The Hackintosh Project Part 1 - or how I got annoyed by the cost of style over performance

I love Mac... There, I've said it - I'm outed! I like the look, I like the feel - I love my iPhone and my black MacBook is well spec'd, looks cool and has been my saviour for the last few years. It has done pretty much everything I could want out of a laptop and has done it with panache and extreme ease of use. I open the lid, it turns on and is ready to go - I can plug it into my HD projector and it pops up movies in crisp quality far beyond the resolution of its little screen. The battery life is (still!) superb and it runs pretty much like a dream even when the very adequate 250GB hard-drive is full-to-brimming.

BUT - my little laptop is just that... a laptop for doing day to day tasks, working on the train, writing up PhD chapters , watching iPlayer - all that fun stuff. With a 2.4GhZ Core 2 Duo processor and 2GB of RAM, it packs a bit of punch for its size - but is not really up to all the tasks that I need. I want to be able to render AfterEffects projects, I want to edit movies, I want to futz around with high-res photos, I want to run Windoze in a virtual machine so I can use my accountancy software, I want to augment reality, I want to run hard-core 3d visibility calculations and do geo-statistics on landscapes. Don't get me wrong, the black MacBook can do all those things (and my one currently is) - but you won't be able to get it to do anything else whilst it's processing!

OSX

The main draw to me of Macs - as well as the look - is the OSX operating system. I like the clean interface, the intuitive menus and the seamless 'spaces' and expose hot-corners. I haven't tried Windows 7, which may or may not accurately ape these features - but I love playing around in the Terminal and having access to all the funky unix commands - but only when I want them - not all the time! I know that the up-to-date distros of Ubuntu, etc. are getting much better in terms of GUIs - but in my opinion you can't beat the ability to plug in and play peripherals and all the developers porting stuff to OSX.

So I need a PowerHouse computer with OSX. Great - so I have 2 choices, an iMac 27inch or a Mac Pro.

iMac -

• 2.66GHz Quad-Core Intel Core i5
• 4GB 1066MHz DDR3 SDRAM - 2x2GB
• 1TB Serial ATA Drive
• ATI Radeon HD 4850 512MB
• 
  

For an iMac with a quad-core processor, 4GB of RAM and with a reasonably decent graphics card we are looking at £1,634.00. Ouch! Admittedly this comes with a whopping 27inch tasty screen and due to all the gubbins being in the screen it obviously has a small desktop footprint. Except it doesn't really.... I generally like the aesthetics of Macs - but the iMac to me (especially the 27in one) is just too big. It totally dominates the room and as opposed to a slimline 27in monitor with a desktop box hidden away somewhere - the iMac seems to me to be a bit of a White monster in the corner of the room. For a funky architects studio which a great bank of them thats a different story - but for a home desktop powerhouse - it seems just a bit too overpowering - the room becomes about the computer instead of being about the bookshelves or whatever!

Mac Pro - The Mac Pro is Apple's powerhouse desktop - and to be fair its certainly a bad-ass.

One 2.66GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon "Nehalem" processor
3GB (three 1GB) memory
640GB hard drive 1
18x double-layer SuperDrive
NVIDIA GeForce GT 120 with 512M

This little beauty will set you back £1940. It doesn't come inbuilt in the monitor but the Nehalem processors are pretty sweet. The geForce GT 120 seems to be a rebranding of the nVidia GT 9500 - which whilst a reasonable card isn't all that hot. For an extra £163 you can upgrade to the ATI Radeon HD4870 which is a v. good sub-£200 graphics card - but still not at the top of the graphics game as you would hope from a computer setting you back over 2k.

Too much Buck for the Bang?

Macs are expensive. They are too expensive for the components that are in them. This I have always suspected - however its much harder to spec up a laptop and I like the MacBooks. It all comes ready-prepared, works out of the box and looks nice. For my money the extra money for a £800 MacBook is worth it over a better spec'd £600 laptop (that is ugly and runs Windows). But when you start looking at the higher-end desktop Macs it's very difficult to justify this.

