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Tuesday - June 05, 2007Apple Updates MacBook ProIt looks like the rumors were true: Apple Updates MacBook Pro
From Apple's website: CUPERTINO, California—June 5, 2007—Apple® today updated its MacBook® Pro line of notebooks with the latest Intel Core 2 Duo processors, memory up to 4GB, and high-speed graphics in a stunning, lightweight, aluminum enclosure that is just one-inch thin. The new MacBook Pro is available in 15-inch models with a new mercury-free, power-efficient LED-backlit display and a 17-inch model with an optional high-resolution display. All models include a built-in iSight® video camera for video conferencing on-the-go, Apple’s MagSafe® Power Adapter that safely disconnects when under strain, and built-in 802.11n wireless networking for up to five times the performance and twice the range of 802.11g. Posted at 08:28 PM Read More Thursday - July 06, 2006First Steps with iWebI purchased iLife '06
last month, and have been using the iPhoto
component of it since it then. I've been pretty satisfied with iPhoto 6.05, but
I wish there was a special upgrade price for those who already have the prior
version of this photo-handling software. It would also be nice if you could
purchase the individual applications, comprising iLife, separately. In
addition to iPhoto, iLife '06, includes updated versions of iDVD,
iMovie HD, and GarageBand, as well as a new software application iWeb.
iWeb is designed to make web site creation easy, even for people who have no
prior experience in web site design. I used it for the first time yesterday to
create a new web site, and I can see how novices would find this software useful
and easy to use. On the other hand, more advanced users will find some annoying
limitations.
With iWeb, you use a graphical user interface (GUI) and select one of several templates to design a web site. No explicit coding (e.g., html, javascript, etc.) is needed. On the other hand, it would be nice if you could add your own html code, using the GUI. I like the way that's supported in iBlog. At some point I may dig into the iWeb templates and further customize my iWeb web site, but for now I just don't have that much time on my hands. At any rate, you an see my iWeb web site by clicking here . Be warned that's a work in progress. Posted at 06:05 AM Read More Wednesday - June 14, 2006MiKTeX for Mac OS XAs noted in a previous posting, one of my
favorite applications on Windows XP is MiKTeX, a very well-designed LaTeX package
manager. With this application, you can easily manage your LaTeX add-on
packages (e.g., sty files). Christian Schenk, the developer of MiKTeX, has made
available the source code of MiKTeX, suitable for UNIX systems. What you get
are command line tools associated with MiKTeX. Let's face it. If you're using
using UNIX (e.g., Mac OS X) or Linux, write LaTeX documents, and know about sty
files, then you are probably pretty comfortable with the UNIX command line.
This morning, I downloaded, built, and installed MiKTeX for UNIX on my Mac OS X
system. It works!
Here's my setup: I use TeXShop as my LaTeX editor, previewer, and general interface to LaTeX. (TeXShop is developed by Richard Koch, Dirk Olmes with contributions by Mitsuhiro Shishikura, Seiji Zenitani, Martin Kerz, Isao Sonobe, and others.) I used Gerben Wierda's latest i-Installer to install LaTeX (and supporting packages) according to the instructions at the TeXShop web site. The i-Installer installs an alias /Library/teTeX, which points to /usr/local/teTeX, which is where everything else is installed. As noted at Gerben Wierda's web site, teTeX looks for files in the following order: •
~/Library/texmf
•
/usr/local/teTeX/share/texmf.local
•
/usr/local/teTeX/share/texmf.gwtex
•
/usr/local/teTeX/share/texmf.tetex
•
/usr/local/teTeX/share/texmf
This is important to know before installing MiKTeX, because it can help you decide where to have MiKTeX install additional packages. By default it will install packages in /usr/local/teTeX/share/texmf.local. In most cases, this is a convenient location, because it will be available to everyone on the system, and if you later reinstall LaTeX with the i-Installer, /usr/local/teTeX/share/texmf.local, will not overwritten so that you shouldn't lose any packages installed with MiKTeX. Before building MiKTeX from source, you'll need to have the Xcode development tools (GCC) which comes bundled with Mac OS X. These are on the Mac OS X installation DVD, but you can download the latest version from http://developer.apple.com/ (you may need to register, but registration is free.) I had Xcode 2.3 installed on my system when I built MiKTeX. From this point the installation of MikTeX is quite easy. • Download the source from http://www.miktex.org/unx/
• Copy the downloaded tarball (e.g.,
miktex-tools-2.5.2199-beta-4.tar.gz)
into a temporary working directory, for example,
~/tmp
• Unpack the tarball with the
command tar zxvf
miktex-tools-2.5.2199-beta-4.tar.gz
• Change to the newly created
miktex-tools-2.5.2199-beta-4
directory with the command
cd miktex-tools-2.5.2199-beta-4
(You should read
the read
the INSTALL and README files before proceeding any further.)
