Will follow-up later– using 10.6.8 IONetworkingFamily.kext in /E/E.

“This Apple ID is valid, but is not an iCloud account.”

FaceTime wasn’t cooperating either (not that I cared, but it helps in terms of symptom diagnosis).  I immediately turned to the network issues that plagued my original Lion installation by making it unable to connect to the App Store, but strangely enough, the App Store was working fine; I was able to download and install the recently-released Xcode 4.2 directly from the App Store.

The InsanelyMac forums indicated two possible causes of the problem:

1. Chameleon was out of date; I was running the ancient R755 release, as I didn’t really have a reason to update it.
2. My SMBios.plist, which governs the way OS X perceives the Hackintosh hardware, might have an invalid serial number.

<key>Interfaces</key>
	<array>
		<dict>
			<key>Active</key>
			<true/>
			<key>BSD Name</key>
			<string>en0</string>
			<key>IOBuiltin</key>
 <true/>
			<key>IOInterfaceType</key>
			<integer>6</integer>
			<key>IOInterfaceUnit</key>
			<integer>0</integer>
			<key>IOMACAddress</key>
			<data>
			AB190lHh
			</data>
			<key>IOPathMatch</key>
			<string>IOService:/AppleACPIPlatformExpert/PCI0@0/AppleACPIPCI/PEX4@1C,4/IOPCI2PCIBridge/GIGE@0/AppleRTL8169Ethernet/IOEthernetInterface</string>
			<key>SCNetworkInterfaceInfo</key>
			<dict>
				<key>UserDefinedName</key>
				<string>Ethernet</string>
			</dict>
			<key>SCNetworkInterfaceType</key>
 <string>Ethernet</string>
		</dict>

Everything looked good– but still no dice.

Finally, I updated to the latest Chameleon build (as of yesterday), 1627VS.  And what do you know…

Boom

TL; DR: Updating to Chameleon 1618 DIDN’T work for me; updating to Chameleon 1627VS did the trick.  Hope this helps!

The interwebs indicated that the EFI string I’m using to inject my NVIDIA GTS 250 graphics card was causing the problem.

Sure enough, I removed the EFI string and was able to boot into the GUI, albeit without graphics acceleration.

I was able to add pseudo-acceleration by adding the Chameleon key to my com.apple.boot.plist, but it was choppy and slow.

Finally, I returned to my old way of graphics injection by throwing the NVEnabler.kext (64-bit) into /System/Library/Extensions (the NVEnabler devs claim that it should work in /Extra/Extensions as well, but I tried that first and it didn’t work).

TL;DR: To get my NVIDIA GTS 250 graphics card to play nice with OS X Lion 10.7.2, I had to remove the EFI injection strings from com.apple.boot.plist, remove the GraphicsEnabler plist key, and add NVEnabler.kext (64-bit) to /S/L/E.

Steve Jobs was more than just an inspiration to me. His vision that technology can be beautiful changed the way that I work. He taught me that there is a place for art in everything. And he created a great piece of the world that I live in.

There is nothing I can say about him that hasn’t already been said, but there is a part of me that always hoped I would grow up to be this man. Steve, may there be endless beauty and a single black turtleneck wherever you go.

SharePoint does not provide a way to limit the range of calendar events out-of-the-box. Like all things SharePoint, the calendar is a list; however, items in the list are displayed on top of an existing layer of data, or the pre-determined collection of “allowed” calendar dates, which consists of 365 days in each year, etc.

While there is no way to create a calendar in which this “allowed dates” set can be limited (without custom development), there is a way to send users directly to a specific date by modifying the URL to the calendar.

The default calendar URL looks something like this:

http://MySharePointSite/Lists/Calendar/calendar.aspx

By adding the following to the URL, you can specify the date range to show the user, as well as the “time period” (month/week/day) to display:

http://MySharePointSite/Lists/Calendar/calendar.aspx?CalendarDate=10/10/2011&CalendarPeriod=week

The aforementioned URL would direct the user to this view of the calendar.

Note: Query string parameters are added following a question mark (?); if more than one parameter is specified, additional parameters must be separated by an ampersand (&).

Placing a similarly-constructed URL on the Quick Launch sidebar gives us a way to quickly send users to a specific date range on the calendar list, and fits our use case quite nicely in that the calendar itself is not modified, but the user is directed to the dates on which the conference takes place.

