Mac at Work (was FreeBSD on Dell C400, and other stuff)

I use LaTeX to produce most of my documents, but occasionally I need to send someone something in Word format. Often I just use latex2rtf, but sometimes it does not do a good job. I recently ran into another alternative. It is called GrindEQ . It is not free, but it seems to do a pretty decent job. GrindEQ also has a tool to convert from Word to LaTeX. You can download an evaluation copy that will launch 10 times. It seems to work pretty well for what I have tried.

I thought I would add to the discussion of Parallels vs VMWare Fusion. For those who don't know, both of these programs run on Intel Macs and provide a way of running other operating systems alongside Mac OS X. Most commonly, this is used to run Windows programs on the Mac. Until recently, I had no interest in trying Parallels because I knew VMWare was coming out soon. I have used VMWare in the past and have been impressed. However, recently I installed Parallels 3.0 to troubleshoot something at work. The install lasted less than a day on my system because it the software my company develops did not work with Parallels 3.0 running on Leopard, but worked flawlessly in VMWare Fusion 1.1 running on Leopard. I currently work for Aquaveo, LLC which develops the XMS family of programs for water resources engineers. I did not make benchmarks of Parallels vs VMWare because Parallels simply did not work right. I am still a fan of VMWare because I have had no problems with it at all

I just figured out how to save terminal settings in Leopard so I can use spotlight to launch a terminal with an ssh session started automatically. You pick Shell->New Remote Connection and set up your connection. In the line below the username box, for ssh you would type ssh user@server. Then click the connect button. When the new terminal window comes up, Select Shell->Export Settings and save the file somewhere. Now you can use launch an ssh session by opening that file.

Recently, my wife has been complaining that the internet is significantly slower on my MacBook than on here linux PC. She was right. The MacBook was substantially slower, but it was only slower at home. At work and school, pages load very quickly so I suspected that perhaps the DNS server had something to do with it. Sure enough, once I changed the DNS server to OpenDNS, the pages were loading faster than ever. Both of these machines use a wireless connection, but my wife's desktop has a static IP address while my laptop is set to automatic, so it gets whatever the router gives it for DNS. I created a Home location in the Network Preferences with a static IP and the OpenDNS servers for name resolution. Now I can have fast internet everywhere :)

Yeah! I just got a linux machine to copy the whole system into a ramdisk and then boot from it. Talk about fast! Read on to find out how I did it. Introduction: My friend who owns A Byte Better Computers (www.byte-better.com) just built himself a new machine to play spades with. It has a 2.6 GHz Core 2 Duo, 4 x 500 GB SATA2 hard drives with 16 MB cache on each (2 TB total), DVD+R DL CD burn everything drive, floppy, and currently has 4 GB of RAM, soon to be upgraded to 8 GB. It currently runs Windows XP on one drive,and Gentoo linux on a second drive. The other two drives are for data. We thought about several RAID options, but for now they are all separate drives. So we thought to ourselves "We have this great system, how can we make it even faster? Ah! Run the OS from RAM!" So we decided to try it. While we were installing the OSes on the big box, I was using my laptop to build a prototype to work out the bugs. After a lot of research, much trial-and-error, and

Sometimes I use Excel or NeoOffice/OpenOffice.org to create tables I want to include in latex documents. I try to get latex code for the table using Calc2Latex or the Excel2LaTeX , but when that doesn't work so well, I print the table to a pdf an include that pdf in the pdflatex document. [UPDATE] I recently discovered that the graphicx package can include pdf files as pictures. Also useful. [/UPDATE] This is what you can use for concatenating PDFs: (shamelessly stolen from http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/software/pdf-append.php) begin quote If you have LaTeX installed, you probably have pdftex and a package called pdfpages, and you can use those together with a hand-written driver file to append PDFs. This approach is more work than I'd really prefer, but it's the only one I found that actually did work in my situation, after spending a lot more time on the problem than I ought to have (and not being paid by the hour, so it hurt). If I were doing this task many times I cou

So I have switched from Opera to Camino. Why? Well, the killer feature in Camino is the ability to use Google Spreadsheets, which we use at my work. It seems that only the Gecko rendering engine does it correctly on the Mac. I also tried OmniWeb 5.5 . I thought it was a very nice browser, but Camino does everything I need and performs very well. I have used Firefox on the Mac, but I prefer the interface of Camino. Other people will like other things. On a separate note, Sherlock is a pretty neat tool for searching things on the web that comes with OS X and Path Finder is great Finder replacement.

It has been quite a while since my last post. I have discovered some great software. The Fink project is quite nice as it allowed me to easily install octave (a matlab clone) with gnuplot and aquaterm . Transmit is a very nice FTP client for the mac, but it is a bit expensive. Also, shapeshifter is pretty fun if you want to play with themes , but I always come back to Aqua because it is very hard to find other themes that are really useable. I hate having my interface get in the way, which is why I liked the ion window manager so much on my FreeBSD machine. Oh yeah, I got that RAM upgrade I mentioned a few posts back. Now running at 2 GB of RAM. The system is really smooth! I can run Windows XP in VMWare and OS X together with no performance loss. Let's see, I use vobcopy and Handbrake to get Movies onto my computer. Handbrake is the best ripper I have used so far. It even has presets for Apple TV, iPod video, and others.

In a previous post, I mentioned that I installed QuickSilver. I have since removed it because I found that the spotlight feature of OS X 10.4 works well amazingly well.

I used this tool to recover a forgotten password for the HiNet.net DSL service on Windows XP. It is supposed to work on other versions of windows as well. You can find it at http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/dialupass2.html I have been liking the MacBook. The keyboard is great, and I have never used a better touchpad. Their driver is great. There is an option that allows you to ctrl-click by cliking with two fingers on the pad. It makes using windows possible without a real mouse.

Well, working with a windows only machine sure made life difficult. Now I am back in the Unix game with a shiny new Macbook running OS X Tiger. I was pleased to find out that it uses the ipfw firewall which is what I was using before. Since I have only had this for machine for two days, I have not explored much of the unix side of things except to setup my preferred colors in the shell, turn on the firewall, and edit some files with vim. I downloaded the beta version of VMWare Fusion and installed Windows XP Pro so I could do some of my specialized school work. The performance is good enough if I don't switch between the Mac and Windows worlds much. A RAM upgrade should speed things up. Of course, I had to install the Opera web browser. So far I like the OS X interface. Oh yeah, I had to add a few essentials like Desktop Manager for virtual desktops and QuickSilver for easy program launching. NeoOffice , the native OS X version of OpenOffice.org, meets all my off

Sadly, I sold my dell c400 a couple of weeks ago. I bought a new Averatec 2260 that unfortunately, is not well supported in linux or BSD so I am running windows on it. Hopefully I will get back into the *nix side of things soon.