There are a few articles around detailing why this is and many more showing how to solve it.

The problem is around the fact that the Windows Bootloader doesn’t seem to treat ISO9660 file version numbers correctly. To make a disc work and boot in EFI mode on these machines, you need to rebuild the ISO with ISO9660 version numbers suppressed.

However, all of these solutions required running Windows utilities to recreate the ISO. As I recently installed a new harddrive in my Macbook Pro I didn’t have a version of Windows installed that I could rebuild the ISO with.

I decided to find if I could create a compatible bootable Windows 7 DVD using only tools that are runnable under Mac OS X.

I used an article from jowie.com as a reference. It describes how to recreate the ISO with the fix using a 3rd-party Windows utility “Imgburn”.

I downloaded the latest version of “cdrecord” (formerly “cdrtools“) which includes the latest version of “mkisofs“, a *nix utility for creating ISO files with advanced options.

I managed to find the correct set of arguments to create a bootable DVD. DVD-RWs are my friend, although it only took 4 or 5 tries.

My machine is running Mac OS X Snow Leopard but I don’t see anything that won’t work on Leopard. These steps require the Mac OS X Developer Tools to be installed.

If you’re at this post, you may have already burned a copy of the Windows 7 DVD ISO (or a copy of Windows 7 Retail). I did, so I got the files for recreating the ISO from the DVD, you may choose to simply extract the contents of the ISO to a folder on your harddrive instead.

If you choose to use a folder, replace occurances of “/Volumes/GRC1CULXFRER_EN_DVD” with the folder you extracted the DVD to.

Here are the steps I took:

1. Put the Windows 7 DVD in the drive or extract the ISO.
2. Download the latest version of cdrecord from:
   http://freshmeat.net/projects/cdrecord/
3. Extract the archive and run the following from Terminal:
   make
make install
4. Once again from Terminal:
   cd /opt/schily/bin/
   ./mkisofs -N -UDF -iso-level 4 -no-hfs -U -V GRC1CULXFRER_EN_DVD -no-emul-boot -b efi/bcd -c boot.catalog -o windows7rc.iso /Volumes/GRC1CULXFRER_EN_DVD

5. Now burn the new ISO to a disc. You can use Disk Utility, Toast or any other ISO burning tool to do the job
6. If you haven’t already, make sure you have either free unpartitioned space or a spare partition to install Windows on to.
7. Reboot your machine, hold down Option to bring up the boot menu
8. Insert the DVD into the drive (if it isn’t in there aleady).
9. Select the Windows CD, Windows 7 should now boot without problems

That is it.

Once Windows 7 is installed, insert a Snow Leopard disc to install the 64-bit Boot Camp drivers. If you don’t have Snow Leopard, you can download the latest Boot Camp drivers from Apple’s download section.

As I’m incredibly lazy, I set about finding a way for my computer to tell me who was calling when the phone rang instead of having to find the cordless phone (or run to the corded one if it was flat) to check who was calling. I have set an option in the control panel at Xnet that sends me an email whenever someone rings my home, which includes the Caller ID but alas, it still takes the email about 30 seconds to arrive in my inbox (I check my email every 1 minute) so it didn’t really help to know who it was before I picked it up.

It turns out that the router’s status page displays the state of the VoIP line and also the last number that called it. Bingo! I whipped up a little PHP CLI script that polled the router’s status page for when the status was “Ringing” and captured the phone number displayed there.

I then added a piece of AppleScript that interfaces with Address Book on MacOS X which could translate a phone number into a name if that number was in the Address Book.

The last piece of the puzzle was to utilise the command line program called growlnotify to send out a Growl notification and made it send out to the two laptops in the house.

I placed this script on the Mac Mini I have connected in the lounge and set it running. A few bug fixes later and I now have Growl alerts show up on my laptop screen within about 3 seconds of my home phone ringing saying exactly who is ringing.

All in the name of laziness.

If anyone is interested, I can post the utility. The VoIP router I designed it for is the Linksys SPA-2102.