Note that specifying “week” as the CalendarPeriod parameter will automatically display the work week to which the CalendarDate parameter belongs.  To modify the day/hour range of a standard work week, modify the Regional Settings from the Site Settings page.

Below is a quick and dirty walk-through demonstrating how to install Windows 8 on a VirtualBox virtual machine.  Before you start, you will need to download and install Oracle’s VirtualBox virtualization software.  You’ll also need the Windows 8 Developer Preview installation media.  Finally, make sure that your hardware supports virtualization and that it has enough juice, RAM and hard drive space to run a Windows installation on top of your host operating system.  I’m running this on a Core i7 1.73GHz laptop with 6 cores and 8GB of RAM.

Once VirtualBox is installed, create a new VM by clicking the ‘New’ button.  Call the VM anything you want (I went the creative route), and select “Microsoft Windows” and “Windows 7 (64-bit)” as the Operating System and Version.

Don't worry, the similarities between Windows 7 and Windows 8 virtually end here.

Give the VM plenty of memory; Windows 8 requires at least 1GB, but I recommend at using at least 2GB.  Make sure your host system can handle it, though, because this memory is automatically allocated up-front as soon as you boot the VM.

Give 'er at least 2GB of RAM.

You need to give the VM a virtual disk from which to boot.  Select “Start-up Disk” and then select “Create new hard disk” unless you want to use an existing disk.

You can also use a physical disk if you have one...

The next options allow you to create a disk image that can be imported to various other VM players.  I chose VDI because at the moment, VMWare Player won’t support Windows 8 anyway.

Parrallels? lolz

Next, specify how VirtualBox will allocate your virtual disk space on your physical hard drive.  If you don’t want to allocate all of the disk space up front, choose “Dynamic” and the disk will be expanded as needed.

"Dynamically allocated" is faster, too.

Specify how big the disk should be.  I wouldn’t use less than 20GB.

Or you can put it on your internal 2TB laptop hard drive.

Make sure all the virtual disk settings are as you expect them to be, then click “Create.”

You can't go back now. There's no "Back" button.

Now, verify the settings for the entire virtual machine and click “Create.”

Note that you can alter these settings later (you will).

Now that you’ve created your machine, you need to configure it to properly run Windows 8.  You’ll have to specify display settings, processor cores, and mount the Windows 8 Developer Preview installation ISO.

The first tab of the “General” screen allows you to change the name of your machine if you’re feeling flip-floppy.

How about the Fighting Mongooses? That's a good team name: the Fighting Mongooses!

The “System” screen allows you to set the RAM allocation, processor cores, and virtual device boot order.  Make sure that your CD/DVD-ROM virtual drive is set to boot first.  If you don’t have one, we’ll get to that soon.

See that "IO APIC" checkbox? That's what VirtualBox has and VMWare Player doesn't, and it's required to boot Windows 8.

Click the “Processor” tab of the “System” screen to set the number of processor cores that your VM can use.  I’d give it a minimum of 2.

Don't give your virtual processor more cores than your real processor has to lend.

Enable hardware acceleration/virtualization on the “Acceleration” tab.

I'm not entirely clear on what these checkboxes enable.

You will also need to ramp up your video memory in order to use Windows Aero.  Give your VM at least 128MB of video memory, and enable both 2D and 3D acceleration.

One monitor should do.

Next, you need to mount the installation media ISO.  Click the “Storage” screen.  Notice that there are two IO controllers:

I'm not sure why you would want to virtualize an IDE controller.

Select either the IDE Controller or the SATA Controller (if you have trouble using the SATA Controller, use the IDE Controller).  Then click the little icon that looks like a disc with a plus sign and select “Add CD/DVD Device.”

You don't need another hard disk.

Click “Choose disk” to specify the ISO.  Navigate to the folder containing your installation media ISO and click “OK.”

You can un-mount this later.

You should now see the WindowsDeveloperPreview ISO mounted on your IDE or SATA Controller.

If you already have an "Empty" controller, there's no need to create another one. I just added it for the sake of explaining how to do it.

Your new VM is ready to boot!  Click “OK,” then select your VM and click “Start.”  The VM will boot up and begin booting your installation media.  If it doesn’t boot the installation media right away, you may need to hit F12 as soon as it boots to specify the boot device:

Behind the dialog box, you can see the prompt to "Press F12 to select boot device" in the lower right-hand corner.

