Thanks Google

Real quick post because there isnt a great deal to comment on, but for the first time since 2001, Internet Explorer (ie5.5 + ie6 + ie7) market share has dropped below 80%, whilst Firefox continues to rise.

We all know that IE is crap so its nice to see that it’s market share is falling, but its nicer to see Firefox gaining even more ground.

Since i use a MacBook I have been getting a bit annoyed at not being able to test my sites in IE6 or IE7 unless i go home and turn on the pc. Sure i can run IE6 in X11 but its slow and a little buggy, plus IE7 doesn’t run at all.

Since i am running Leopard i thought that i would try and install boot camp and then run Windows XP on a new partition on the hard drive. There are tons of tutorials about how to do this and the process is simple but you may have tried doing it only to find Boot Camp crashed whilst making the partition and you end up having to do a hard reset… this will happen time and time again until you do a little bit of tricky.

So here is a quick step by step guide to getting boot camp to work 100%, the guide assumes that you have already tried using boot camp and that it crashed whilst creating a partition…

1) Boot camp has just crashed…

2) Place your Leopard install disk 1 into the CD drive and turn off the computer

3) Whilst booting up keep your finger pressed on the C key, this forces your mac boot from the dvd drive

4) Wait ages until OSX installation gets going and the on the menu bar find Disk Utility

5) Select your hard drive in Disk Utility (DU) and click repair…
What we are doing here is rebuilding the partition because when Boot Camp crashed it was half way through creating a new one, thus you will have less space available if you don’t repair the disk

6) Wait for repair to finish and then reboot the machine, again holding C to load the OSX install disk

7) Now we are going to go back into Disk Utility and create the partition that boot camp was supposed too.
The reason boot camp is crashing is caused by it trying to move files from the space that it was going to partition. Since Boot Camp was running in OSX it could not move the files and sent the kernel into a panic. Now we are booting from a CD so by creating the partition we are forcing it to move the files into a different area.

8 ) You will see something similar to the image below, but you will probably only have 1 partition. Simply click on the + arrow at the bottom right (my image doesnt show this) and it will add a new partition. You should resize this to be about 1gb larger than you was planning to use for boot camp

9) Apply the changes and let DU do its work, once it has finished exit out and then reboot, again holding C to boot from the install disk

10) After the disk has loaded again, go back into DU, and select your new partition, click the – button and it will throw up a warning to say that the partition will be deleted but all information on the original partition will be ok. For the love of God make sure you selected the partition that you wanted to delete and triple read the wording to make sure you are removing the new, smaller partition.

10a) You now need to resize the original mac partition so it fills the entire disk, simply grab and drag the partition to fill the space.
Thanks go to Sergio in the comments for pointing out this step i had missed

11) Wait for it to finish, exit out of DU and reboot, DON’T hold C this time, we want to boot into native OSX

12) Go back into Boot Camp and go through the process, now that we have a clean section on the drive it can partition the disk without any issue.

13) Wait until the partition has been made and you should see…

14) Put your Windows XP or Vista (ha) disk in, and wait for an icon to appear on your desktop, once it does hit start installation, and wait for the machine to reboot.

15) You will now reboot into Windows installer mode, go through the yadda yadda and you should see something like…

16) Make sure you install on the new partition that was created, the screen shot doesnt show it but OSX will have labelled this partition [BOOTCAMP] [FAT32] – hit enter to install on that partition.

17) When asked how to format i chose Fat 32 as it allows Leopard to actually write files back to a windows disk, you could then say edit a txt file from both within Leopard and XP. Its your choice but make sure you reformat it and dont select the option which says “Leave it how it is”

17) Go through the boring windows setup and wait for it to complete, once Windows runs you will need to pop your Leopard install disk into the machine to install all the windows drivers, this is thankfully painless.

18) Marvel at XP on a Mac, and pat yourself on the back, its been a hell of a ride.

Bonus tip:
If you want to select which operating system to use during boot up simply keep the option (alt) key pressed and you will get the following screen…

If this has helped you, please leave a comment :o)

With all the shouting that goes about whether Google really do stick to their “Do no evil” slogan its nice to see that the power house is teaming up with the National Centre for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) to utilise the technology it created in filtering copyright material on YouTube to help catch scumbags who create child porn and exploit children.

The program uses pattern recognition to enable analysts to sort and identify files containing child sex abuse.

“The program uses pattern recognition and will work even if the pattern has been modified,” explained technology analyst Larry Magid.

“So if police can identify a pattern such as a calendar on the wall or a t-shirt logo, they have a much better chance of finding the exploited child and catching the suspect.”

Google engineers and scientists were able to work on the project on what the company calls “20% time”, which allows all employees to dedicate that amount of time to projects they initiate.

This is a great step forward in trying to protect children from exploitation on the Internet and hopefully the technology can be further developed to be even more effective.

This is just so awesome it defies belief, some guy called CupBoy has managed to create world 1-1 of the original super mario brothers in Javascript.

If that wasnt impressive enough he has also managed to squeeze it all down into an ity bity 14kb javascript file.

The sprites are stored in custom encoded strings in a format that only allows 4 colors for each sprite but in turn only takes up around 40-60 bytes per sprite.

We also have MIDI music embedded as base64-encoded data: URI’s. No music for IE, though, and it seems all the other browsers each have different, minor problems with it, but it sort of works.

Go check it out now!