Software (Windows/Mac)

A software which has both a Windows and a Mac version:

• Audio recorder (voice recorder). Audacity.
  

ThinkPad T40-T43 maintenance

A few tips on thinkpad maintenance (T-series):

• Replacing key in keyboard, see here.
  

I am a doctor (well, sort of).

Yes, yes, the senate of Tel Aviv University just ratified my PhD in Computer Science!

Mac Maintenance and tweaks

Tricks and tips on how to clean/tweak mac:

• Remove unwanted services from menue: Service Scrubber or look in "/System/Library/Services" and "~/Library/Services".
• Remove unwanted apps from contextual menu (right click, also from More! menu): Go to "~Library/Contextual Menu Items" or "/System/Library/Contextual Menu Items" and put unwanted plugins in a subdirectory (which will not be shown). See also here and a video.
• Useful context menus can be found here. (also has a shortcut in the dmg to restart Finder - a nifty util :))
• Copy/Change icons: go get info and copy/paste to the icon on the upper left corner. See here.
• FTP client for MAC: cyberduck.
• Text editor: TextWrangler.
• Delete locked files in Trash: Use TrashIt! or Onyx.
  

PowerPoint on Mac

Power point on mac does not have custom motion paths.
(Either in Office 2004 or Office 2008).
Builds (read animation) in Keynote'08 do not get exported to ppt.
I tired to look into NeoOffice - but it looks like a very poor imitation of PowerPoint - was not able to figure out how to draw the path of the object.

OCaml IDE

Looking for an IDE for OCaml on Mac.

(Obviously, I was not the first, see, e.g., here).

• Emacs (Aquaemacs)
• Download Tuareg
• Config Aquaemacs (see)
1. place both tuareg.el and camldebug.el somewhere in
   

   ~/Library/Preferences/Aquamacs Emacs/

2. Add to ~/Library/Preferences/Aquamacs Emacs/Preferences.el (from append-tuareg.el): 
   (setq auto-mode-alist (cons '("\\.ml\\w?" . tuareg-mode) auto-mode-alist))
   (autoload 'tuareg-mode "tuareg" "Major mode for editing Caml code" t)
   (autoload 'camldebug "camldebug" "Run the Caml debugger" t)

3. Append custom-tuaerg.el at the end of (the modified)
   ~/Library/Preferences/Aquamacs Emacs/Preferences.el
   

• Camelia (for students going from scheme to ocaml)
• Eclispe (a few plugins)

Font Smoothing Moaning

Font smoothing (aka anti-aliasing) is supposed to make fonts look nicer.

It does.

However, Apple and Microsoft differ in the way they do it.

Microsoft optimizes visibility on screen.

Apple optimizes similarity of on-screen font and printed font.

Thus, with a mac you get a better WYSIWYG experience, with the price of more blurry fonts.

I prefer to read on screen for short-medium documents, and print out long ones (unless I just need to browse them). I found that ever since I started working with a Mac (which I like more and more), I print more often because the on-screen font looks too blurry and gives me an headache. Thus, I prefer, in this case, Microsoft approach. I wish that both option would be available. I feel bad that I became "less green" ever since I started working with a mac.

Thus, I call to apple:

Reduce the blurriness: Give us an option to optimize on-screen visibility, and help save trees!

(I will try to ue Vista fonts on mac. Maybe it will help).

Directional Speaker Cables

Can a speaker cable has a direction?

QED representative answered:

I've just found this:-

Quote-----

From the horses mouth :-

Dear David,
unfortunately our marketing department doesn't like to offend people who
believe in the "burn in" and directionality theory of speaker cables. If
you subscribe to these theories, you may choose to arrange the QED Original
cable so that the writing points from the amplifier, towards the the
speaker.

If, like me, you don't believe a piece of copper can behave like a diode,
you may safely ignore the advice!
Sorry to have worried you for the sake of political correctness,
Yours sincerely
XXXXXX XXXXXXX
xxxx@qed.co.uk
QED AUDIO PRODUCTS LTD,
(ARMOUR HOME ELECTRONICS)
Unit B3
Kinsgswey Business Park,
Forsyth Road
WOKING,
Surrey UK
GU21 5SA
www.qed.co.uk
Tel: +44 (0)1483 747474
Fax: +44 (0)1483 545600

--- Quote

However, monster cable faq says:

Quote ---

Will I notice a difference if I hook up my cables in the wrong direction?
You probably will not, but if you think that you are experiencing noise problems, check that they are. Cables are directional for shielding purposes only. Should you not see these arrows, remember that the signal flow should go in the same direction of the print on the cable jacket, reading left to right away from the source (source to destination)

--- Quote

So go figures.

[Disclosures: The above entries come from a discussion in an (unreachable) discussion in AVForum which was cached in google.

SqueezeCenter conflicts with CheckPoint's Secure Client

I tried to run SqueezeCenter on my macbook.

It did not start.

Apparently, there is a known problem with apple security updates etc.

I followed the suggested solution, i.e., installed OnyX, and now it did not work.

I tried the CPAN trick I found here, did not work either.

Finally, I looked into /etc/services looking for usages of port 9000 (the port that SqueezeCenter listens to).

I found that I had a service called cslistener listening to this port.

After some googling, I discovered that it is the secure client of checkpoint.

I stopped the secure client; started SqueezeCenter, and all worked perfectly ...

Kile: LaTeX Frontend for Mac

I have been looking for a nice LaTeX editor/frontend on Mac for a long time.

I was used to using WinEDT on Windows,  and  I was not happy with the "standard" tools used for writing LaTeX documents in Mac. |(Namely, TEXShop, Emacs, TexMaker,  TextMate, etc.).  Personally, I did not think that these tool compared as LaTeX frontends to WinEDT. (They might be great editors, but as LaTeX frontends, they felt a bit clumsy compared to WinEDT).

Then I found Kile. 

Kile is a great frontend for LaTeX on KDE.

It is ported to Mac. (I used the Fink port.)

Installation was not painless.

(It is a good idea to install/update to the latest version of  X11 as a first step. This can prevent a bug in the X11 version supplied by apple that breaks the compilation.)

But it is worth it!

A few tricks I used to make Kile happy:

- Linked kdvi to xdvi

- Linked acroread to kpdf

The main problem of Kile, as pointed out to me by Eran Yahav, is that it does not have an online spell checker. However, this problem is due to be fixed in KDE 4.0. 

 

Blogging - again

After creating my blog, I just left it unused.

Now I will try to use it more faithfully.

I started by changing the template ... :) 

Note that this is exactly 1 year and 1 day since I created the blog.

Happy Birthday blog!