• Configure your build/installation:
./configure
• Build MiKTeX:
make
• Install MiKTeX (in
/usr/local)
with the command sudo make
install
• Update the database:
sudo mpm --update-db
• Make sure that your LaTeX installation
recognizes the newly installed files:
sudo texhash
• Use the MiKTeX configuration utility to
create the file name database files:
initexmf -u
You actually get three utilities with MiKTeX: • mpm.
The package manager. With mpm you can install, uninstall, update, list, etc.
Issue the command mpm
--help for more details.
• initexmf.
The MiKTeX configuration utility.
• mthelp.
The help utility used to display package
documentation.
I found that newly mpm-installed sty files were not
recognized until I issued the sudo
texhash command.
It's important to note that the above steps worked
for me. Please keep in mind that I have not tested this thoroughly, I am quite
new to MiKTeX, and cannot be held responsible if you apply the above steps and
mess up your system. I'm merely sharing my (rather limited) experience with
MiKTeX on Mac OS X Tiger. I would guess that the best places to seek support or
help with MiKTeX are on the MiKTeX forums and the MiKTeX support
pages.
Finally, note the the set of instructions presented
here may not work without modification in the future. For example, changes to
the LaTeX installation (especially if you install LaTeX with TeX Live or
MacTeX)
may slight modifications to the instructions presented in this posting.
Posted at 10:24 AM Read More Sunday - June 11, 2006Windows XP: First StepsMy university recently provided all full-time
faculty members with HP laptops running Windows XP. I received mine a couple of
weeks ago, and began acclimating myself to Windows. Prior to receiving the
laptop, my experience with Windows was limited to using MATLAB and an archaic
web-browser named Internet Explorer. So after a couple of weeks of using
Windows XP, I'd have to say that it seems quite inferior to Mac OS X Tiger,
Linux, and Solaris. On the other hand, I've discovered a few free applications
that don't bring Windows XP up to par with Mac OS X or other UNIX-type systems,
but they help make this quirky little operating system useful and "reasonably"
friendly to UNIX geeks.
For some screenshots, just click the "read more" link below. Posted at 06:24 PM Read More Friday - April 28, 2006A UNIX User's Guide to Mac OS X - Providence Section of the IEEE PresentationBrian Jepson and I put together a presentation
for the Providence Section of the IEEE. I enjoyed
meeting and presenting the talk to those folks yesterday evening. The slides
are available here.
Posted at 07:25 AM Read More Thursday - April 06, 2006Apple's Newest Switch CampaignI think most people would agree that Apple's
switch
campaign to entice Windows users to "switch" to the Mac platform has
been largely unsuccessful. I don't have the latest figures for market share of
Mac systems, but it's probably still around 3-4%. Apple recently switched to
Intel processors for its Macintosh computers. But when you boot up an
Intel-based Mac into Mac OS X, you have no doubt that you're using a Mac. My
guess is that the Intel switch is probably not substantially increasing market
share. So what's next? Entice Windows users with the ability to run Windows on
the Mac (Intel) hardware. I like the idea of being able to run more than one
OS on a computer. But Mac OS X is my favorite OS. Oddly enough, Apple's
announcement that Intel-based Macs have the ability to run Windows came on the
heels of the announcement that key Mac OS X developer Avie Tevania is leaving
Apple. In fact, his last day at Apple was less than a week ago. At any rate,
this latest move by Apple adds capability to the Mac, and that makes it a more
attractive computing platform. My question is where is this
going?
