Abhishek Chatterjee Online

Bon Jovi’s new album “The Circle”

2009-12-06T16:21:23+05:30

My favorite band has a new album and they ROCK with it! There are amazing songs and it looks like there is nothing stopping these guys…

Here are the top three songs from the Album:

“Work for the working man” is a Livin on a prayer style song and has some excellent guitar riffs and vocals.

Starting iPhone Development – Building your Mac clone/Hackintosh (post #2)

2009-12-06T12:43:37+05:30

As described in the previous post, you will need a computer running Mac OS X to install Xcode (the IDE for iPhone app development). In this post we have a look at how we can set up a regular Intel machine to run Mac OS X. At first, try all the options for installing Mac OS X on your existing PC and if that doesn’t work, build a cheap Mac clone.

Check out the hardware compatibility of your existing mother board at the OS X 86 project wiki.
1. Find out your mother board model and chipset and search for it in the list. Check out what comments are there by others who have tried installing on it.
2. Find out your graphics card and see if it is known to run with OS X (worst comes to worst, you will have to live with 1024x768 resolution)
3. Even if it is not listed, give installing OS X a try as described later
Now you must download a patched distribution of Mac OS X which is explicitly intended to be installed on PCs. There are many such distributions like Kalyway, iAtkos, iDeneb etc. I used iATKOS. Search for the torrent of their latest distribution version and download it. You may need to try multiple distributions
Burn the downloaded distribution image to a DVD (we need to boot from it)
If you have windows installed already, keep the Vista or Win7 DVD handy. We might need it to fix the booting problems.
Check the torrent download if they provided a readme or installation guide with it. Use it as a reference.
I used iATKOS and booted the DVD. In many non-compatible computers, the installation interface hangs on the Apple logo screen. Just do some research and maybe a BIOS tweak might fix it.
When greeted with the installation window, start the Disk Utility from Utilities menu and create a Journaled partition. You may refer to the numerous online guides on these steps found online
Close the disk utility, select the partition you created and continue.
Make sure you hit Customize before pressing install.
Have a look at the selections on this screen. We might be coming back to it in case something doesn’t work for us after installation. For me, my laptop’s trackpad and keyboard didn’t work. I came back later and ticked the appropriate drivers.
Make sure Chameleon Bootloader is selected. It will automatically detect and allow your windows drives to boot. (in case your windows drives don’t boot after restart, set the windows drive as the active partition by booting into the Windows DVD and selecting Recovery tools command line. Check online docs on how to set active partition using the command line tool diskpart.exe Then exit diskpart and type the command “bootrec.exe /rebuildbcd” this should rebuild the BCD and when you restart without the DVD, you should see only the windows boot menu. Your windows should boot as well. Now again boot from windows DVD and set the active partition to the OSX partition. Reboot and you should see Chameleon. Dual boot will work now.)
Once you boot into Mac OS X, you will be greeted by first time wizard. If your keyboard mouse dont work, again boot from the OS X DVD and select drivers for your keyboard/mouse which are usually generic. You will now go through a process of hit n trial where you see what works and doesn’t work on your Mac OS X.
Your best friend in this quest will be insanelymac.com/forum
If you can’t access them, open it via web proxy like www.hidemyass.com. You also might need to create an account to be able to download the kext drivers for your non-functioning hardware.
Download and install iPhone SDK on your OS X
You should be ready for iPhone development
If the installation is too crappy or didn’t work at all, use OS X 86 project wiki hardware compatibility list to figure out the cheapest mother board known to work with OS X latest version and build a cheap clone. Also make sure the graphics card it comes with is supported by OS X or else you might need to buy an external one.
Leave me a note if any of rant made your day. (Leave your comments anyway)

Blogspirit sucks... My blog died... had to clone it..

2009-12-02T23:14:29+05:30

My blog went down in the last week of Nov 09 and stayed down till today. I am extremely pissed off with blogSpirit and its services. Sucks horribly. I have a paid Classic account and I logged multiple tickets requesting a solution to this problem but none helped. I am really not sure why I chose them when there amazing free services like that of Blogspot and Wordpress.

My google ranking has been effected terribly and my pages have stopped showing up in search results.

Lesson learnt: never trust low end service providers like blogSpirit. Either go with a more well known provider, a trustworthy free provider like Blogspot and Wordpress OR host it on your own domain name, so that if ever the server goes down, you can switch servers and redirect your domain to the new location.

Starting iPhone development - What do you need? (post #1)

2009-12-02T23:00:33+05:30

Yes, this is the first and foremost question we need to address. The answer is actually very simple, and its also one of those which throws people off the track.

