On a beautiful day, with my Mac
This
is my page dedicated for Macs.
My first encounter with these fruity machines was dated back in the
early 80s: my first personal computer was actually an Apple
II clone (ok technically it's not a Mac, yet). I was able to add
a giant floppy drive, an 80-column video switch (can you imagine you
need that to display 80-column texts?), and a huge pointing device
called 'mouse' - a novelty at that time! Gone are the days when I booted
my machine into Apple Basic (and later, using floppies, the Apple Pascal),
waited for my tape recorder loading my favorite games, or coding.
The following years I wandered into the land of Microsoft/Intel camp
(XT, AT, 486, Pentium, Pentium Pro, AMD Athlon, Pentium 3/4, etc.).
Frustrated by the way the software was designed/implemented, I started
using Linux, starting from Red
Hat Linux 4.0.
Finally
in 2002, after reading so much about the UNIX underpinnings of Mac
OS X, I decided to come back to the land of fruity computers, and
got myself a PowerBook.
Not only I could fire up MS Word or connect to Windows shared folders,
but I get to keep all of my familiar UNIX/Linux/Open Source apps. The
fact that the modern Macs run on a BSD core is both a miracle and a
dream come true: we get a powerful UNIX workstation disguised under
a "lickable" user interface! Coders of the UNIX tradition now pour
their collective thoughts into creating numerous great apps and making
them free for download (see Apps and Links to
find these little gems).
So here I am: back to the Apple family, where I started my relationship
with computers a long time ago. I hope the information here would be
helpful for both prospective and current Mac users.
Update 20060405: Do you know the new Intel Macs now do
Windows too?
Mac Tips
Here are some tips/software I developed/collected over time. I hope
you find them useful.
- Fight
spam with Mail.app + JunkMatcher (on Sourceforge.net):
Icon
courtesy of
Steve Caplin
JunkMatcher is a versatile spam filter addon for Mac OS X. Although
Apple's built-in Mail.app has
a wonderful, statistically trained junk filter, spammers nowadays
use various
tricks to conceal the real things they want to say (use of graphics,
encoded characters, etc.). If you're going nuts about your spam problem,
I've written a cocktail-styled tool that makes use of various effective
techniques such as Bayesian filtering, IP-based blocking
and flexible regular
expressions to identify those sneaky junk mails.
- Cool
Apps for Mac: A list collecting cool/useful shareware/freeware
apps for Mac.
- Links
for Macheads: A collection of useful links for Mac
users.
- UNIX
tips: Find here bits and pieces about taking advantage
of the UNIX power under Mac OS X.
Made on a Mac
This site is a little demonstration of what can be accomplished on
a Mac - it was built entirely on my PowerBook G4. I use:
- Dreamweaver
MX and Emacs
on OS X: for coding up the pages; the template management facility
in the former is particularly useful;
- Photoshop:
for graphics editing;
- iPhoto and BetterHTMLExport:
for importing and managing my picture collections, and for exporting
them into HTML pages;
- BibDesk and bibtex2html:
for managing my bibtex database files (for the lists of publications)
and exporting them to HTML files;
- A healthy bunch of Python scripts:
for various text massaging tasks, and also for pulling out the data
used in Today's Musicians in History on the home page;
- CVS (Concurrent Versions
System): for keeping track of site changes and doing the site updates
correctly.