I would guess that if having the ability to run Windows on Macs increases market share of Macs, most new "Mac" users will run Windows on Macs. Suppose that at some point, the Mac market share increases to 20%. But if this happens, only a relatively small percentage of the total Mac user community will be running Mac OS X. If at some point in the future, most Mac users run Windows, why would Apple continue to develop Mac OS X? Are we witnessing Apple's switch to Windows? You can download a free copy of the first public beta release of bootcamp, which enables Intel-based Macs to run Windows. Posted at 06:11 AM Read More Tuesday - March 07, 2006Apple Announces date for WWDC 2006Apple has announced that its annual World Wide Developer Conference
(WWDC) will be held August 7-11, 2006. Since the WWDC has been held
in June in recent years, I'm sure the Internet will be abuzz with speculation on
why this year's WWDC will be held so late.
I'm not sure if I'll be able to attend the August WWDC 2006 conference in San Francisco, CA, but I will probably attend at least some of the July SIAM annual meeting in Boston, MA. We'll see... Posted at 01:40 PM Read More Monday - September 19, 2005Google Talk with iChat SSL Bug FixedIt appears that the bug that prevented Google
Talk from being used with iChat has been fixed.
Posted at 07:11 PM Read More Friday - September 09, 2005New Google Talk and iChat SSL Error - 9843I'm not sure what has changed recently, but since
yesterday I haven't been able to use Google Talk with iChat. An attempt to
connect to the Google Talk server with iChat fails and opens the following error
message
window.
 Here's what I got in the console window: 2005-09-09 08:28:04.658 iChatAgent[599] WARNING: SocketStream: CFStream error 3/-9843 occurred on input stream 2005-09-09 08:28:04.658 iChatAgent[599] WARNING: XMLStream: CFStream error 3/-9843 occurred on input 2005-09-09 08:28:04.676 iChatAgent[599] WARNING: JConnection: Error: An unexpected SSL error occured. [-9843], type=2, code=-9843 I got the same result on three computers, with at least two different Google talk accounts. Moreover, Adium and Coccinella had no trouble connecting. I was able to successfully use iChat with other Jabber servers, for example, jabber.org.uk. The only thing that I recall doing on the Macs before iChat became incompatible with Google Talk was I installed the Quicktime and iTunes updates. All three Macs that I used to check iChat with Google Talk had these updates. I suspect these are coincidental, but it'd be good to have someone confirm that the problem exists without the updates. Anyone else out there have this trouble with iChat? UPDATE[09/11/2005622am]: I posted about this on my O'Reilly weblog and got some useful feedback. The problem appears to be unrelated to the various Apple updates. I didn't think they were, but I thought it was worth seeking some feedback to confirm that. Anyway, as one of the people who provided feedback on that weblog pointed out, Google is aware of the problem and has promised a fix: http://www.google.com/support/talk/bin/answer.py?answer=24076 Posted at 08:40 AM Read More Sunday - September 04, 2005Coccinella and Google TalkAs you may already know, Google recently
announced their Google Talk Jabber-based instant messaging
service. Although I think Gtalk would be a better name, I do like the fact that
their instant messaging service is Jabber-based. Unlike AIM, in which your
screenname and password are transmitted in plain text across the network, Google
Talk supports secure SSL connections. Although it is currently not supported by
Google Talk, it's possible that transports to other IM services may be provided
in the future. The public Jabber server jabber.org.uk, for example, supports
transports to Yahoo! and MSN. At any rate, Google also released a Google Talk
client for Windows, and provides a list
of thrid-party clients capable of using the Google Talk service.
Google even provides tutorials on how to use these third-party clients with
their IM service. One client that they missed, however, is the open source,
cross-platform, and Jabber-based chat client Coccinella, now at version 0.95.9. One of
Coccinella's distinguishing features is its whiteboard support and plug-in
architecture. The whiteboard feature makes it especially interesting to me as I
look for ways to expand my use of IM in teaching.
