Running your Bootcamp Partition Inside Snow Leopard VirtualBox

Published April 20, 2010 / by gavin

This is adapted from: http://dashes.com/anil/2009/10/how-to-run-windows-7-under-mac-os-x-106-for-free.html

First, install bootcamp and windows as instructed by apple.

Then, open a terminal window and enter:

sudo chmod 777 /dev/disk0s3

sudo VBoxManage internalcommands
createrawvmdk -rawdisk /dev/disk0
-filename win7raw.vmdk -partitions 3

Start VirtualBox (download it from http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads).

Navigate to your home directory and open win7raw.vmdk.

In your Settings tab in VirtualBox, go to the Storage tab and set the IDE Controller to “ICH6”.

Launch the virtual machine, install the VirtualBox guest additions, and you should be good to go.

Mindsets

Published January 11, 2010 / by gavin

At a successful wine bar visit (Noir) after a failed attempt at seeing a Bollywood film in Pasadena, our friend Joel, a math professor, began to explain optimal grid packing in terms of how a grocer stacks oranges. If you have an infinite number of oranges, stacking them as a grocer would is, apparently, optimal.

Jill: “But nobody has an infinite number of oranges!”
Joel: “Nobody except a mathematician!”

Coder for the People

Published November 25, 2008 / by gavin

I write software for a living, these days at Google, but in the past at DreamWorks Animation, Idealab and ArsDigita among others. I think rich internet applications are The Way, and I like to make them richer.
I like people. I like meeting new folks, and talking to them, and meeting their friends, and walking up to strangers in public places and striking up conversations. I actually hand out a lot of business cards, just because it seems like the polite thing to do after somebody has done me the courtesy of getting to know me.

At work you can pick your own title for your business cards. Well, you can’t put “CEO” or “Vice President” unless you really are one, but the internal designations are pretty useless outside Google.

I thought for a while about what I do, and why I do it. What I do, ultimately, is try to make peoples’ lives more pleasurable, especially when they touch technology. That’s one of the reasons I like movies, and user interface, and open source, and the web. I’m here for the people.

Coder for the People

Coder for the People

Between Times

Published October 23, 2008 / by admin

A friend’s startup started layoffs this week. He was working on the servers until 3:00am the day before his Last Big Meeting. It got me thinking.

We worry a lot when things crash. When I took this picture, my thought was “Whew! I’m out of that dangerous dotcom phase of my career.” In retrospect, this would have been the perfect time to start a scrappy Web 2.0 business with a couple of my buddies.

We’re in one of those between-times now. In a few years, I suspect we’ll either be doing the new-new thing that’s germinating right now, or wishing that we had. There’s at least 1500 web-savvy folks about to come on the job market this year. Who knows what they’ll cook up?

The last time I drove by this building, the sign had been replaced, but the www and .com remained. There was something new going on between them, though.

Pay Attention Everybody!

Published September 7, 2008 / by admin

A lot of wise people are blogging about the political conventions,  who said what about what when and why, how this person or another is lying and distorting the truths that should be self-evident and so on.

A friend just sent me a link to the film below. I LOVE a good crazy conspiracy theory. But… pay attention. Watch it through the closing credits.

Watch it here: Dark Side of the Moon

And remember to do your own thinking in the months ahead.