Today, I updated the i7 920 Nehalem quad core processor in my ASUS P6T based Hackintosh to an even more spiffy 970 6-core Gulftown CPU.  Since the i7 970 was retired and discontinued (EOL) recently, prices for the leftover stock have fallen sharply so I decided to get a new one as long as they’re still available. If you own an ASUS P6T make sure you use at least Bios rev. 1303 or the mainboard won’t recognize the 970.

Upon booting OS X I noticed that P-state P0 a.k.a “Turbo Mode” wasn’t working anymore with the new hexacore CPU on the mainboard. In order to get Turbo Mode back, I needed to edit Chameleon’s com.apple.Boot.plist. Here’s what I added:

	<key>GeneratePStates</key>
	<string>Yes</string>
	<key>GenerateCStates</key>
	<string>Yes</string>

With these settings Chameleon automatically takes care of the C-states and P-states for the CPU. Very cool, that saved me a lot of time messing around with the DSDT! You need at least a recent Chameleon version like RC5 though, the last official release from 2009 won’t support those properties.

Here’s the Geekbench score of the updated rig:

Since Apple announces their keynote addresses in their respective time zone (Pacific Standard Time or PST), I always thought it would be nice to have some sort of automatic time zone aware converter that shows the start of a keynote address for everyone’s local time zone. Since no one else is providing this kind of service (at least not that I know of) I took matters into my own hands.

Once Apple announces a keynote address, wheniskeynote.com will show the start time of the keynote depending on the time zone setting it finds on your computer. By the way, did you know they have a :45 minute time zone offset on Chatham Island?

The link list gets shuffled every time the page is loaded so not to give preference to any of the linked web sites. I wanted the site to look like a real keynote slide and I think the design comes pretty close to that. This was primarily a fun project to try out some programming techniques I wasn’t too familiar with. It would have been a lot more work if it hadn’t been for the fantastic jQuery JavaScript library, the very useful time zone detection JavaScript from Josh Fraser and Jon Nylander and the uber cool looking countdown timer JavaScript from Vassilis Dourdounis.

Check out wheniskeynote.com.

Mac OS X Lion boot performance has been optimized and shows off some ridiculous boot times if booting from an SSD. Here’s a video of an ASUS P6T based Hackintosh booting OS X Lion.

Inspired by MacRumors post about the new 27-inch BTO iMac being the fastest Mac ever, here’s the same with an ASUS P6T based Hackintosh, obviously it uses an SSD too just like the iMac shown in the video. The ASUS P6T rig is 2 years old and uses a Lynnfield Core i7 CPU (4 cores), so no fancy Sandy Bridge there.

Both videos were taken with an iPhone and no modifications were made, it’s straight from the iPhone’s camera.

Pretty sick, isn’t it?

A few weeks ago I started working with WSO₂‘s Enterprise Service Bus software, which is a lightweight and extremely high performance, open source enterprise service bus (ESB). One reason it’s so lightweight and fast is that it doesn’t have to be run in a bloated application server environment (although it can, but where’s the point). Instead, it’s running in an OSGi container. While the ESB itself still needs some polishing, especially in the area of deployment in large company environments, it looks extremely promising. We even flew in a few guys from HQ in Sri Lanka to help us with the initial setup of the product. Judging from the guys I’ve met, there must be a lot of talent in that company! Support is top notch and fairly priced.

One thing I was working on over the last few days is a command line remote control utility for the WSO₂ ESB. It supports deployment and undeployment of the Eclipse Carbon Studio .car files and many other features, which at the time are only available through the web based user interface. The utility comes with an awesome name too: Carbonara :) We need this command line functionality for our fully automated change and configuration management processes. There’s no point in releasing the whole thing to the public because it’s tailor-made for the staging processes in my company.

Here’s a small Carbonara excerpt that shows how to send administrative commands like shutdown or entering/exiting maintenance mode to any WSO₂ product using JMX. You can also use JConsole to remotely control any WSO2 product by the way. You will have to activate the JMX registry in the carbon.xml file in order to be able to use JMX. The supplied username and password will have to match a user with administrative privileges in the user store. Read more »