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Technorati Tags: mupromo bundle
[ Continue reading "New MacUpdate Promo Bundle" ]The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) has a decent overview of the options for viewing man pages — those pesky reference manuals to UNIX commands — on something a dash bit nicer than the command-line interface (cli) that I've been using for the last few years. vi is nice but it lacks something. Perhaps the word is usability.
The developers with whom I've worked at Fermilab and U of Chicago would disagree, I'm sure.
Great time to test out which man reader would be best for my needs.
I'm trying out MarsEdit from Red Sweater Software. It's an offline blogging tool for Mac OS X. (I'm tired of losing posts when my Firefox decides to freeze up.)
MacUpdate's Promo site had its massive second bundle, and it got me both buying and looking at different Mac apps. There is a good deal of decent shareware for Mac. I suppose that this is also true of Windows. But I really had moved to Linux, and the Linux community really isn't interested in supporting shareware. They like freeware, which is problematical since no one has an interest in creating something for a market, only for themselves.
I have to admit, MarsEdit is already wining my heart and mind. It lets me create links easier than my MT interface in Firefox. In fact, the MT GUI in FF is more or less broken. I wonder why I have put up with it for this long. Maybe I should upgrade over the holiday — not that I have any time off.
(On a related note: I always worry about giving value for the money paid. I've stopped worrying about that: I have to get some consulting for a project I'm currently on, and I'll burn through my monthly rate in less than three days with them. Actually, less than two.)
It's that time of year again, when our thoughts turn to upgrades or porting. I'm upgrading an old eMac I picked for Lisa to Tiger, and then to iLIfe '06, since '08 is a step backwards. Hopefully this will keep her moving for the next few months.
It's odd that we've become a Mac-centric household. I'm not crazy about working on the Apple Monolith (frankly, Wintel is much, much more open) but I grew really tired of trying to keep up with Windows. Which is why we became a Linux Desktop-centric household a couple of years ago.
The problem with Linux on the desktop — well, one of many complaints — is the wretched support for wireless. Yes, I know all about the problems of the chips in the cards. I even went out and bought a new Belkin G PC-card because they supposedly worked well, and it did. I'm not upset about having to purchase particular hardware. The Mac has the same problem. What bothered me was the amount of "Oh, wait, let me walk you through doing that" that I had to do whenever she wanted to do the simplest things. Perhaps the problem was that we had the wrong distribution. (Mepis was my third.) Perhaps my wife needed to learn more about the underlying systems of her computer. Perhaps I shouldn't have installed Mepis onto a c. 2000 laptop from Dell.
For a variety of reasons, my experience with Unix remote computing has been entirely shell based. That is, I use the command-line to connect to the remote computer, and then do everything that I need to do on the command line. I know, I know: "1972 called and they want their command line back." It's just that most of the work I do disallows any complex connections.
I've been using X11 on the Mac since I got OS X, but only for local applications. (Frankly, I avoid using them because I just prefer the Mac interface designs.) Recently I was assigned to create a bunch of Mac user documentation for the scientific groups I'm working for. X11 came up and I discovered, much to my surprise, that I could have been using a GUI to interface with these servers over here.
Plus, I could have been running weird Linux apps over on one of the other servers. X11 is just the windowing environment: the application would still be running on the remote machine but would be displayed on my Mac. Because we have some of the fattest pipes in the entire world, there's no real delay.
This would have helped me out when I had to find a UML application recently. i ended up using the Java-based solutions.
What was I thinking?
My server got hacked by a known method through FrontPage extensions. I've been a *nix user for some time, and started hosting here off of Linux because Catalog.com was running Solaris, which I rather like. (I'm pretty sure that I'm now running on RedHat Enterprise Linux.) I don't use Microsoft at home, and even my old Win2K box is unaccessible any longer, since I have apparently forgotten even the administrative passwords. Frankly, there's nothing there that is worth getting back.
So it is pretty frustrating to have been hacked through FrontPage extensions.