Wow, two services in one week! The atrocious "beta" Google Groups just became the only interface, despite everyone I know inside and outside of Google hating it...
I don't have any scientific explanations, but my hands hurt after about half an hour of typing on a crappy keyboard. I can type on a Model M (or the split M15 I have at work) for hours without a problem. This has seemed totally counter-intuitive to me, and I went through many ergonomic keyboards, including the Kinesis ones and an expensive low-force DataHand keyboard as recommended by my hand surgeon, before I discovered that the Model Ms work the best for me. Among the quieter designs that I like and can use are the older, beige/purple SGI keyboards (earlier were proprietary, later were PS/2) from around the time of the 4D/Indigo/Indy, and the Apple Extended/Extended II keyboards.
Well, actually, it seems to be the _old_ 23" Apple Cinema Display, connection-wise (it may use the same LCD panel as the newer one, or not; the two have different specifications). The power/data cable that connects the "media station" to the display is nothing else but the Apple Display Connector - you can see it at the top of the pictures; it looks like a DVI-I connector with six additional pins: two for power (DVI already provides power, just not enough), three for USB, and another (not sure whether Apple's "LED" or "Soft Power" = DVI's "Hot Plug Detect"). Apple's latest displays went back to using DVI directly, with separate USB/FireWire connections.
Pretty cool that LG is reusing the stuff they developed for Apple, though.
Such as the fi-4120c is what I'd recommend. You might have to stretch your budget a bit. The cheap HP sheet feeders are very unreliable; we went through two HP 5550c's enduring constant paper jams before switching to a better (Fujitsu) scanner.
Unfortunately you don't have much use for something like Acrobat Capture because you have handwritten notes to deal with. To process the files, SANE and/or TWAIN interfaces are reasonably easy to write code for. The cool thing about SANE is that you can run the saned daemon on any Mac or Linux box, and with a couple of lines of config file changes, it's instantly available over the network from any Mac, Windows, or Unix box (there are TWAIN bridges for Mac/Windows so it even shows up in Photoshop and so forth); there are also standalone GUI clients like XSane.
I wrote a document management system in Python/wxWidgets (for Windows) in about a month part-time, and it works very well. Either on Mac or Windows, PDF makes sense because of the ubiquity of the viewers, even if you lose a bit in compression compared to more optimized formats such as DjVu. On Windows you can easily embed the Acrobat ActiveX control; on Mac OS X you have native PDF support, Panther's Preview kicks ass, and there are several open-source PDF browsing components such as the ones out of TeXShop or Glen Low's Graphviz port you can embed in your own app.
Given a choice I would probably pick the Mac to do this project, because of the wonderful Quartz/CoreGraphics Python bindings. You can just draw right to PDF, and place PDF files as if they were images; for example, here's a short script to rotate a bunch of PDF files (sorry, Slashdot destroys Python indentation):
#!/usr/bin/python
from CoreGraphics import * import math, sys
for inputPDFPath in sys.argv[1:]: inputProvider = CGDataProviderCreateWithFilename(inputPDFPath) &n bsp; inputPDF = CGPDFDocumentCreateWithProvider(inputProvider) &n bsp; if inputPDF is None: print >> sys.stderr, \ "unable to open '%s': perhaps is not a PDF file?" % inputPDFPath continue outputContext = CGPDFContextCreateWithFilename( inputPDFPath + '-rotated.pdf', None)
You could also use ReportLab, but because a lot of the PDF processing code is written in Python it's somewhat slower and memory-hogging for high-volume use. (I used ReportLab on Windows for the above project, and use CoreGraphics Python bindings for my research, so I do know what I'm talking about mostly:)
Can you get a IIgs to net boot off netatalk yet? We used to have a lab full of IIgs's netbooting off a Mac IIcx AppleShare 2.x server (LocalTalk, baby!) back at my middle school years ago, and it worked incredibly well. So fast, too, when I was used to the speed of GS/OS booting off 800K floppies at home...
I'd pull my IIgs out of the closet if I could get this to work again.
Totally agree. I spent close to $1000 on a DataHand keyboard, which a doctor recommended, and it ended up making my pain worse; now I use the IBM split keyboard (relative of the GoldTouch one) and it works very well for me.