It took more a little more time than I care to admit to configure Coccinella on Mac OS X to use Google Talk. After playing with some of the settings, I hit on the right combination. Subsequently, I found pretty clear instructions on how to set up Coccinella for Google Talk on the Coccinella web site. At any rate, to see how to do it on Mac OS X, read more: Posted at 12:38 PM Read More Friday - August 19, 2005jsMath Update 2.0b fixes issue with Safari.The recent 2.0b update to Davide
Cervone's jsMath has fixed an issue with Safari. Prior to
this update, the page here did not display properly. It sure looks
pretty in Safari now. Thanks, Davide!
Posted at 01:44 PM Read More Friday - August 05, 2005Apple's New Mighty Mouse: Modern Mouse with a "Classic" Mode?Earlier this week, Apple announced Mighty
Mouse, a new mouse possessing 4-button functionality. As you read
this posting, please bare in mind that my remarks are on the design philosophy
of Might Mouse and not a review. It's also worth mentioning that I approach the
design philosophy primarily from the point of view of a Unix guy, who took his
three-button mouse with him when he switched to the Mac. I have not tried Might
Mouse. If it will be bundled with my next Mac purchase, then I'll write about
my experience with it.
At any rate, the introduction of Mighty Mouse mouse breaks a two-decade tradition (or perhaps stubbornness) of producing only one-button mice. You may have noticed my peculiar wording, "possessing 4-button functionality." That's because, as Apple puts it, "you get the programability of a four-button mouse in a single-button design." Apple also claims that, although others have created multi-button mice with scroll wheels, "nobody made a mouse as easy to use as your Mac. Until now." One of Mighty Mouse's new features is the scroll ball, offering 360-degree scrolling capability. That does sound nice. The Might Mouse is also supposed to work on Windows PCs. Another nice feature. On the other hand, Apple seems to be reluctant to let go of the one-button design. Apple, I love ya. Mac OS X, iPod, and so many other things you do are absolutely breathtaking! But you need to get over your fixation on the one-button design. Maybe this mouse is really great, but the idea that four-button functionality is best achieved by a one-button design seems counter-intuitive . On the other hand, consider the source of this opinion. (That's me.) In spite of all the musical sounds available for cell phones nowadays, my cell phone alerts me to an incoming call by ringing. Just like an old fashioned phone. If I want to hear music, I'll reach for my iPod. Yes, I know that someday my phone may double as an MP3 player, but it will still use a ringing sound to let me know there's a call coming in. So, my first reaction is that a four-button mouse should have four-buttons. To be really fair to Apple on this one, however, I should point out that Might Mouse is not designed only to function as a four-button mouse, but rather as either a multi-button mouse or as a one button mouse, depending on how you configure it in a preference panel. It's my understanding that the one-button mode is the default behavior. Having the one-button behavior as the default reminds me of the early days of Apple's Mac OS X when Macs shipped with both Mac OS X and Mac OS 9, but Mac OS 9 was the default. I think this makes sense for most traditional Mac users. On the other hand, if you're already a multi-button mouse user, then the idea of a mouse that can be configured as either a one-button or a multi-button mouse will probably seem a bit odd. Today's Macs don't boot into Mac OS 9, but a Mac OS 9 environment known as Classic can be run within Mac OS X. One-button mode is to Mighty Mouse what Classic is to Mac OS X. My guess is that the both the one-button mode on Apple Mice and Classic will eventually disappear. Posted at 01:52 PM Read More Wednesday - July 13, 2005Bug in Mac OS X Tiger Address Book Syncing with .Mac Continues in 10.4.2Apple's Mac OS X 10.4.2 update to Mac OS X, released
yesterday, fixed a large number of bugs in Mac OS X Tiger, but the Address Book
Syncing bug that I reported on earlier here was not among the many bugs fixed in this
Mac OS X Tiger release. To summarize the problem, contact URL's are lost when
syncing Contacts to .Mac (and subsequently to other Macs). Apple has known about
this problem for several months; their technical note
301230,
advising .Mac subscribers to "put URLs in the Notes field for Address Book
syncing," is dated March 30, 2005. Don't get me wrong. I think Tiger is an
awesome OS, and I'm a happy .Mac subscriber, but I hope Apple will fix this in
the next update to Tiger.