What a lot of people are saying is that compared to international prices, these plan details are extortionate. Vodafone have made the point that their plans compare with what is on the market in New Zealand already but that doesn’t seem good enough.

A Vodafone Marketing representative got monstered on Campbell Live last night in typical John Campbell fashion. I don’t think the guy completely expected John Campbell to have complete listings of the plans available to iPhone customers from all over the world right in front of him. The guy had to stick to “we are offering a range of plans” that “represent great value” for New Zealand customers.

Vodafone also mentioned that the upfront cost for the handset on their cheapest plan is comparable to the price of an iPod Touch. Currently in the USA, the iPod Touch is more expensive than the iPhone. You normally expect a handset-subsidy when you sign up on a long contract and that point was basically saying that on the $80 a month plan you get no subsidy.

I was waiting out to see these prices to decide whether I’d get an iPhone. The announcement in the US of such cheap prices gave me a little glimmer of hope when Vodafone announced they would also offer the iPhone from as low as $199. The catch is that to get the phone for $199, you have to sign up for a 24 month contract at $250 a month. This includes 1GB of internet traffic and 600 minutes as well as 600 text messages but comparing to plans overseas it falls far short as most countries offer a plan cheaper far cheaper than that which includes unlimited traffic.

Unfortunately, I won’t be getting one in the near future. Public pressure has caused a Swiss provider to alter their iPhone plans, we’ll see if the consumer attitude is similar in New Zealand. I hope Vodafone have shot themselves in the foot. They had the potential to murder the market share statistics by getting a bunch of people who haven’t yet had a PDA or cell phone into the market by making this device affordable, similar to what has happened in the US but it appears they’ve lost that chance. It would have been perfect considering Telecom’s imminent entry into the UMTS world.

You can buy the iPhone from Vodafone without a contract by visiting a Vodafone store but the 8GB model will cost you $979 and the 16GB model $1129. However you apparently won’t be able to access the internet via the Vodafone network without a Mobile Broadband contract.

Also, visual voicemail will not be available from launch in New Zealand and you apparently cannot use an iPhone on Prepay.

Oh well.

It turns out you can use the iPhone on Vodafone’s existing on account plans as long as you have a mobile broadband plan. This means you can get an iPhone for $849 on a plan which includes 200MB Data ($0.50/mb overage charge), 40 text messages, 20 anytime minutes and 60 off-peak minutes for $48.90. This may be appropriate for those who want to only use their iPhone occasionally. This plan is the Mobilise 200 + YouChoose Base plan.

They don’t currently have a wireless network at their house and seeing as the iPod Touch has wi-fi capability we ended up discussing that I was interesting in selling my current Airport Express Wireless G base-station to upgrade my infrastructure to Wireless-N.

The main reason I wanted to upgrade was actually to have an Airport Extreme Base Station which would allow me to share both printers and also a couple of hard-drives over the wireless. The Airport Express only supports one printer and no hard-drives so I have had to switch USB cables around to print to the other printer in the past.

So, knowing that he was keen for that deal, I went out and purchased a new Airport Extreme Base Stations with Wireless-N and Gigabit ethernet. I also picked up a new Wireless-N capable Airport Express so that I could once again stream music to our downstairs speakers.

My next mission was obviously to map out how I wanted to set up the network and the devices. I love setting up network infrastructure, I don’t purport to say I’m any good at it at all but I find it a hell of a lot of fun.

I plan to sprinkle this blog post with diagrams of the old set-up and the new set-up but my laptop is currently at the shop getting its iSight looked at and I’m using a user-account on Aimee‘s laptop which doesn’t have anything that I can easily draw diagrams in. For now I’ll add a textual description.

My network consisted of:

• An ADSL Modem/Router for internet connectivity
• A LinkSys VOIP to POTS adapter, for use with our Xnet Fusion VOIP account
• An Apple Mac Mini, connected in the lounge for entertainment purposes
• Two Apple MacBook Pro Laptops
• An Apple Airport Express, currently in use only as a base station since we moved to our new house

Then I added:

• An Apple Airport Extreme Base Station
• A new Apple Airport Express

And I’ve packed up the old Airport Express.