You will need the following:

1. Mac OS X 10.5 or later
2. Latest iPhone SDK (you need to sign up as a registered iPhone developer on Apple, it's free)

3. A device to test (iPhone/iPod touch) with the iPhone OS updated to the version you are developing for
4. A $99 iPhone Developer Program membership "IF" you want to deploy your application to App Store

Now the important thing here is, you can start iPhone dev with almost no monetary investment at all. The very first requirement, i.e. Mac OS X might have had you thinking. Usually most people conclude as per popular belief that if there is no Mac, there is no Mac OS X. It was true till the reign of Tiger. But Leopard onwards this has changed which shifted its target architecture to Intel. So that means, you could build a Mac clone using the same hardware that Apple uses and install Mac OS X. Yes, that indeed is true and also the cheapest way to get a perfect Mac OS X installation running. However don't do that before you have tried installing Mac OS X on your existing Intel computer (AMD is a bit of an issue but there are workarounds for it too).

So point 1 now translates to - Build a H@ckintosh. On a lucky day, this could be a breeze for you. You may already have a OS X compatible hardware set and doing a plain install might get it working. But for me, it wasn't completely true. I had to go through a long process of finding the right OS X distribution, tweaking BIOS, and fixing driver issues. I still don't have a 100% working video display driver and I hope someone somewhere will figure out a fix. If you got confused by my rant, don't worry that's my post no. 2 on how I got my H@ckintosh in place.

Post #2 should be: Getting the Hackintosh ready

Starting iPhone development - post series

2009-12-02T22:59:31+05:30

Over the next couple of weeks, I will be posting a series of articles in which I will highlight my experiences with starting iPhone app development. I am sure there are many out there who have this thought crossing their minds "The iPhone is sooo cool, I am a programmer, I guess I should write some programs of my own!" and this just remains a thought since you either don't know where to start or you get thrown off by the fact that you need a Mac to run development tools and IDE or you simply loose interest because of the hazy picture.

I shall share my experience in a series of posts which will solely describe my experience and not try to act as a tutorial. These posts shall just serve as a kick off point which trigger enough interest in you to start researching more and actually get your hands dirty with creating apps.

So I guess lets begin then... post no. 1 on its way :)

OpenVPN on Vista 64 bit

2009-12-02T22:58:18+05:30

Most of you running on Vista 64 bit would have faced this problem while installing OpenVPN. Midway through the installation it says Error occurred installing TAP-Win32 driver. There is a easy and quick work around for that. Use the latest available installer. I used the installer called: openvpn-2.1_rc15-install.exe When you run it for installation, make sure you right-click and select Run as Administrator. It should install without any problem. Also make sure you uninstalled all previous versions before installing it.

To grab a copy of the installer I used, I will attach it with this post, also I will post a mediafire link:
http://www.mediafire.com/?mkjwzyymbwz

07/09/2009 13:12

Installing Drupal on FreeHostia webspace

2009-12-02T22:57:01+05:30

Since I am writing this article and you are reading it, we agree upon the fact that there are problems with installing Drupal on FreeHostia web space. Here I will detail the issues and their workarounds. This may apply to a few other free web space providers as well.

I assume the following of having been done from your side:

* You have a FreeHostia account
* You know how to log into it's FTP site and upload files
* You have downloaded Drupal 6.x and uploaded all the files to a directory
* You have made a copy of default.settings.php and called it settings.php and given it write permissions
* You cannot get Drupal to install by facing one of these issues:
o Server simply throws an error when you try to access the directory or the install.php file
o install.php runs but gives an error saying register_globals is On and it should be Off

The solution is very straight forward once you know what to do. We have two important things to do:

* Make some changes to the .htaccess file
* Create a php.ini file with the settings that we need

1) Make some changes to the .htaccess file

You need to comment out a line that reads
Options +FollowSymLinks
and make it look like the below
# Options +FollowSymLinks

Now you need to change a line that reads
Options -Indexes
and make it read
IndexIgnore *

2) Create a php.ini file with the settings that we need

Create a new empty file using notepad or any other ASCII text editor and call it php.ini
Add the following two lines in it:

register_globals = OFF
memory_limit = 16M

Save the file and upload it to the base directory where you uploaded your Drupal files. Now try accessing install.php and it should run. If it still doesn't, create a test.php file which has as its content. Upload it and try accessing it. If this basic php file also gives an error then there is something still wrong with .htaccess file.

12/13/2008 16:26