However, given a decent keyboard and good posture, I still have trouble if I don't keep in shape. Not exercising out of work is the #1 contributor to my pain. I just do 30 min/day of exercises at home, that's about the minimum acceptable, though I did martial arts until last year and plan to get back to it in the fall.
I actually tried the Apple Adjustable Keyboard and didn't like it very much. I find the feedback of the IBM clicky keyboard is very useful; I can type almost as well on a flat IBM clicky keyboard.
On the Mac, disable the "DNSPlugin" Network Services Location plugin, in the Extensions folder. This applies only to Mac OS 9.0 through 9.2.2; the 8.5-8.6 version of NSL didn't have DNS update support (it answered SLPv1 broadcasts only, and might have registered with a SLP DA, I don't remember); the OS X version of NSL doesn't have it either.
Also note that this registration does not happen always on the Mac, only if you enable network servers that use NSL (primarily the personal AFP/file sharing and Web sharing services). I've never enabled them, so I've never seen this.
Another thing to do is just set your domain so it's one whose nameservers you control:-)
Can I jump to a location on a scrollbar with the MMB in any version of Windows or MacOS? No.
Actually, yes you can... OS X supports this (it can be the default, too). Since there's no multiple-button mouse it's Option-click for the 'other' action (page up/down or scroll to here) but it's simple enough to bind that to the middle mouse button if you wish.
Can I create bookmark directories in IE without launching a helper-app? No.
OS X actually supports up to 65,535 mouse buttons, not that anyone in their right mind would use that many. I use a MS TrackBall Explorer, which has 5 buttons + wheel, and am able to read them all.
Even the Mac pre-OS X supported multiple mouse buttons natively, though it didn't do anything useful with them more than passing the button number through to applications.
One part of what makes 3DOSX useful are those gigantic Mac OS X icons... you can actually make them out from a distance and they help you to see where you are in the filesystem. Compare this to the Stonehenge of TurboGopher VR and you have a much more usable system.
The Biology WorkBench moved to SDSC along with Subramaniam. I briefly considered working at his lab when I first came here (I'm a MD/CS PhD student at UIUC), but as it eventually happened I'm working on parallel performance analysis now.
I'd volunteer, naturally, but I've been to central Illinois in the winter before and nearly froze to death:-)
Hey! It snowed here yesterday for the first time in YEARS! It's blowing around a bit now, but I don't think the weather is all that bad here.
This is not a problem with the Visor version of the radio. However,
the Palm software that comes with it is incredibly buggy and tends to
crash at least once every day, often when powering on or off. If it
weren't for the size differential I'd be switching to a Pocket PC
device just for the stability.
FreeBSD 4.4 is currently being merged into OS X/Darwin, as you'd see if you kept up with the Darwin developer lists and/or the public Darwin bugs site (which is very interesting reading, for me at least). Here's a bug from yesterday, in fact, that mentions it.
Ugh. Versant blows. It's the very opposite of efficiency.
(yes, there's a story and actual experience behind this, I'm just too
exhausted to write right now, but not too exhausted to post my opinion
to slashdot.:)
Because Sun cares zip for the Mac. When Sun did anything decent for the Mac, such as their Tcl implementation, their horrendous JDK 1.0 implementation, or their abortive efforts at re-porting StarOffice, it was either because it was historical, or because it was a checklist-item soon to ba abandoned.
Considering how they're working to oppose Microsoft in platform (Java) and office suite (StarOffice/OpenOffice) dominance, it's just crazy that they don't support the only other currently viable desktop platform. They can't expect everyone to use Solaris, after having put next to no work into improving its usability (CDE? GNOME? uh, no, certainly not in their current state.).
Sun just fired Lee Ann Rucker, who worked for Sun at Apple on the OS X Java implementation, in particular the Aqua Look & Feel for Swing, and was doing an incredible job. Check out recent messages on Apple's java-dev mailing list for more. I'm still stunned - I hope Apple is able to hire Lee Ann directly.
There is a GPG port for OS X, but what I'm really sad about is that NAI was working on a native Cocoa PGP port to OS X, and it was probably going to be finished in the next couple of months.
I hope it's going to be possible to salvage and finish the code that was under development. I never understood why PGP was free, given its the extraordinary quality. I would have gladly paid for it. NAI's Web site was so badly organized, even when I did want to buy it, it was a tremendous mess to try.
This is also an issue in that there's now no decent, free IPSEC client coming for OS X. Time to put some effort into continuing the port of KAME's efforts, I guess.