I wanted to add to the network

• My Laser printer
• My inkjet Printer
• My 2-disk RAID enclosure
• Possibly a couple more hard-drives for laptop back-up purposes.

There are a couple of restrictions this placed on the network. For internal network QoS, the Linksys VOIP Adapter needs to be placed between the router and the network so that voice traffic gets injected right at the router. This also means that our cordless phone and corded phone need to be connected within a few meters of that adapter.

The RAID enclosure isn’t network capable so it needs to be connected  with a meter or so of the Airport Extreme Base Station. As do the printers.

Also, the only two locations in the entire house with a phone plug are the kitchen/dining area and the master bedroom.

So I went ahead and picked out a possible solution. It all works pretty well.

I went the whole hog and set up my Wireless-N network on the 5GHz frequency using wide-channels to get maximum possible throughput. We don’t have any 802.11b or g devices in the house (or so I thought) and I doubt anyone in our close proximity has a 5GHz network set up so all was well.

I have the router in the master bedroom and an ethernet cable running from that into our work room. In there is the Base Station, the hard-drives, the printers and the VOIP adapter attached to the cordless phone base.

Downstairs I have the Airport Express and the Mac Mini. As I eluded to above, it turns out that the Mac Mini isn’t Wireless-N capable as I thought it was, it only supports 802.11b and 802.11g so it ended up being connected via gigabit to the new Airport Express as they’re right next to each other anyway. The Express is currently connected to the Base Station using WDS.

I had a fun time setting up the printers. I decided to stretch USB to the limits and see how far away I could keep the printers from the base station. It turns out it is 7 meters keeping to the skirting board to the first printer and another 3 meters to the second where they are placed quite conveniently now. There is a maximum length of 5 meters between devices  so I pulled out an old USB Active Extension cable, then plugged in a  2 meters of USB extension, followed by a USB hub and then plugged the first printer in using a short cable and used a 3 meter cable to reach to the other printer.

I thought I had all my numbers worked out but for some reason, the base stations wasn’t recognising either of the printers! I played around a little and found that the base station didn’t like the active extension cable plugged into it, but it didn’t mind having a hub first and then the active extension so I went down that road. Turns out I would have had to add that initial hub anyway to plug in the hard drives next to the base station so all is well.

I wasn’t particularly pleased with the file transfer throughput so I ended up playing around with WDS, wide-channels, different frequencies and even forcing the base station down to wireless-g to see if I could find out what was happening.

I’m just finishing up testing the network performance using the various settings which I’ll post about at a later stage.

• The interlaced channels now actually play properly.
• The “New Zealand” setting has the correct parameters.
• It doesn’t appear to stutter after playing back a recording after 10 minutes

My only issue now is that the signal strength isn’t particularly great and I’m suffering choppiness and dropouts every 10-20 seconds at some times of the day. By the looks, that is a lot to do with the aerial on the roof and slightly broken wall socket for the aerial. It is still very watchable but it does get frustrating after a while.

We rent the place we’re staying in at the moment and only moved in in March so I hadn’t really paid any attention to the roof, turns out, we only have a VHF/UHF combination aerial unlike 90% of the houses in the area which have a VHF aerial and a medium or fringe UHF aerial. This explains why reception of Prime is so crap.

In Hamilton, an “infill” Freeview|HD transmitter has been set up in the CBD which means that we are approximately 2.5km from it. The big problem is that the aerial isn’t pointing in that direction so we can’t really benefit. To show the difference though, the aerial is probably pointing out to Te Aroha at the moment but I can’t get a stable Freeview signal from the Te Aroha frequencies but I can on the Hamilton Infill frequencies so I have a hunch that if the aerial was facing the infill the reception would significantly improve.

Some approximate trigonometry using Google Earth and a ruler shows at least 15º rotation between the two transmitters from our location.

My next step is to investigate options of repointing the aerial or asking the landlord nicely for a UHF antenna.