If you’ve installed Windows before, you should be able to take it from here.  The rest of the installation moves just like the Windows 7 installation.  Here’s the boot screen (this was taken at a different screen resolution than the screens above):

Booting the Windows 8 Installer

And here are a couple screens of the installation process that I posted earlier:

Nothing new.

It actually installed much faster than Windows 7 did, but this isn't a complete version.

Finally, after a couple of reboots, Windows 8 will boot for the first time.  You will be asked to supply a Windows ID.  I don’t know what happens if you *don’t* supply one, but do you really want to find out?

Not sure how I feel about linking to a Windows ID off-the-bat. Probably about the same way I feel about OS X asking me for my Apple ID post-installation.

Happy Windows 8-ing!  Just remember that this is a developer preview– not even an alpha or a beta– so expect things to be buggy, sluggish, incomplete and strange.

I’ll post a review later on my impressions so far.

So I was forced to install Oracle’s VirtualBox to get the developer preview up and running.  Not a big fan, but it’s good enough for now.

Suggestions:

• Enable 2D and 3D hardware acceleration
• Give ‘er at least 2GB of RAM and 2 cores– I went 4/4
• If you’re used to VMWare’s nice display integration, good luck

Without further ado, here are a few screenshots.  I’ll reserve my commentary for later, but let me just say that I think Windows 8 has huge potential to bridge the gap between tablet and typical PC, but there is still a lot of work to be done.

RAM Settings I used for the VirtualBox VM

Booting the Windows 8 Installer

Typical Windows installation so far

Still pretty standard...

I don't think we're in Kansas anymore.

When you're in the standard Windows desktop, don't you dare hit "Start"-- or you'll get the tile menu. Hover in the lower left-hand corner to display some more familiar options.

I wanted to set the “Job Description” property of a custom SharePoint Timer Job, because it was not appearing on the “Edit Timer Job” screen in SharePoint Central Admin:

"Job Description" is missing.

If you try to set the “Description” property of your timer job in the constructor, you’ll notice that “Description” is a read-only property of the SPJobDefinition class.

As my colleague pointed out, this “Description” property is a virtual property, as noted in the class description on MSDN:

//MSDN definition of SPJobDefinition.Description property
public virtual string Description { get; }

But you cannot simply override it in your timer job class (which is a subclass of SPJobDefinition) as such, because there is no definition for a ‘set’ accessor:

//Override Description property-- doesn't work
public override string Description
{
     get;
     set;
}

Curious, as was I, my colleague disassembled the SharePoint.dll assembly, and what do you know, the ‘get’ accessor is written to return an empty string (hence the inclusion of the ‘virtual’ keyword to encourage overriding the base accessor):

//Disassembled SharePoint.dll SPJobDefinition class
public virtual string Description
{
     get
     {
      return string.Empty;
     }
}

I also tried creating my own CustomDescription property in my class that inherits from SPJobDefinition and overriding the ‘get’ accessor of the base Description property to return the value of CustomDescription:

//Custom Job Description
private string CustomDescription
{
    get;
    set;
}

// Override built-in Description property by returning our custom description in the getter accessor
public override string Description
{
    get
    { return CustomDescription; }
}

Then I set the value of CustomDescription in the constructor (EDIT: do this in ALL THREE constructors!):

//Constructor for custom timer job class that inherits from SPJobDefinition
public MyTimerJob(string jobName, string jobDescription, SPWebApplication webApplication)
     : base(jobName, webApplication, null, SPJobLockType.ContentDatabase)
{
    this.Title = jobName;
    CustomDescription = jobDescription;
}

No dice.

Here’s the link to the MSDN thread where the same question was supposedly answered; I found this thread following the initial publication of this post, and it looks like we both tried the same thing.  We’ll see if I hear back.

I’m not really sure where to go from here.  It looks as though this “Description” property is set for OOB SharePoint timer jobs only, and there’s nothing we can do about it.  Unless, of course, you can set a timer job’s description from stsadm or a PowerShell script…

Turns out you have to set the CustomDescription in ALL THREE constructors.  Why?  Because even though I’m calling my custom constructor to create the timer job, SharePoint actually calls the base constructor.  Attach to the process if you don’t believe me