Enter the Hackintosh

I don't have £2k to spend on a new computer. I don't like Windows, am used to OSX and want a powerful machine to do all sorts of processing and graphicsy-stuff. I will also make another admission here - I love PC gaming. I have an old PC that I play games like Battlefield 2 and low-spec FPSs on - but it immediately falls over on any of the more modern games.

It turns out that due to the wonderful people at the Hackintosh Project it is possible to install OSX on non-Mac hardware. Whilst lots of people use Hackintosh for NetBooks and that type of thing - it is also possible to run it on a desktop as well.

So I thought I would try and spec up one of those iMacs or Mac Pros and see if I can get the same bang for a lot less buck. Of course I would need to be able to run OSX and a Windows partition (purely for the games).

Here is what I managed for £645.15 including shipping and VAT. This is all from www.aria.co.uk.

1 x Antec Two Hundred Midi Tower Gaming Case @ 34.65GBP
1 x Arianet Stealth 700W "Silent" ATX Power Supply for AMD and Intel Motherboards 20Pin + 4Pin @ 29.36GBP
1 x Western Digital Caviar Green 1TB SATA-II 32MB Cache - OEM (WD10EADS) @ 66.96GBP
1 x SAMSUNG SH-S223C SATA DVDRW Black @ 15.26GBP
1 x TP-Link 10/100/1000Mbps Gigabit PCI Network Card @ 5.58GBP

1 x HIS ATI Radeon HD 5770 1024MB GDDR5 PCI-Express Graphics Card @ 115.14GBP
1 x Gigabyte GA-EP45-UD3LR Intel P45 (Socket 775) DDR2 Motherboard @ 82.24GBP
1 x Intel Core 2 Quad Q8300 LGA775 (Yorkfield) 2.50GHz (1333FSB) Processor - Retail @ 108.09GBP
2 x Patriot Viper Extreme Performance 4GB (2x2GB) DDR2 PC2-6400C4 800MHz Dual Channel Kit @ 70.49GBP
1 x Western Digital 500GB 3.5" SATA II Hard Drive - OEM @ 36.88GBP

Here we have a Quad Core processor - it's only 4 processors each at 2.50Ghz but should be just about on par with the mid-range iMac version (not quite as good as the Intel i5 in the Mac Pro). One of the reasons for choosing this processor was that it's compatible with the Intel P45 motherboard, which is needed for the OSX install (as you will see in the next installment). I have slammed in 8GB of RAM (double the iMac and the 1.5x the Mac Pro). With a TB drive for the OSX install and a separate 500GB HDD for the stand-alone Windoze gaming install (500GB more than the iMac and 900Gb more than the Mac Pro). The graphics card here outstrips both the iMac and the Mac Pro cards (even the ones in the highest spec machines).

The spec here (albeit with a slightly under-powered processor) should be easily on par and exceeding in lots of cases the offerings from the iMac and Mac Pro. which works out at saving so far of at least £1000 (more if you compare it to the Mac Pro).

This is already pretty sweet Windows gaming computer right out of the box (well after assembly!). But if the Hackintosh install works then I have the best of both worlds. It also clearly appeals to my anarchist side - taking the only reason for a PC (the Windows gaming and cheap hardware) and one of the main reasons for a desktop Mac (OSX) and putting them together in beautiful harmony.

Of course, my initial joy and excitement may well fade once I get the bits and have to put them together! I've built SFF Pcs before, but this will be my first desktop from complete scratch. I have to wait a couple of days for the delivery from Aria so stay tuned over the next couple of weeks to see how the story unfolds!

CASA Conference 8th - 9th January 2009 - DAY 2

Day 2 of the conference concentrated on a number of different projects involved in S4 program, from Leeds University and CASA. This day was aiming to be a bit more of a workshop day. Unfortunately I only managed to catch the afternoon sessions.

