For anyone running a hackintosh who saw the recent security update in software update, it is fine to run right from the actual software update program.

UPDATE: Turns out that for some reason the AppleACPIPlatform.kext was not deleted when i ran the script, after that I had to find a new driver for video, since the old one stopped working. You can grab it here. Here’s the screenshot:

Well, today I decided to install the 10.5.5 update to my hackintosh, unfortunately all did not go well. I had the same problem of being unable to edit the /System/InstallAtStartup/scripts/1 file, but as before, i got through it and actually did it with nano this time by chrooting to my Mac Os hd then running nano. After that, the next boot was no-go, so i figured it may be the new AppleInel dirvers and replaced them with my old kexts. That made the boot stop at the grey booting screen. Then i removed the AppleIntel drivers to see if it booted using just the framebuffer. It did, but i was left without keyboard and mouse support. I’m still working on it, but may also be going for the retail install soon because this is getting annoying.

Digging into the realm of facebook apps, i initially started on my trusty gentoo server. I got the facebook api php tools, and within minutes i was able to list out friends and pics, simple. Well, at work the next day i had to leave the comforts of php (we are a M$ shop), but i said, “Hey, no problem php was simple how could the c# version be bad?” Famous last words. First i needed Linq, then .Net Framework 3.5, then connecting to the API failed because facebook’s ssl cert wouldn’t work on the .new. URLs in facebook. After working around all of the road bumps, the docs for the C# API were FAIL: the code, when copied line for line from the docs had errors, one that a read only variable was trying to be modified. OK, simple stuff, so after a couple fixes there the process still fails and i have no idea why. I’m tired and in search of a different API wrapper. Php wins. Fatality.

I recently got an xbox360 and I have to say it has made my wii more of a decorative item than a game console. I also have been playing with the Facebook API. This made me think. I thought it might be cool if there was a facebook app that could use gamertag info. Before actually looking for a facebook app that did this I searched for an Xbox gamertag API from Microsoft (turns out that there are already a couple gamertag facebook apps). While they do actually have such a service, it is not currently open for anyone (only 50 developers currently have access). I thought that that was pretty crappy so i started searching around for “Alternative” methods (read: Hacks) to retrieve the gamertag data. Things turned out better than i could have imagined when I found the website of a Microsoft dev that seemed to disagree with the closing up of the APIs and had created a SOAP/Rest webservice that could retrieve the data, kudos to Duncan Mackenzie for opening the api up to small devs. Check out his blog in general, but this post particularly relates to the APIs. He asks that you let him know if you use his services.

Web safe hex values for each color are: 00, 33, 66, 99, CC, and FF. That’s it. There are many color combinations that fall in between these and sometimes there is a need to convert them. Here’s a quick way to do it: First, convert your value to RGB. This seems a little odd but in RGB the web safe value for each color part (red, green, or blue) must be divisible by 51, that makes it very easy to do our conversion. Then take color modulo 51, if there is no remainder then the color is web safe. If the result is less than 25 then subtract it from the color, otherwise subtract the it from 51 then add it to the number. Here’s an example:

Ex1.
let’s say that the value of blue is 210.
210 mod 51 = 6, that is less than 25 so subtract it from 210.
210 - 6 = 204.
204 mod 51 = 0, so the value for blue is now web safe.

Ex2.
the value for red is 140.
140 mod 51 = 38, that is greater than 25 so subtract the result from 51.
51 - 38 = 13, add that to the original value.
140 + 13 = 153.
153 mod 51 =0, so the value for red is web safe.

Just do that for red, green and blue parts of the color and convert it back to hex. That’s it.