Posted at 08:42 AM Read More Saturday - July 02, 2005Bug in Mac OS X Tiger Address Book Syncing with .MacOne of the selling points of a .Mac subscription is
the ability to sync your iCal Calendars, Safari Bookmarks,
Address Book Contacts, Keychains, Mail Accounts, and Mail Rules, Signatures, and
Smart Mailboxes across several Macs. Although syncing was available in earlier
versions of Mac OS X, a few syncing features were introduced in Tiger. For
example, keychains, and mail-related items are new. The trouble is that
syncing in Mac OS X 10.4.1 (I didn't check 10.4) is a bit buggy, and if you're
not careful, you may wind up losing data. For example, if you sync your
Address Book contacts from a Mac (say Mac A) to .Mac, the
URL
fields won't be synced. They'll remain on Mac A, but won't be transferred to
your .Mac Address Book. If you subsequently sync your Address Book contacts
from .Mac to another Mac (say Mac B), then the original URLs won't wind up in
your Address Book on Mac B. It gets even worse. Suppose you've synced your
Address Book to .Mac and subsequently reset sync data on Mac A. If you then
sync your Address Book contacts to transfer data from .Mac back to Mac A, you'll
lose all your contact URLs. (As if you needed it, that's another reason to
backup your data, frequently.)
As noted in the Apple Support Document 301230, you can include URLs in the Notes field in Address Book, and these will be synced successfully. Unfortunately, this is not an acceptable workaround. If you have many contacts with occupied URL fields, it's a big hassle to enter each of these into the Notes fields. Moreover, if a URL is not present in a contact's URL field, it won't show up in your Safari (or Omniweb) Address Book Bookmarks. The Apple Document 301230 referenced above is dated March 30, 2005. I hope this bug doesn't carry over into Mac OS X 10.4.2. I'll post an update on this problem after Mac OS X 10.4.2 is released. UPDATE: This bug was not fixed in 10.4.2. Posted at 10:34 PM Read More Monday - June 06, 2005Apple with Intel InsideAbout two years ago, computer guru Rush Limbaugh
said that "The G5 is going to go to 64-bits, and it's going to change
everything." The first part of his statement was a simple matter of fact, while
the second part was a prediction. Just two years later, one can argue that
Rush's prediction has, in an odd way, come to pass. Beginning next year, Apple
Macintosh computers will have Intel inside. Why? Because of IBM's priorities
and failure to put out satisfactory G5s, both 3+ GHz and those that could be put
into a laptop. I don't think that Apple had much choice.
It will be interesting to see how the Apple-Intel deal affects sales of Macs over the next year. Posted at 03:02 PM Read More Sunday - June 05, 2005Is Marklar Poised to Conquer the PC Market?Rumors of Apple saying "...later, dude" to IBM and switching to
Intel have
surfaced over the years, but this time such reports come not only from those
wild and crazy Marklars running the popular rumor mill sites
(e.g., http://www.macosxrumors.com, and http://www.macosrumors.com/),
but also from fairly mainstream media like CNet and the Wall Street Journal. If it's
true, I'll be interested in how Steve Jobs spins it. I guess we'll see
tomorrow. In the meantime, you can read more about Marklars here and here. And finally, listen to Kyle Broflovski explain this whole Marklar thing
here.
Posted at 08:28 AM Read More Thursday - June 02, 2005jsMath Update (1.8) Fixes Issue with Omniweb 5.1.1Davide Cervone's jsMath has been updated to version 1.8. The
issue with Omniweb 5.1.1 beta 1, previously reported here, has been fixed in the new release of
jsMath..