More updates: Appears I had the position of the Hamilton infill transmitter slightly wrong on the map, updated the co-ordinates.

New Zealand recently launched Freeview|HD, a High-Definition free-to-air television service.
There are now two Digital Video Broadcast (DVB) services in New Zealand. The first is a satellite service which launched last year and the newest is a terrestrial High Definition service.

Last year, I bought a satellite-based Freeview box because the television reception at our flat was shocking and there was a Sky satellite dish on the roof when we moved in. Setting that up was a breeze, just plugged in the cables and it practically set itself up.

Two weeks ago, I decided to buy an Elgato EyeTV Hybrid to see whether it could handle the new terrestrial service so we could watch television is crazy resolution. The answer was a resounding “sort-of”. The software that comes with the EyeTV Hybrid and all Elgato’s products is regarded as the best native Mac PVR software, so I really wanted to give it a go.

I took it all home and plugged it into our Mac Mini. I got the software installed and then mucked around trying to figure out which cable coming from the wall was the UHF aerial. There were three cables, one I knew was the satellite as I had our old Freeview box plugged into it. It didn’t take me too long to find which of the other two it was and then it was on to try and get everything set up.

My first hurdle was that the DVB parameters for New Zealand in EyeTV are copied from Australia’s. Turns out that New Zealand has changed their specifications quite a bit and have used a lot of cutting edge technologies so I wasn’t too surprised that I had to fiddle around to get the everyting to work correctly.

What I needed to do was select United Kindom as the country and use the settings for their service as they use a similar system to theirs. I tried tuning in the channels using the search function but found that the UHF aerial on our new flat doesn’t appear to be the best so the auto-tune kept missing channels.

I found a reference of all the frequencies used for Freeview|HD at launch and input those numbers directly into EyeTV and all the channels came up in the list with their names.

The next hurdle was that New Zealand has chosen some fairly new compression codecs, they’ve chosen H.264 for the video and AAC for the audio. This gives New Zealand the ability to transmit much higher quality signal and save a lot of bandwidth. The downside to this is that not many software packages support these codecs using DVB. EyeTV 3.0.1 does not support AAC audio and has extremely limited support for H.264.

The net result is that the currently released EyeTV version will not show you any interlaced channels and won’t play any sound. Looking at anything except TV One, TV2 and Kordia’s Freeview test channel resulted in a crash.

I emailed Elgato to find out if support was being worked on. I had discovered that Norway chose the same set of codecs and Elgato were currently working on support for Norway so I hoped we’d be able to piggy back on that. Sure enough, I was sent a beta release to try out and see whether it solved any issues.

The beta release I was sent stopped EyeTV from crashing and the audio now works superbly, I still can’t seem to get the interlaced channels to work correctly though. That means I can only watch TV One, TV2 and Kordia’s Nature Loop. Alas, hopefully Elgato will get that sorted in the near future.

Meanwhile, I can record, rewind and pause live HD TV on TV One and TV2 and record Analog TV of TV4. As we still have our Satellite box hooked up we can watch all the Standard Definition Freeview channels but not record them without some hassle.

I can’t wait to be able to record all of them.

As a reference here are the technical specifications and useful numbers for the Freeview|HD Service:

Country:

New Zealand

Service:

DVB-T

Band:

UHF

Bandwidth:

8MHz

Video Format:

H.264

Audio Format:

AAC, 24kHz, 96kbps

Multiplexes:

• TVNZ
• MediaWorks
• Kordia

Hamilton frequencies

• TVNZ (689.5MHz)
• MediaWorks (698.5MHz)
• Kordia (712MHz)

Channels (Just the major ones)

Channel	Multiplex	Stream Type
TV One	TVNZ	720p
TV2	TVNZ	720p
TV3	MediaWorks	1080i
TV4	MediaWorks	576i
Maori Television	Kordia	576i
TVNZ 6	TVNZ	576i
TVNZ 7	TVNZ	576i
TVNZ SPORT EXTRA	TVNZ	576i
Freeview | HD	Kordia	720p

Anyway, this post is about Windows Vista. More specifically, installing Windows Vista Business (64bit) onto a Macbook Pro (Santa Rosa).

