doesn't work as straight forward as you expected. Take iTune for example. I was expecting that both Mac and Windows version of iTune use the same kind of iTune Library structure. Turns out that was NOT the case. In fact, everytime the Mac iTune sees that "something" touched the library (in my case, the Windows 7 iTune application) , it will try to Update the iTune Library. Search the term "Updating iTunes Library", and you will realize that the whole process takes freaking HOURS, which is exactly what I am experiencing now. So from now on I will let the iTune stay in one environment. Notice that have different iTune on differnt machine pointing to the same iTune library doesn't seem to have THAT much problem (still caused a little bit update time, but not like an hour plus.)

Interesting enough, while iTune library is updating, I can still use FrontRow to listen to music. Odd.

Yet another discovery: on Mac, since all text are unicode, the Traditional Chinese text (Big5 encoded, I think) now shows as garbage, while those really Unicode Chinese song title still stays OK. Sigh, guess I need to reorganize the iTune Library someday.

Crazy error on Windows 7 side of my Mac Mini

The more I think about it, my experience with MacMini running Windows 7 is kind of like my old experience of running DOS on my old Mac Qudra 610 DOS Compatible: things usually work, but when it failed you can get very frustrated. It's almost as if Steve intentionally put these crap in the environment to prove a point, "see? I told you Windows suck!"

Here's a few Gotcha I experienced so far:

• I used Acronis Disk Director 10 on MacMini running Windows 7, hoping to create 3 partitions for various usage, but Disk Director failed to reboot the machine because of some mysterious problem (like without enough privilege to reboot, even though the app is running with administrator right.) So I solved the problem by doing the partitioning on ANOTHER machine (Lenovo S12, to be exact). Sigh, so there are things that I CANNOT do on the Windows 7 in Mac Mini.
  
  
• I got a Windows 7 boot problem. I resolved it by starting the BootCamp Assitant on Mac side, got the machine reboot using the Windows 7 installation disc, and then do a system repair at the beginning of Windows 7 installation. I suspect that the problem is caused the fact that I have a bootable FAT32 partition on an external USB drive. And maybe the start up process (by holding the ALT key) confused by trying to bootup with that FAT32 partition. Solution? I found an app on the Mac side called BootChamp which allows me to specify which partition to use to reboot into Windows. That seems to solve the problem.
  
  
• I found that my "portable" Need For Speed Shift didn't start because some missing Nvidia file. So I downloaded the latest NVidia driver and see if it can fix the problem. Well, it didn't. Deal to stupidity and disappointment, I uninstalled the drivers. Big mistake. Now the video driver rolled back to VGA. Using the Snow Leopard bootup disk trying to recover the drivers, and still didn't work. I used Windows Driver Manager, select update driver on the video adapter. That worked. It downloaded NVidia driver and installed it. But the problem is that there's an item called "Co-Processor" didn't get the right driver. I rightcliked on the item and let Windows update it. Windows pointed me to a file, which I downloaded, installed and fix the problem. The whole process wasted me almost half an hour. How stupid.

Green

I found the device light in green, but still didn't compile (on another VM environment that is). Solution: select [Clean All Targets]. That solved my problem.

To make XCode recognize my iPod in VM

I realized that I have to have the iPod Touch connected to the hosting machine before starting the OSX VM, or otherwise the OSX in the VM won't recognize it. You will know that if you start XCode, bring up [Window][Organizer], and see that the light for my iPod Touch is not lighted as "green".

Development nuggets

How to get current date

• http://howtomakeiphoneapps.com/2009/03/heres-a-quick-way-to-deal-with-dates-in-objective-c/

How to get current time

• http://stackoverflow.com/questions/566265/retrieving-current-local-time-on-iphone

How to get current location

• http://iappdevs.blog.co.in/2008/12/06/get-current-location-sample-example-iphone-programming/

• http://blog.objectgraph.com/index.php/2009/04/08/iphone-sdk-30-playing-with-map-kit-part-3/

Gesture

• http://stackoverflow.com/questions/907512/is-there-a-high-level-gestures-library-for-iphone-development
• http://iphonedevelopment.blogspot.com/2009/04/detecting-circle-gesture.html

System Updating OSX 10.6 on VM ... seems fine for second trial

Yesterday when I tried to do System Update on the OSX 10.6.x in VM (running VMWare Workstation 7), I got a system panic error.

So today when I do it again, I tried to play it safe. I updated everything except the following one:

------------------- start ---------------------------

Security Update 2010-001 (1.0)

Security Update 2010-001 is recommended for all users and improves the security of Mac OS X.

For information on the security content of this update, please visit this website: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1222.

------------------- end---------------------------

Everything went fine in the first round. So I tried updating the "Security Update 2010-001". Interestingly, that also worked OK. So now I have a OSX 10.6 fully updated to the latest. Nice.

Finally ordered a MacMini

After using the VM for quite, it's time to get the real thing. So a ordered a MacMini just a while ago. The machine will be mainly used for development, but main eventually become my little quite desktop machine.

The main reason why I get a MacMini is because of the darn VM. Everytime I use the left SHIFT button on my keyboard, it will get sticky can cost me a lot of pain typing code. Sure the problem will be disappear after I use the RIGHT SHIFT button once, but still it's pain in the butt. I want my XCode experience to be something happy so that I will code more, and the VM maybe a negative force to drag me back. Oh well, what's done is done. Looking forward for my new MacMini!

Ah, so I missed the view controller reference!

After not touching XCode for a while, I picked it up again, and hit a wall for a short while.

The problem was that I got the code all wired up properly, but when I run the application, I didn't see the UI coming up. I was frustrated for a while, look at some samples at sites and still didn't get the answer.

And then I realized that the "view" outlets didn't show up when I right clicked on the View in Interface Builder. That's odd I thought, cause I was supposed to link the view to the "File's Owner" which is suppose to be View Controller. That's when I realized that the File's Owner wasn't definited yet. It's still in type "NSObject"! So I set the class to the proper View Controller, and link up the view outlet, and boom the view shows up in the simulator.

Guess this is a common mistake I make.

Next stop, link up the button actions.