Posted at 09:40 PM Read More Tuesday - May 24, 2005Support for jsMath in some of Tiger's Web BrowsersjsMath provides for rendering of TeX-coded
mathematical equations in HTML without using image files. To get the best
rendering of pages that employ jsMath, you should install the TeX-fonts
from
TeX-fonts.zip.
On Mac OS X, download and unzip the TeX-fonts.zip file on your Desktop to create
a folder named TeX-fonts on your Desktop. Then select all .ttf files in this
folder and drag them to your
Library/Fonts
folder. (For instructions on installing these fonts on other operating systems
see http://www.math.union.edu/~dpvc/jsMath/download/fonts.html.)
To see some examples of web pages that use jsMath, check out http://www.math.union.edu/~dpvc/jsMath/examples/welcome.html. Using one of the web browsers that support jsMath, for example, Safari, you can see a page from Struik's Lectures on Classical Differential Geometry. On the other hand, if you try to view the Henrici Applied Complex Analysis example, Safari 2.0 will not display the equations. Firefox 1.04 will have no problem rendering the mathematical equations on this page. To see some examples, including screenshots, click the "read more" link. [Update 8/19/2005: The issue with Safari has been fixed in version 2.0b.] Posted at 04:34 PM Read More Wednesday - May 18, 2005The 10.4.1 Update Brings Tiger Out of the Beta StageI updated my Tiger system
to 10.4.1 a couple of days ago, and although I can't guarantee anyone that
they'll have no problems with it, I can say that I've haven't encountered any
problems. In this release, Apple fixed several bugs that were present in
their initial Tiger release (10.4), which occasionally felt more like a
beta-level software rather than a final product. The marketing policy of
pushing new software out the door with the number and type of bugs that would
have been deemed unacceptable just a few years ago seems to be quite common
nowadays. At any rate, the quality of 10.4.1 rev seems quite excellent. Aside
from the issue of whether the initial Tiger release was good enough to be
unleashed on the public, I really like Tiger and think it's a major improvement
over Panther.
If you're doing scientific computing, especially on G5 hardware that can fully take advantage of Tiger's new features, Tiger is a real must-have update. Other users will be able to take advantage of Tiger's new features too. There are, however, some caveats. For example, make sure that your critical third-party apps run on Tiger. My important third-party apps including MATLAB, LaTeX (along with TeXShop and iTeXMac), R, MS Office 2004, and Photoshop (CS) all run well under Tiger. Both Fink and DarwinPorts work just fine, but many of their packages don't seem to build under Tiger just yet. For example, gnuplot doesn't build under DarwinPorts, and it seems absent altogether from Fink's list of packages. Posted at 06:56 AM Read More Thursday - May 12, 2005iChat to Yahoo Through JabberOne of the improvements in iChat
AV 3.0 (shipped with Tiger) over iChat AV 2.0 (shipped with Panther)
is its support for Jabber, which allows you to indirectly communicate with other
IM services like MSN and Yahoo. There's a nice tutorial on how to get your iChat
to talk to MSN at All Forces. I normally use Adium or the Yahoo IM client for Mac OS X, but I wanted to
see how this would work using iChat, which I normally use for AIM. I followed the
instructions on the All Forces site to set up my iChat to communicate with
Yahoo. The trick is to locate a public Jabber server that supports Yahoo.
Although there are plenty to choose from here, not
all public Jabber servers that support Yahoo work well with iChat. Several
allowed me to send messages to Yahoo from iChat, but not to iChat from Yahoo. I
was about ready to give up---it's not really that important to me---until I
tried jabber.org.uk. Now I can use iChat for both AIM and Yahoo instant
messaging. So what's the big deal, since at least two other free apps, Adium and Fire, do the same thing very well? I guess
iChat has better integration with other Mac OS X apps. For example, when you're
logged into both AIM and Jabber-->Yahoo in iChat, the little green dot
appears next to emails from online buddies in Mail.app. This has always worked with AIM and
.Mac IM users, but now thanks to Jabber support in iChat, it also works with
Yahoo buddies.
Posted at 03:52 PM Read More |