Last weekend, I broke my long hiatus from going to the movies with RED. And man, did I pick the right one (I wavered between RED and Social Network). I can’t deny I’m a total sucker for graphic-novel adaptations. Though you might expect something like Sin City from the illustrious cast, RED is a completely different animal. It makes no effort to be artsy or classy, and as we know from Shoot ‘Em Up, awesome things happen when a movie knows exactly what it wants to be. It’s emphatically not another Die Hard, though Bruce Willis plays yet another old man who refuses to retire. The screenplay is impressively non-cliche and the acting is superb – they could not have casted this movie more perfectly from John Malkovich’s Marvin and Helen Mirren‘s…stone-cold crazy grandma killing machine. There is no trace of any CIA-related cliches, like ex-agents knowing exactly how long it takes to trace a call and hanging up right before it completes. Nope, not in this movie. From start to finish it’s a powerhouse of adrenaline (pumping alarmingly slower in the old characters), and garnished with colorful supporting characters played by Brian Cox and Richard Dreyfuss. It will be totally worth buying the DVD so I can pop it in when I’m bored or knitting. I don’t really knit, but it feels appropriate to do while watching a grandma pump rounds of machine gun ammo into cars. Someone has to switch roles with her.

I have been wanting to take a crack at iPhone app development for a long time, but was dismayed to find out that I need a relatively new Mac in order to run the iPhone Software Development Kit. A friend of mine scored an old Powerbook G4 for me, but without an Intel processor it wouldn’t serve my purpose.

An extensive list of Googling later, I decided to sell the Powerbook, buy myself a Netbook to hackintosh. After consulting the most amazing hackintosh guide table ever, I went for a used Dell Inspiron Mini 10v (1011), which was one of the very few models that could support every Mac OSX function.

Once I got it though, it wasn’t smooth sailing at all. I originally intended to get partitioned dual-boot working between Mac OSX and Windows 7, but I kept running into the not-so-well-documented “boot0″ error, which seems to occur because the two operating systems have completely different boot protocols. A couple threads online recommended using fdisk in terminal to fix this error, but I went wrong somewhere and ended up not being able to boot into ANY of my partitions.

I ended up re-installing the OSX, this time giving up on the dual-boot. I wasn’t really going to need Windows anyway. With one partition running OSX, the netbook seemed to be hacked without problems… until Snow Leopard updated to 10.6.4. This resulted in a kernel & CPU mismatch error, crashing mid-boot. Panicking, I re-installed OSX yet again. Later I found out there is an easier solution to the problem, which is using the NetbookInstaller from Meklort’s Blog after starting the computer in recovery mode – hold shift while booting, and type “recovery=y” as a boot option.

So it’s been a long journey, but I finally got the thing to work. My Dell Mini 10v is now running OSX 10.6.4 with iPhone SDK installed.Hopefully I’ll teach myself fast enough to make some apps soon!

Really? Because I just downloaded the new iTunes, and it broke the unicode in every Asian song I had. Apple proponents are always criticizing PC software for having bugs or releasing before they are “perfect,” and I get this from iTunes, one of Apple’s most important and globally prevalent. I would’ve been less infuriated if it was just on the front-end of the program “not being able to display” unicode, but because of iTunes’ auto-organization, all my non-English songs were put into folders made of boxes. At this point I had to system restore. An angry fist needed to be shaken at this offense.