Hm. I wonder what Japanese filenames look like on the command line of OS X?
OS X uses Unicode, so they just look, uh... weird. For example, when I try to complete a Japanese filename in zsh (I typed some random Japanese characters, they're probably nonsense:-) - it appears as:
\M-c\M-^B\M-5\M-e\M-\M-^P\M-h\M-^N\M-+
OS X has the same input methods as OS 9, except with much nicer looking Japanese fonts. --
Yeah, the story is really one-sided. They're basically saying, that because Apple doesn't open -everything- it doesn't matter if they open anything. In the case of the Sorenson codec, or much of QuickTime, there are licensing issues that make open-sourcing anything very difficult. Apple voluntarily makes its changes to BSD licensed software in Darwin available, they don't have to. And of course when they modify and enhance GPL'ed software such as gcc, they have their changes publically accessible too, as they must.
I really wish ZDNet would disappear into the ground (and yes, I know people who work there, and they mostly feel the same way:-). These kinds of articles are just blatant grabs for readers. --
Slashdot Mirror
Wipt is an apt-like tool that uses MSIs and a repository; might be useful as a starting point.
Wow, two services in one week! The atrocious "beta" Google Groups just became the only interface, despite everyone I know inside and outside of Google hating it...
I don't have any scientific explanations, but my hands hurt after about half an hour of typing on a crappy keyboard. I can type on a Model M (or the split M15 I have at work) for hours without a problem. This has seemed totally counter-intuitive to me, and I went through many ergonomic keyboards, including the Kinesis ones and an expensive low-force DataHand keyboard as recommended by my hand surgeon, before I discovered that the Model Ms work the best for me. Among the quieter designs that I like and can use are the older, beige/purple SGI keyboards (earlier were proprietary, later were PS/2) from around the time of the 4D/Indigo/Indy, and the Apple Extended/Extended II keyboards.
s/Ty/Tigh/ also.
Well, actually, it seems to be the _old_ 23" Apple Cinema Display, connection-wise (it may use the same LCD panel as the newer one, or not; the two have different specifications). The power/data cable that connects the "media station" to the display is nothing else but the Apple Display Connector - you can see it at the top of the pictures; it looks like a DVI-I connector with six additional pins: two for power (DVI already provides power, just not enough), three for USB, and another (not sure whether Apple's "LED" or "Soft Power" = DVI's "Hot Plug Detect"). Apple's latest displays went back to using DVI directly, with separate USB/FireWire connections.
Pretty cool that LG is reusing the stuff they developed for Apple, though.
Unfortunately you don't have much use for something like Acrobat Capture because you have handwritten notes to deal with. To process the files, SANE and/or TWAIN interfaces are reasonably easy to write code for. The cool thing about SANE is that you can run the saned daemon on any Mac or Linux box, and with a couple of lines of config file changes, it's instantly available over the network from any Mac, Windows, or Unix box (there are TWAIN bridges for Mac/Windows so it even shows up in Photoshop and so forth); there are also standalone GUI clients like XSane.
I wrote a document management system in Python/wxWidgets (for Windows) in about a month part-time, and it works very well. Either on Mac or Windows, PDF makes sense because of the ubiquity of the viewers, even if you lose a bit in compression compared to more optimized formats such as DjVu. On Windows you can easily embed the Acrobat ActiveX control; on Mac OS X you have native PDF support, Panther's Preview kicks ass, and there are several open-source PDF browsing components such as the ones out of TeXShop or Glen Low's Graphviz port you can embed in your own app.
Given a choice I would probably pick the Mac to do this project, because of the wonderful Quartz/CoreGraphics Python bindings. You can just draw right to PDF, and place PDF files as if they were images; for example, here's a short script to rotate a bunch of PDF files (sorry, Slashdot destroys Python indentation):
You could also use ReportLab, but because a lot of the PDF processing code is written in Python it's somewhat slower and memory-hogging for high-volume use. (I used ReportLab on Windows for the above project, and use CoreGraphics Python bindings for my research, so I do know what I'm talking about mostlyCan you get a IIgs to net boot off netatalk yet? We used to have a lab full of IIgs's netbooting off a Mac IIcx AppleShare 2.x server (LocalTalk, baby!) back at my middle school years ago, and it worked incredibly well. So fast, too, when I was used to the speed of GS/OS booting off 800K floppies at home...
