botWerks

follow the advice here: http://www.jwz.org/doc/backups.html

seriously. just do it.

if you need a GUI, SuperDuper, works wonderfully.  this will save your ass. no joke.

some comments re: X11

somehow, apple managed to really screw up the X11 implementation that they shipped with leopard.  fortunately, they had really sharp guys tracking this and the xquartz project stepped in quickly to plug the gaps.  if you’re running leopard, this is the release to get.  personally, i keep a copy of the latest version on my machine in the odd chance than an OS upgrade happens to trigger nastiness on the X11 front.

why use this versus terminal?

if you need to run a UNIX X app, you’re going to need an X server running.  however, for the most part, if you’re just doing CLI stuff you’re not going to care.  i happen to have an apparent inability to use the option key as meta.  terminal doesn’t allow you to remap the command key to meta so  .. i use rxvt (built from ports) and xterm is  obviously readily available.  X11 will honor the use of the command key as meta so my thumb will do the right thing.

make sure you’re using something later than r2.3.2.1

x11 preferences

release 2.3.2.1 and later provides the ability to update the system pasteboard w/copy on select from X11. this means that copy and paste work pretty much the way you would intuit between OS X apps and xterms, etc. without having to manually invoke the copy operation from the menu w/i X11. this of course assumes that you have sanely disabled “Enable key equivalents under X11″.

note to make this work you need to enable the “update pasteboard immediately when new text is selected” option in the preferences. this has persisted across a number of releases and pretty much just works the way you want it too.  this was a major nit for me for a number of years.  if you’re  a recent convert, enjoy.

productivity

omnifocus – the most powerful productivity tool on my mac.  i used to use a collection of text files, scripts, etc.  this just slurps it all up and syncs to my phone.  i use a hacked version of GTD for my workflow, which omnifocus is oriented to. however, as a catchall for things that need to get done, this can’t be beat.  infinitely customizable and tweakable.  i haven’t found too many things that it doesn’t just do.

adium – the last word in instant messengers for the mac.  covers pretty much every protocol out there and a few that you really wish would just die already.  the latest beta builds include support for twitter.  i have to confess that integrated twitter support is a lot handier than i expected.

yep – i collect a lot of PDFs.  be they academic papers, work documents that i want to archive, presentations from conferences, etc. i need a way to tag them and organize them.  i happen to use yep. i’ve vacillated between this and papers countless times over the past couple of years.  particularly given that papers seems to be getting a lot more active development and has a sweet iphone application that matches up with it.  unfortunately, it’s a matter of inertia for me, i have sooo much stuff in yep right now that i would need to dedicate a few days to migrating to papers.  folks might actually benefit from looking at papers right off the bat.

gitx – gui git client for the mac.  this actually rocks pretty hard.  graphical display of what you have going with your local git repo and useful for dorks like me who do everything in emacs before they shove it into word to share with coworkers.  it’s been quite useful for me.

vmware – you just need this. period.  i used to be a parallels fan.  then vmware fusion came out and the performance was awesome and i could use other folks VMs and it didn’t sporadically suck up all available CPU and i was happy.

cord – the best remote desktop client i’ve seen to date.  full screen mode rocks, there’s support for font smoothing and unlike the microsoft remote desktop client, it just works.  neat features like connect in full-screen mode and drawer storage of configs, etc are quite handy.

yojimbo – a junk drawer app – this thing will hoover up PDFs, passwords, web clippings, bookmarks, misc. notes, etc.  i’ve found it to be pretty solid and speedy.  it has a handy quickfile drawer.  which lets you hit a hotkey and drag contents into it.  when i want to clean off my desktop and i don’t have a solid notion of what i need to do with something in terms of filing, i’ll simply stick stuff here and cull it later.  great for printing out boarding passes, web receipts, etc as a PDF print destination.

the usual apps

keynote – this is part of the iWork suite and i’ve personally found it to be a better presentation package than pretty much anything else i’ve seen.  which isn’t a particularly high standard to beat, given that pretty much all presentation software sucks rocks.  this is a notable exception it quite frankly rocks.

microsoft word – over the years i’ve made my peace with MS word.  under the mac it’s proven to be a more than capable platform for crafting those internal missives.

entourage – quite frankly i regard this as a flaming hunk of shit.  i’ve made my peace with it and perturb it as little as possible with the fear that it will flame out and crash horribly.  the sync function is barely passable.  that it talks to exchange servers is nothing short of a miracle given that it comes from microsoft.  it’s consistently had issues with parsing timezone information and the management of meeting invites and lack of a plug-in architecture has me consistently wondering if they’ve taken explicit pains to make this a royal pain in the ass to use.  treat with care it will likely fsck you over.  i refuse to put real email into this given the proprietary database backend and repeated exposure to horror stories involving corrupted databased.  if i can’t edit my email with a text editor something’s gone horribly wrong.

in no particular order – here are some notes on the use of OSX for my UNIX dweeb friends who are making the jump.

