Talamathi

I have a strong need use BiBTeX files, but fortunately life is generally made a lot easier with BibDesk . As I only need to deal with bibliographies in spurts, invariably there’s a new version when I get started. I didn’t think Leopard would inspire any changes to BibDesk, but indeed it has. The first change I noticed is that it saves a file for each publication, so that Spotlight will play nicer with each one (notice how it is also using QuickLook to present it like a card from the card catalog: This turns out to be really useful. Almost immediately after messing with BibDesk again, I needed to search for an author. Interestingly, BibDesk uses a different QuickLook style if you use QuickLook proper: I actually have no idea how they pull that off, but it’s very nice. Looking at all the other features BibDesk has, it has become very clear to me I am a total novice with it (they have a whole page for AppleScripts! ). Technorati Tags: Leopard , Mac , QuickLook , BibDe...

Almost a year and a half ago , I listed out a bunch of Mac applications that would be useful for some newly converted friends of mine. This is sorely in need of an update, but until then I’ll just occasionally post what others have to say. Macworld just covered SmartSleep , which can be great for people with laptops: Patrick Stein’s Smart Sleep, a System Preferences panel, lets you choose between four different sleep modes: Sleep and hibernate: Default mode. Sleep only: No RAM written to disk. Hibernate only: Power fully off. Smart sleep: A special mode whereby your machine will generally just sleep, but will sleep and hibernate when the battery is below a certain power level you specify via a slider. If the battery is below five percent charge, then it will only hibernate. After Apple made hibernation the default mode when closing a laptop, people are supposed to wait (up to a minute!) for it to finally go to sleep. This tool can be great for doing what rea...

So I still don’t have IMAP available for Gmail . A post on the Official Gmail Blog said it would take a couple of days to do them all, but I was hoping I would be better than average. Oh, well. I have picked up some useful pieces of information from an editorial “ Will Google replace Microsoft Exchange? ”. I don’t know if everything is true (I try not to use editorials as a source for facts, although Technologyevangelist.com has tended to be pretty good), but if it is there were two things I did not know previously: Gmail’s IMAP does not currently support IMAP Idle . This is too bad, but also not surprising, since I assume they wanted to get IMAP out as they could. I would be surprised if this doesn’t hurt them in the end, what with everyone doing full refreshes. Leopard will support IMAP idle. This is great news. Before I started using Gmail for everything, I was using IMAP and loving it. Unfortunately, Mail.app didn’t have idle so I sa...

For a computer graphics class , I needed to build PBRT . Being a Mac guy, I decided to build it for Mac OS X. In addition, I wanted to make sure I was using the latest version of at least PBRT (it's at 1.0.3 as of this writing). I also wanted to use Fink as much as possible for any dependencies. Getting the PBRT source code To do this, you will at least need to grab the source code for v1.0.3 from PBRT's downloads page . If you want to try and of the sample scenes, however, you will need to grab them from the CD that came with the book. After unpacking it, I moved the new folder to ~/pbrt . If you want it somewhere else, make sure to change the PBRT_SEARCHPATH environmental variable in the next step accordingly. Setting the environmental variables In Mac OS X, I believe that if a .profile file exists in your user folder, any .bashrc file is ignored. It could also be that .bashrc is just plain ignored. In any case, Bash in Mac OS X likes using .profile , so putting this...

I have a friend who recently made the switch to a Mac, and so a few weeks ago I compiled this list of useful Mac apps that I use and thought he might. The list wasn’t really specific to him, though, so it seemed reasonable to pass this on to anyone who intends to make the jump. I’m not mentioning Firefox or Skype or other stuff that is pretty crossplatform. One thing that I think is really telling about Mac software is that there are a total of two pieces of Mac software I list that are pay-for versions (NetNewsWire comes in a great full version, and OmniGraffle is pretty limited until you pay for it. Adium : Chat program that uses libgaim to do it's dirty work. Heck of a lot better looking than Gaim , and I don’t mean that as a knock necessarily on Gaim, more how great Adium is. BibDesk : A BibTeX front end. Having tried to write these files manually for my references in TeX papers, this is so much better. Camino : Uses Gecko, but is much more of a Mac app than Fi...

When I last wrote four days ago , I was trying out a blogging client called Bleezer . In retrospect, it ended a little bit more critically than I really intended it to be. I will admit, though, that I have been getting a little frustrated with blogging clients in general. Posting through a web interface is not really my thing, and I can imagine that this is true for a lot of other people. Trying different blogging clients out there has kind of left me wondering how all of my favorite blogs seem to get updated so often. Anyway, after my post Larry Borsato (the person behind Bleezer) left a comment , which was geneal enough to convince me to keep trying. Actually, I probably would have in any case, since this program does have a lot of potential. And yesterday Bleezer was updated to version 0.9.8.2 , which makes it (0.982 - 0.980) ÷ 0.980 ≈ 0.2% better than version 0.9.8 (which I was using). I guess the question is if this makes it usable for me? First off, I’ll start by...

After MarsEdit turned out to be less than optimal with the new Blogger (for now), I am trying to find another tool that might work. I’m new to this whole thing, but Bleezer seems to fit the essential qualities of what I would like: I can actually post titles (unlike MarsEdit, for now). Like MarsEdit, it gives me the ability to see previews of what I’m typing. Unlike MarsEdit, there’s a compose mode where I can try to type a little bit WYSIWYG (From what I can tell, MarsEdit is a strange, although mostly intuitive, mix). I can ping a few sites for notification, i.e. Technorati . Again this is like MarsEdit. I can write things in Unicode, and it escapes everything appropriately. See: तलमाथि. 日本語. It did that for me. Hopefully, tags work. On the other hand, there are some definite downsides. It’s very obviously a Java application, which has the upside for the developer of not needing to compile it multiple times. Unfortunately, this makes it very unMac-like. Seriously, what’s the deal ...

I used to hear a lot of good things about MarsEdit , and since I have a free copy due to having NetNewsWire 1.x, it seemed reasonable to give this a try. That, and I've always liked Markdown . It gives me a standard way to write text files that are easy for others to read. Plus, with a little bit of work, you can modify your favorite Markdown tool and have it output LaTeX. Edit: Unfortunately, it does not seem to pass on the post-Markdown formatting to Blogger. Anyway, never mind this. I got a little annoyed with Blogger’s web interface for posting things. And now, to try some code: #include <iostream> using namespace std; int main() { int a, b, c; a = 2; b = 3; c = a + b; cout << "a = " << a << ", b = " << b << ", c = " << c << endl; } Should this come out nice, I expect to post a lot more. Of course, that’d require someone to read it.