The Apple Bootcamp drivers that came with my laptop don’t support Windows Vista 64bit so I had to do some digging around to find the drivers that worked and get everything running smoothly.

This information is out there on the web but I found some of the instructions on exactly which driver to choose a little had to understand. Below is a list of the drivers I used to get Vista Business 64bit working on this Macbook Pro.

Video

Hardware: nVIDIA 8600M GT with 256MB RAM
Drivers: nVIDIA ForceWare X 167.62

Audio

Drivers: RealTek R190

Keyboard/Fan

Drivers: Input Remapper 1.0.04
NB: Screen backlight control is not supported on the nVIDIA card yet

Wireless

Drivers: Atheros v7.6.0.83

Ethernet

Drivers: Marvel Yukon v10.57.3.3

This information is mainly from two sources:

http://rumblingsfromdeveloper.blogspot.com/2007/12/macbook-pro-and-vista-64bit-x64-issues.html

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=149395

With these drivers I got a Windows Experience Index of 4.9
Processor: 5.2
RAM: 4.9
Desktop Graphics: 5.9
Gaming Graphics: 5.5
Primary Hard Disk: 4.9

http://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughtsonmusic/

With the default key combination that seems borrowed from Windows (⌘ + ⏎ – similar to Alt + Enter which is full-screen/window mode toggle for apps on Windows) it sends the Application full screen.

The big deal for me was that it worked multi-monitor flawlessly even allowing 2 windows to be full screen on different monitors creating an uninterrupted workflow between the two. Now I can set up a text editor on one screen and Safari on the other at work and not have any distractions.

Long story short it was possibly the combination of transferring 40GB of files to the harddrive over Samba filling the HDD to 1GB free and then playing a movie over said Samba connection. These are the dying words in one of the coolest Crash Logs from the Kernel I’ve seen:

Jan 10 20:29:31 localhost kernel: netsmb_dev: loaded
Jan 10 20:42:16 localhost kernel: smb_iod_sendrq: TRAN_SEND returned fatal error 57
Jan 10 20:43:06 localhost crashdump: Unable to determine CPSProcessSerNum pid: 413 name: mplayer
Jan 10 20:43:06 localhost crashdump: Started writing crash report to: /Users/Jo/Library/Logs/CrashReporter/mplayer.crash.log
Jan 10 20:43:06 localhost crashdump: Finished writing crash report to: /Users/Jo/Library/Logs/CrashReporter/mplayer.crash.log
Jan 10 20:44:39 localhost diskarbitrationd[85]: disk1s2    hfs      651C7F29-1350-3F82-A747-FFEE52A28818 MPlayer                 [not mounted]
Jan 10 20:44:39 localhost diskarbitrationd[85]: disk1s2    hfs      651C7F29-1350-3F82-A747-FFEE52A28818 MPlayer                 /Volumes/MPlayer
Jan 10 20:44:43 localhost diskarbitrationd[85]: disk2s2    hfs      C5BA4CED-7491-32B0-A79A-5C8D9F4FC679 MPlayerOSX_8r5          [not mounted]
Jan 10 20:44:44 localhost diskarbitrationd[85]: disk2s2    hfs      C5BA4CED-7491-32B0-A79A-5C8D9F4FC679 MPlayerOSX_8r5          /Volumes/MPlayerOSX_8r5
Jan 10 20:44:53 localhost kernel: jnl: flushing fs disk buffer returned 0xd
Jan 10 20:44:53 localhost kernel: disk1s2: device is write locked.
Jan 10 20:44:53 localhost kernel: jnl: do_jnl_io: strategy err 0xd
Jan 10 20:44:53 localhost kernel: jnl: write_journal_header: error writing the journal header!
Jan 10 20:46:27 localhost kernel: hfs: WARNING - blocks on volume Macintosh HD not allocated!