I'd pull my IIgs out of the closet if I could get this to work again.
Totally agree. I spent close to $1000 on a DataHand keyboard, which a doctor recommended, and it ended up making my pain worse; now I use the IBM split keyboard (relative of the GoldTouch one) and it works very well for me.
However, given a decent keyboard and good posture, I still have trouble if I don't keep in shape. Not exercising out of work is the #1 contributor to my pain. I just do 30 min/day of exercises at home, that's about the minimum acceptable, though I did martial arts until last year and plan to get back to it in the fall.
I actually tried the Apple Adjustable Keyboard and didn't like it very much. I find the feedback of the IBM clicky keyboard is very useful; I can type almost as well on a flat IBM clicky keyboard.
Yup, Mac OS X's equivalent of Win32s DLLs is CarbonLib, which you can use to make CFM Carbon apps run on OS 9 as well as OS X.
Like Win32s in Win3.1, there's no more protection than running native (Win3.1|OS 9) apps, though.
On the Mac, disable the "DNSPlugin" Network Services Location plugin,
:-)
in the Extensions folder. This applies only to Mac OS 9.0 through
9.2.2; the 8.5-8.6 version of NSL didn't have DNS update support (it
answered SLPv1 broadcasts only, and might have registered with a SLP
DA, I don't remember); the OS X version of NSL doesn't have it
either.
Also note that this registration does not happen always on the Mac,
only if you enable network servers that use NSL (primarily the
personal AFP/file sharing and Web sharing services). I've never
enabled them, so I've never seen this.
Another thing to do is just set your domain so it's one whose
nameservers you control
The HFS+ filesystem code in Darwin is open. Linux also reads (but
does not write) HFS+. I doubt there'd be an issue.
Can I jump to a location on a scrollbar with the MMB in any version of Windows or MacOS? No.
Actually, yes you can... OS X supports this (it can be the default, too). Since there's no multiple-button mouse it's Option-click for the 'other' action (page up/down or scroll to here) but it's simple enough to bind that to the middle mouse button if you wish.
Can I create bookmark directories in IE without launching a helper-app? No.
'bookmark directories'?
Sorry, not true. How else would XDarwin work?
OS X actually supports up to 65,535 mouse buttons, not that anyone in
their right mind would use that many. I use a MS TrackBall Explorer,
which has 5 buttons + wheel, and am able to read them all.
Even the Mac pre-OS X supported multiple mouse buttons natively,
though it didn't do anything useful with them more than passing the
button number through to applications.
One part of what makes 3DOSX useful are those gigantic Mac OS X icons... you can actually make them out from a distance and they help you to see where you are in the filesystem. Compare this to the Stonehenge of TurboGopher VR and you have a much more usable system.
Yes, of course, there's source, check the same page you can download from. :-)
--Nicholas (also 3DOSX co-author, but not a major one)
The Biology WorkBench moved to SDSC along with Subramaniam. I briefly considered working at his lab when I first came here (I'm a MD/CS PhD student at UIUC), but as it eventually happened I'm working on parallel performance analysis now.
:-)
I'd volunteer, naturally, but I've been to central Illinois in the winter before and nearly froze to death
Hey! It snowed here yesterday for the first time in YEARS! It's blowing around a bit now, but I don't think the weather is all that bad here.
This is not a problem with the Visor version of the radio. However,
:)
the Palm software that comes with it is incredibly buggy and tends to
crash at least once every day, often when powering on or off. If it
weren't for the size differential I'd be switching to a Pocket PC
device just for the stability.
(Maybe Palm OS 5 will help here too
FreeBSD 4.4 is currently being merged into OS X/Darwin, as you'd see if you kept up with the Darwin developer lists and/or the public Darwin bugs site (which is very interesting reading, for me at least). Here's a bug from yesterday, in fact, that mentions it.
Ugh. Versant blows. It's the very opposite of efficiency.
:)
(yes, there's a story and actual experience behind this, I'm just too
exhausted to write right now, but not too exhausted to post my opinion
to slashdot.
Considering how they're working to oppose Microsoft in platform (Java) and office suite (StarOffice/OpenOffice) dominance, it's just crazy that they don't support the only other currently viable desktop platform. They can't expect everyone to use Solaris, after having put next to no work into improving its usability (CDE? GNOME? uh, no, certainly not in their current state.).