essential tools / things to get:

go and get the developer toolkit (aka Xcode) – this will get you a working compiler and a kick ass development environment.  unfortunately, i haven’t had a lot of time to monkey with Xcode for its primary purpose of developing mac apps.  you should be able to install this off of the optional software installation on the OS distribution disk.  alternatively you can get this from the apple developers web site. (http://developer.apple.com/mac/ – note you might have to create an account on this site to get the latest tools and they are a big download.  get it when you’re someplace where you have a solid and fast connection.)

macports – run, don’t walk, to get this one.  i’ve messed with fink, i find this to be more complete and  more often than not, it just works.  to make life easier, you should periodically update your ports collection.  this is trivially accomplished via a periodic sudo port selfupdate.  note, you’ll need to have a working Xcode installation to get this appropriately installed since, like the FreeBSD version of ports, it will build this stuff from source and resolve dependencies in the process.  it’s not a binary build system like fink, et al.

editors

emacs / vim – without taking a religious perspective on this topic it’s good to know that there are first rate implementations of both on this platform.  i install both and toggle between the two of them as it makes sense.  personally, i’ve toyed with some very useful 3rd party editors as well. i’ll include some additional notes on these as well.

• emacs – i use this one, there are folks that swear by aquaemacs, but i can’t make the keybindings happy enough for my taste.

• vim – macvim – need i say more?  i used this version for a long time prior to finding an emacs that made me happy on the mac.  the new version of macvim is sexy as hell and has tabs and shit.
• TextMate – this one seems to have all of the web 2.0 folks in a twist.  i find it to be a remarkably good editor with emacs-like keybindings that work for most things. (meta-b/f don’t work as expected so that’s a frustration for me, personally.)
• SubEthaEdit / Coda – i mention these in the same breath.  SubEthaEdit is a collaborative text editor which allows folks to simultaneously edit a document, this editor is embedded within the coda web development package.

OSX oddities

su / root account – if you’re used to just su’ing to root, then you’re going to be surprised by the fact that root isn’t enabled by default.  instead you use sudo for pretty much everything.  if you’re used to running things as root and you feel like doing this all over the place you’re welcome to enable root (done by following these directions), over the past couple of machines i’ve had, i haven’t enabled root.

cron – OSX doesn’t run the crond like you’ve seen on other platforms instead there’s launchd.  which assumes the responsibilities of a whole host of classic UNIX processes (notably, init and crond).  if you use crontab -e a la the classic UNIX interface to crond, then all of the launchd stuff is handled in the background for you. if you expect to just copy over your crontab files from /var/spool/cron then you’re in for something of an awakening.  to make all of this just work, use crontab, it will make sure that launchd is updated appropriately.

this is definitely one of the more interesting slide decks i’ve run across in the past few months.  it’s been making the rounds as of late.  there are some refreshingly capitalist notions of how attract strong employees and to drive business direction.  however, i find their assertions re: scale of an organization interesting.  last i checked netflix was a relatively small company with ~400-500 employees.  a good chunk of their staff i suspect is associated with the packaging and handling of the DVD content and as they move online with more content they’re going to improve the efficiency (in terms of revenue / head).  but i find myself wondering how many of these principles apply to large organizations with lots of business units and departments within business units.

is there a practical limit to how well these principles scale? or do you simply look to subdivide the application of these principles to new and smaller contexts?  as corporations grow, a level of process emerges or you have chaos.  or at least that’s what i’ve been told. i’m quietly reserving judgment.

turning a page in eucalyptus

i recently ran across a number of references to hiram bingham’s, Inca Land, which is available for free from project gutenberg.  this of course prompted the search for an appropriate ebook reader with hooks to project gutenberg.  behold eucalyptus, which will download books from project gutenberg on the fly and give you a killer interface for viewing the contents of the book.  insane attention to detail is visible everywhere.

the text is rendered in very high quality fonts, the animation is tight and the search function is spot on.  my only nit, is the lack of graphics for books which do have photos.

http://eucalyptusapp.com/ – definitely worth the $9.99 that they’re asking for it.

i should point out that i’ve also purchased classics (http://www.classicsapp.com/) which is equally stunning visually. however, the library that’s embedded inside classics is anemic.  while they’ve taken great care to display the content beautifully i find myself aching for more content.  i’d give up some of the visual appeal for the content and the portability.  eucalyptus seems to have struck a very nice balance here.

while all these two apps are capable reading platforms, i do find them lacking a few features which i really irritate me.  specifically these:

• the ability to annotate or make notes. now, i know that there are all sorts of additional considerations associated with this and there’s a corresponding need to provide a means to extract those notes into a different application, provide sexy input overlay, etc.  but i’m a margin writer or a highlighter.  if i like a book i like to make it mine.  while this is a general nit with ebooks, i would love to find a reasonably decent digital proxy.  failing this, i would like …
• the ability to copy a selected region of text and use the paste function to bring that content into another application for sharing or notes.  seems like a pretty duh item for me, particularly given that the content is all without copyright encumbrance.

these are hardly damning criticisms of these apps, in fact they’re more reflective of my desire to have a host of reading functionality in my pocket which to date i haven’t been able to find.  these apps represent the greatest non-kindle based means of portable reading that i’ve personally poked at and i find my curiosity piqued and a couple of things lacking.