How to fix an upsized Apple TV stuck in 1.0 software

Some months ago, I swapped some hard drives, and ended up upgrading my Apple TV’s 40GB hard drive. The process was the standard procedure you can find in many sites: back-up the drive, create the correct partition map on the new drive and restore the data into the new drive.

When I upgraded the hard drive, the software version was already 2.x. However, the Apple TV restore partition was still the original 1.0. Here is where the problem started. Whenever new software upgrades were downloaded, they just failed. I’m not sure the upgrades check the hard disk size. Most likely, when restoring into the larger hard drive, some permissions got messed up. A “factory restore” takes the Apple TV back to 1.0 (no YouTube, no Apple Store menus) but once again the upgrades fail.

The process I document here doesn’t require to re-open the Apple TV case. You could go that route, of course, but I think it may even take longer.

You will need:

• External USB drive that can be completely wiped (512MB or more)
• A copy of ATV USB Creator
• A DMG from Apple with the latest firmware. At the time of writing 2Z694-5573-24.dmg. I believe ATV USB Creator tries to download it automatically. However, we’ll need the file for the extra step described here, so you’d be better off by getting the DMG yourself.

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Export Plugin for iPhoto

Following up on my previous hack, I ended up writing a plug in in Objective C. It’s currently loading, not much frills. I’m deciding if I’ll try to reuse my Python code bridging with PyObjC or just rewrite in Objective C the export. Most likely the latter.

Here is a screenshot. When installed, my plugin nicely adds another pane to the iPhoto export options. It will export to a folder, just like Apple’s Web export plugin. The users can upload the folder to the webserver however they like.

It borrows a lot of the UI from iTunes builtin web export (more than literally, because I copied a couple of things from the .nib). I hope to have time in the next couple of weeks to finish it. Looks promising, though.

Hanoi Towers nostalgia

This is a game invented in 1883 by Edouard Lucas d’Amiens, a french mathematician. He loved anagrams, and he used the pseudonim Professor N. Claus (de Siam), which is an anagram of his name, to publish about the game.

The rules are very simple:

The goal is to move all the discs from one pin to the other one.

I wrote a Z80 basic program to solve it back in 1984, but I don’t have the code anymore. Recently, Salvat Editores launched here in Brazil a bi-weekly publication where they sell a nicely crafted wooden puzzle every week.
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yapgvb – a binding for Graphviz

My project d2g is currently reading a description file for dependencies, then generating a text file that can be fed to graphviz to generate a picture of the graph. yapgvb is a wrapper in Python for graphviz, so I’ll migrate my code to use, so no additional step will be required.

Will check pydot

The package pydot, a Python interface to Graphviz’s Dot language, may be a better way to generate the graphs than writing intermediate dot files. Will review

According to the site, pydot provides:

An interface for creating both directed and non directed graphs from Python. Currently all attributes implemented in the Dot language are supported (up to Graphviz 1.16).

PyTables seems to be the correct data storage

The PyTables package is a Python interface to HDF5, which is a general purpose library and file format for storing scientific data made at NCSA. HDF5 can store two primary objects: datasets and groups. A dataset is essentially a multidimensional array of data elements, and a group is a structure for organizing objects in an HDF5 file (very similar to a directory in a filesystem).

Need to check GiNaC to provide algebraic manipulation to my software

Found “GiNaC is Not a CAS“, a symbolic algebra manipulation system. Through swiginac it will be possible to use it from Python. The only concern is that may be an overkill.

Writing PlugIns for iPhoto

I hacked a Python program to export the iPhoto albums into the format I need to use zphoto and publish them on the website as Flash animations. I’d like to extend it to be a iPhoto PlugIn and this article has info on writing plugIns for Cocoa

CHARMING PYTHON (Special Installment) — Revisiting XML Tools for Python –

This article CHARMING PYTHON (Special Installment) — Revisiting XML Tools for Python – looks very interesting for the project I’m working on
More Modules: xml_pickle And xml_objectify

I have produced my own set of high-level modules for dealing with XML, called xml_pickle and xml_objectify. I have also written enough about these elsewhere (see Resources) that there is no need to go into a lot of details here. But these modules are often very useful when you want to “think in Python” rather than “think in XML.” xml_objectify especially hides almost all the traces of XML itself from a Python programmer, and lets her work with perfectly “native” Python objects within a program. The actual XML data format that underlies things is abstracted almost to the point of invisibility. Likewise, xml_pickle lets a Python programmer start out with “native” Python objects whose data comes from any source, and dump (serialize) them into an XML format that other users might want downstream.

pygene – simple python genetic algorithms/programming library

Will try pygene – simple python genetic algorithms/programming library to test some ideas on strategy selection tools