Science Fare

Pretty sky above the dairy queen parking lot.

Not so itsy.

I found GTA III for PC cheap so I bought it. I ran into this weird error: A debugger was detected.

After sleuthing, I found that what I need was to install the 1.1 update. The link on the support site was broken.

However, I was able to reverse engineer and guess where the update file ended up:

http://updates.rockstargames.com/patches/grandtheftauto3/GTA3patch1.1.zip

Hope that helps anyone else running into this issue.

320213718-2.jpg

Originally uploaded by nakedtram

I’m climbing the walls!

It is a challenge to upgrade a Mac that has bootcamp installed. The problem is that the Mac uses one way of partitioning drives (EFI) and windows uses another (BIOS/MBR). I have Windows 7, so it uses BCD, too.

I’ve only done this once successfully, so your results may vary. However, this is the tactic I used:

1. Get an external drive dock (I used EZ-DOCK for 19 bucks from microcenter).
2. Install the new drive.
3. Boot off the external drive’s mac partition (hold option key down during boot).
4. Format the new internal drive.
5. Clone the mac partition onto the new drive (I used Disk Utility’s “restore” feature I think. Or maybe asr from the command line? I tried so many variations that didn’t work it’s hard to remember)
6. Reboot onto the internal (freshly cloned) drive
7. Run bootcamp assistant and resize to make room for the bootcamp + data partition
8. Don’t reboot. Instead go to disk utility and remove that partition, creating two in its place (both FAT32). The last one is BOOTCAMP.
9. I may have started to re-install Win 7 and then aborted by forcibly powering off the machine
10. Insert Win 7 install DVD and reboot. Select Recovery console.
11. I may have used PARTDISK here I don’t remember. Then format the internal BOOTCAMP partition to ntfs (use /Q option or you’ll be waiting for hours).
12. Use ROBOCOPY to clone the external BOOTCAMP disk onto internal BOOTCAMP partition: ROBOCOPY E:\ C:\ /e /efsraw /copyall /dcopy:t /r:0 It gave me 16 directories and 4 files that failed to copy… I’m ignoring that…
13. Use the recovery tool to fix boot problem
14. Boot onto internal windows drive. Select “Windows 7 ultimate (recovered)”. It boots!
15. Use bcdedit to remove broken boot entry.
16. Microsoft office doesn’t seem to work right, so I ran “repair” on that installation. Found out what one of those files that didn’t copy is, I guess…
17. Used ROBOCOPY again to copy all the files on my DATA partition. (I leave data as FAT32 so I can access it from Mac side, too.)

The ferry that took us to the UK. We were supposed to have taken this at 12:15, but due to insufficient planning on my part we missed the boat. So instead we got to tour a nearby maritime museum and aquarium…

Which had these funny fishes that reminded me somewhat of paddlefish:

And best of all, we could tour the amazing submarine, the Redoubtable — France’s first nuclear ballistic missile submarine:

A view of the harbor in Cherbourg. This is a panoramic stitching of 42 photographs (Photoshop CS4).

We have returned from France. Here is the sunset that first day there, looked across the English Channel from Normandie.

I just thought of this amusing anecdote.

When I was in high school, a local dude liked to drive his four-wheeler through the big lot behind our house. So Dad scrounged a huge cable from somewhere (maybe it was used for towing barges?) and put it across the trail between several trees. The four-wheeler dude got upset by this and spray-painted this message on an old piece of 4×8 plywood: “YOURA MADMAN”.