There were some v. interesting papers - particularly to do with Multi-Agent Modelling. Alison Heppenstall discussed the creation of individual consumer agents to model a local communities shopping habits. She also briefly discussed Nick Malleson's crime work - which looks really useful. He is using the PECS model, which seems to be a pretty robust way of thinking about agent behaviour.

This paper was followed by one delivered by Vassilis Zacharidias from CASA on modelling queing, whilst it was a bit diffiuclt to understand at points (lots of maths!) the resultant model of the shambolic queing in Victoria Station looked pretty accurate - well at least everytime I'm there I walk round in circles next to the escalators!

The highlight of the day for me was Andrew Hudson-Smith's slightly tongue in cheek discussion on how to visualise ABM with 3D. It's well worth downloading his paper (in fact all of the presentations from the 2 days) here. Andrew's half-hour paper went through his journey from knowing nothing about ABM to NetLogo to reinventing the wheel in 3D StudioMax to finally coming back round to NetLogo - but linking the code (and graphs!) to both 3DSMax and Second Life. This gives you decent-looking 3D models which have a very strong grounding in a powerful ABM model builder which gives feedback and can be calibrated in lots of different ways.

This is something that I am very interested in - especially in the use of gaming-engines (with their in-built rendering and real-world physics models) to extend and expand the normal ABM world. If hundreds of people have already spent a lot of time sorting out making sure computer-based avatars/agents/soldiers/aliens/whatever don't walk into walls and obey the forces of mass and gravity then that's great and lets not reinvent more wheels.

One of the best points that Andrew made was that by doing this stuff in Second Life - the modelling process can become colloborative, with people running the models at different times etc. and everyone tweaking as they see fit. But what really made me stop and think was that suddenly we can now have our avatars (REAL people from anywhere in the world at anytime) logging into the models and directly interacting with the 'dumb' agents themselves. It really does bring an interesting dimension to how we should be using ABMs and also what they can tell us about how systems will react to outside influence and to those 'rogue' situations of human agency that are just so hard to recreate when you are using generic agents. Anyway, a lot of food for thought and definately someone I need to contact and discuss this all further with. He said that CASA are just at the tip of the iceberg with thinking through all of this, and I really think it has massive potential for my research.

CASA Conference 8th - 9th January 2009

Yesterday was the first day of the first Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA) conference at UCL.

The day was quite interesting, more of a showcase of what CASA have been up to. They continue to do some pretty nice looking stuff, a couple of the things that are worth looking at are the (GMapCreator) which is a super easy way to take data off your desktop and up onto the Web - and MapTube which is a website that allows you to take allsorts of different maps and mash them all together.

MapTube is a great resource, its very very simple to use and there are allsorts of bits of random data on there (from rate of teenage stabbings to how the whole of Britain is reacting to the credit crunch). You can basically grab whatever type of maps you want and mash-them-all-up. Of course this being the world of Web 2.0 users can upload their own maps and you can add KML feeds directly on.

It's certainly flashy, and the nice transparency controls allow you to easily pick out patterns between overlays. Mind you, I haven't used it for anything yet - and the data thats up there at the moment won't be particularly useful for my research - but good work CASA for putting more tools and applications out there for people to get hold of and develop. CASA of course being masters of publicity have got a few high-profile maps up on there (Radio 4 things, etc.) - which means that it has had a big whack of hits, which is great.

One of the other interesting things about the papers was Alex Singleton's thoughts on how sites like MapTube get adopted, in terms of public engagement. He said that whilst the press releases bring in a lot of traffic - there are real spikes in traffic after something gets blogged about on a popular blog, or enters the social networking sphere (gets Digg'd or Twittered, etc.). This creates a vast amount of immediate traffic, which is quite hard to deal with on the server side as its often unpredictable - sites being blogged about many months after initial release as people come across them.

Anyway, I'm looking forward to seeing what the 2nd day brings.