Using Windows 7 theme desktop background on your Mac

I have a Windows 7 laptop and my wife has a Mac.

Microsoft has some beautiful wall-papers that they provide as part of their Windows 7 theme packs.

My wife wanted these for her laptop too. So instead of just copying the files over to her computer, I decided to try and figure out how to let her open up themes directly on her own Mac so that she could use them.

Here are the steps:

The Windows 7 theme packs are just zip files. Unfortunately, just renaming them and then trying to unzip them on a Mac does not work. Instead what you need is the StuffIt Expander tool: Download it from: http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/system_disk_utilities/stuffitexpander.html

Next go over to the Microsoft Personalization Gallery: http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/downloads/personalize and download a theme to your desktop.

Go to the Applications folder and open up StuffIt Expander.

Next drag the theme file on to the StuffIt Expander window.

This will extract the files from inside the theme file onto your desktop. Browse to the folder inside containing all the wall-papers for the theme. Copy the images over to your pictures folder (or where ever you keep all your wall paper images). Thats it. you are done!

One of my favorite themes is the “Bing’s Best” theme. (The thumbnails in the first image in this post are from that theme).

Enjoy!

Windows 7 – Boot from VHD – Simple as pie instructions

Here is the simplest set of instructions for setting up Windows 7 to boot from VHD.

First of – why would you want to boot from VHD – because it gives you a experimental machine which is faster than running with VirtualPC but slower than running it natively. The reason I did it is so that I could test out Visual Studio 2010, without having to muck up my machine.

Having said that remember this important piece of information: Boot from VHD is only supported by the Ultimate and Enterprise editions of Windows 7. I learnt this the hard way and wasted at least an hour trying to setup a Win7 Starter boot from VHD machine.

Step 1: Create the VHD:

1. Go to Start –> Right Click on My Computer –> Choose Manage. This will bring up the Computer Management Window
2. Under the Storage node –> Select Disk Management.
3. Right click and select Create VHD
4. Set the location and choose dynamically expanding. Choose a size of at least 15GB. (I choose 20gb). Dont worry, because it is a dynamically expanding disk, it will use only what it needs.
   
5. You should now have a hard-disk appear in your disk-management window
   
6. Right click on the newly added disk and select initialize.
7. Leave the default options and select OK.
   The disk will not report its status as being Online.
8. Right click on the disk again and select “New Simple Volume”
9. Select the defaults and keep clicking through.
   On the 3rd screen, note down the drive letter the volume will be assigned
    
10. On the next screen, choose a name for your volume label. Also make sure that the FileSystem selected is NTFS
    
11. On the next screen select Finish.
    If everything went correctly you should see something like this: (The size will be different).
    

Step 2: Use ImageX to Setup the Windows 7 on the VHD volume:

1. First we need to download the Windows Automated Installation Toolkit (WAIK). Get it from the download center.
   Unfortunately its a big download (1.7GB) for a small file that we will end up using.
2. Once you install the WAIK onto your computer, you can copy out ImageX.exe to a convenient folder (like c:\). (You will find ImageX.exe in the following folder - C:\Program Files\Windows AIK\Tools\x86)
3. You will also need the Windows 7 installer DVD. On the DVD you will find the install.wim file in the sources folder.
4. Run the following command:
   imagex /info "d:\sources\install.wim"
   This will output a whole lot of text to the screen, and will provide you with information regarding the available images in the install.wim file.
   Two parts are important – the image index and the “EditionID”. You want the image index that corresponds to the Enterprise edition or the Ultimate edition of Win7.
5. Now to apply the selected image to the VHD drive. (Remember we selected drive G in 1.9 above).
   imagex /apply d:\sources\install.wim 1 g:\
   The process should take about 15 minutes to complete.
   In the above command the 1 represents the 1 image index we obtained in step 4 and we are applying it to drive g – which is the VHD drive we created.
6. Now you can disconnect the drive.
   Right click on the disk and make it go offline.
   On the dialog – make sure that the option to delete the VHD file is not selected:
   

Step 3: Add an entry into the boot menu:

1. This step will provide you the option to select the VHD boot drive during startup.
2. There are multiple bcdedit commands that need to be run:
   bcdedit /copy {current} /d "Win7 on VHD"
   returns a GUID after copying the current configuration. Copy the returned GUID for use in the next few steps.
3. run the following command
   bcdedit /set {guid} device vhd=[C:]\test.vhd
   {guid} is the GUID returned previously. vhd= points to the VHD file. The square brackets [] are needed.
4. run the following command
   bcdedit /set {guid} osdevice vhd=[C:]\test.vhd
5. run this final command
   bcdedit /set {guid} detecthal on
   This turns on hardware abstraction layer detection.
6. Now restart your computer.
   After restart, you should be shown a menu with “Win7 on VHD” as an option.
   The first time you run Windows on the VHD drive, it will step you through the setup process. Keep your Win7 registration key handy, as you will need it.

And you are done!

In case you run into a problem while setting up BCDEDIT, run the following command to delete the entry and then run through the above steps to resetup the entry.
bcdedit /delete {guid} /cleanup

Ads – the Prized Possesion

Travelers Insurance – Prized Possesion – Ad with the dog.

The Song: Ray Lamontagne – Trouble.

Video Games – Real Time Racing

Real Time Racing is developing technology that will allow for video games that will allow you to race in real-time against actual race car drivers that are competing in an actual race. The technology is very cool and it uses LIDAR to generate maps of the race-tracks (which is how I came across the game).