Sun just fired Lee Ann Rucker, who worked for Sun at Apple on the OS X Java implementation, in particular the Aqua Look & Feel for Swing, and was doing an incredible job. Check out recent messages on Apple's java-dev mailing list for more. I'm still stunned - I hope Apple is able to hire Lee Ann directly.
There is a GPG port for OS X, but what I'm really sad about is that NAI was working on a native Cocoa PGP port to OS X, and it was probably going to be finished in the next couple of months.
I hope it's going to be possible to salvage and finish the code that was under development. I never understood why PGP was free, given its the extraordinary quality. I would have gladly paid for it. NAI's Web site was so badly organized, even when I did want to buy it, it was a tremendous mess to try.
This is also an issue in that there's now no decent, free IPSEC client coming for OS X. Time to put some effort into continuing the port of KAME's efforts, I guess.
Hm, you've got a point. Slashdot could always just post-process it to limit to 80 chars or something; I wouldn't mind that.
But that would be TOO HARD.
*shrug*
--
RPROMPT=' %B%t%b'
prompt="{%U%n#%l@%m:%h%u} %30<...<%~%#"
if [[ $TERM == "*term*" || $TERM_PROGRAM = "Apple_Terminal" ]] {
xterm_prompt=1
prompt="[%U%l:%h%u] %~%#"
}
chpwd() {
[[ -t 1 ]] || return
if [[ -n $xterm_prompt ]] {
print -Pn "\e]2;${USER}@${HOST}:%~\a"
}
}
On tcsh; this is complicated because it uses both xterm and xwsh titles and has to work with an oh-so-lame shell:
if ( $?DISPLAY || $term == xterm || $term == Apple_Terminal || $term == xterm-color ) then 0 44\0573cwd:s|${HOME}|~|\0575\\007\\c\042'"0 44\0573cwd:s|${HOME}|~|\0575\\007\\c\042'"
if ( $term == iris-ansi ) then
# need to use ]2 because xwsh doesn't support ]0 to change
# both window and icon titles...
setenv XTERM_TITLE_ESCAPE '2'
else
setenv XTERM_TITLE_ESCAPE '0'
endif
setenv XTC1 "alias cwdcmd '/bin/echo \042\\033]${XTERM_TITLE_ESCAPE};${USER}@${HOST}:"
setenv XTC2 '$\0573cwd:s|'
setenv XTC3 "${HOME}|~|"
setenv XTC4 '\0575\\007\\c"'
setenv XTC5 "'"
# these actually work, but... whatever... I've spent about 4 hours on this line so far.
#setenv XTC "alias cwdcmd '/bin/echo \042\\033]${XTERM_TITLE_ESCAPE};${USER}@${HOST}:\
#setenv XTC "alias cwdcmd '/bin/echo \042\\033]${XTERM_TITLE_ESCAPE};${USER}@${HOST}:\
eval `echo "${XTC1}${XTC2}${XTC3}${XTC4}${XTC5}"`
set prompt="[%U%l:%h%u] %B%t%b %~%#"
# set prompt = "%{%}%h-%~/%# "
cwdcmd
else
set prompt="{%U%n#%l@%m:%h%u} %B%t%b %~%#"
# set prompt = "%h-%m/%~/%# "
endif
Why, oh why, oh why does Slashdot not support <PRE>? I wish I knew.
--
Hm. I wonder what Japanese filenames look like on the command line of OS X?
:-) - it appears as:
OS X uses Unicode, so they just look, uh... weird. For example, when I try to complete a Japanese filename in zsh (I typed some random Japanese characters, they're probably nonsense
\M-c\M-^B\M-5\M-e\M-\M-^P\M-h\M-^N\M-+
OS X has the same input methods as OS 9, except with much nicer looking Japanese fonts.
--
Yeah, the story is really one-sided. They're basically saying, that because Apple doesn't open -everything- it doesn't matter if they open anything. In the case of the Sorenson codec, or much of QuickTime, there are licensing issues that make open-sourcing anything very difficult. Apple voluntarily makes its changes to BSD licensed software in Darwin available, they don't have to. And of course when they modify and enhance GPL'ed software such as gcc, they have their changes publically accessible too, as they must.
:-). These kinds of articles are just blatant grabs for readers.
I really wish ZDNet would disappear into the ground (and yes, I know people who work there, and they mostly feel the same way
--