Its was recently show-cased on the BBC’s Click program.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/click_online/8334595.stm

Real Time Racing

Google Wave – Bots List

Bots are robots that provide some sort of functionality within a Google Wave. You just drag and drop them just like any other contact onto your wave and you can begin using them. The one weird thing I have found is that there does not seem to be any way to find and add them from within Google Wave. So after a little Googling here are some of the useful ones I have found:

Preview Bug: If you copy and paste the email address into your add contact dialog, Google Wave might not enable the Submit button. If this happens, just delete one of the letters and retype them and it should enable the submit button.

Added 11/01/2009

blog-wave@appspot.com - Used to interact with blog-posts in Blogger. This is a very useful bot.
 

wikifier@appspot.com - Used to interact with Wikipedia
 

tweety-wave@appspot.com – Used to interact with Twitter. Add new tweets or search for tweets. Very cool

amazon-withwaves-com@appspot.com – Retrieves information from Amazon.com.

Linux shell scripts – name of script file

How to get the filename and directory name of the shell script being run:

directoryName=${0%/*} #capture everything before the last /
filename=${0##*/} #capture everything after the last /

Types of brackets

Disambiguation of {braces parentheses brackets}
note: they are all types of brackets

from Wikipedia

• ( ) - round brackets, open brackets or parentheses
• [ ] - square brackets, closed brackets or box brackets
• { } - curly brackets, squiggly brackets, swirly brackets, braces
• < > - angle brackets, diamond brackets, cone brackets, wickets, chevrons

Windows port of some useful UNIX commands

Recently I came across the “Cut” and “Paste” commands in Linux. Man, these are useful tools as they allow you to rearrange your data from an existing file.

And now to make my life easier in Windows, I have found a SourceForge project that has ported many of these commands to Windows.

Find it at: http://unxutils.sourceforge.net/. Very Nice!

The list of UNIX/Linux commands available in the download I got:

agrep.exe
ansi2knr.exe
basename.exe
bison.exe
bzip2.exe
bunzip2.exe
bzip2recover.exe
cat.exe
chgrp.exe
chmod.exe
chown.exe
cksum.exe
cmp.exe
comm.exe
compress.exe
cp.exe
csplit.exe
cut.exe
date.exe
dd.exe
df.exe
diff.exe
diff3.exe
dirname.exe
du.exe
echo.exe
egrep.exe
env.exe
expand.exe
expr.exe
factor.exe
fgrep.exe
find.exe
flex.exe
fmt.exe
fold.exe
gawk.exe
make.exe
grep.exe
gsar.exe
gunzip.exe
gzip.exe
head.exe
id.exe
install.exe
join.exe
less.exe
ln.exe
logname.exe
ls.exe
m4.exe
md5sum.exe
mkdir.exe
mkfifo.exe
mknod.exe
mv.exe
mvdir.exe
nl.exe
od.exe
paste.exe
patch.exe
pathchk.exe
pr.exe
printenv.exe
printf.exe
ptx.exe
recode.exe
rm.exe
rman.exe
rmdir.exe
sdiff.exe
sed.exe
seq.exe
sleep.exe
sort.exe
sh.exe
shar.exe
split.exe
stego.exe
su.exe
sum.exe
sync.exe
tac.exe
tail.exe
tar.exe
tee.exe
test.exe
touch.exe
tr.exe
uname.exe
unexpand.exe
uniq.exe
unrar.exe
unshar.exe
uudecode.exe
uuencode.exe
wc.exe
wget.exe
which.exe
whoami.exe
xargs.exe
yes.exe
zcat.exe

Ubuntu + VirtualBox + low screen resolutions

If you run Ubuntu and you get only a low screen resolution of 800x600 (and not the native resolution of your host machine), then what you may need are the “Guest Additions”.

Here is what you need to do:

1. Run Ubuntu in VirtualBox

2. Use the host key to get to the host OS (normally the right ctrl key). This will allow you to move your mouse out into the world of your actual machine.

3. Click on "Install Guest Additions" under the devices menu:
 
This should load up a window that will display the contents of Guest Additions cd.
 
If you do not see the above disk on your Ubuntu desktop, then you might have to mount the guest additions. Here is how:
Go to Devices –> Mount CD/DVD-ROM –> CD/DVD-ROM Image…

Go to the CD/DVD Images tab and Click on Add.

Browse to the Virtual Box folder and select the “VBoxGuestAdditions.iso” file.

Click on Select on the “CD/DVD Images” tab.

You should get the CD for VBoxAdditions on your Ubuntu desktop now.

4. Double click the CD to view its contents. Which should look like this (and have some more files).

5. Depending on your host system you will have to run one of the “VBoxLinuxAdditions-XXX.run” files.

6. Unfortunately, its not as simple as double clicking the file to run it (as it needs to be run as an admin). Here is what you need to do:

Open a terminal prompt (Applications –> Accessories –> Terminal)

Navigate to the CD drive (type cd /media/cdrom0/)

Type LS and you should see all the files in the folder:

Type sudo sh ./VBoxLinuxAdditions-x86.run (remember its case sensitive)

You should be prompted for your password. Ubuntu should then run for a short while installing everything and you will be asked to restart.

Once you restart, you should get your native resolution. If not check the display settings.

Note: I had to install the Guest additions 2 times to get the new resolution in my Ubuntu virtual installation.

Note 2: Additional good stuff: Your mouse is no longer captured by Virtual box – which means you can seamlessly move between the host machine and the virtual machine. Also, copy paste will work across the 2 machines too. (Very nice!)

Study!

Get over the idea that only children should spend their time in study. Be a student so long as you still have something to learn, and this will mean all your life. ~Henry L. Doherty