Rant

Nine years! It has been that long since I posted. Personal life and work-priorities both conspired to the silence in /usr land, which I finally hope to correct. A lot has happened in the world in the last decade. Technology has moved on (and continues to accelerate), two presidencies have come and gone, climate change is real, and computers might soon become sentient [1]. And the topics I usually posted about: Emacs, the Mac, *Nix, Open Source, and programming, have all made great strides (not always for the better, I’m looking at you: macOS). And while I have been immersed in these transformations, and have things to say, I just never got around to actually writing. And with each passing year, procrastinating slowly changed into a nagging fear: is blogging still relevant these days? And with the overwhelming rise of social media, does the voice of a blogger even matter? ...

Context As an experiment, I have recently started using Vim as my primary text editor. While I have been an Emacs aficionado for a very, very long time - clocking in at almost 16 years - Vim is something that I have always been curious about, and tinkered with from time to time, while ending up going back to Emacs. This time however, I intend to stick around for a while, and try to get a feel of the Zen of Vim. ...

I finally bit the bullet and installed Snow Leopard over last weekend. I did a clean install (i.e., reformat and install afresh) - considering the significant under-the-hood changes that this OS revision has. The basic steps I followed are: Cleaned up the existing Leopard install to remove applications, preference panes and documents I did not need Reviewed the preferences under ~/Library/Preferences as well as the application support items under ~/Library/Application Support and removed the items which were out of date or detritus from old installs Took an image backup using SuperDuper! of the Leopard install Took a backup of the disk using Time Machine to allow easier data restore during the installation De-authorized my iTunes to prevent increment of the install counter after reinstall of the OS Popped in the Snow Leopard DVD and started the install During installation, I used the Disk Utility to reformat the Mac OS partition I also did a custom install to prevent the printer drivers (over 2 GB) being installed. In addition, I selected the optional Rosetta and Quicktime 7 components (seriously Apple, these take less than 10 MB - why the optional tag?) Waited for around 20 minutes to have the base image installed, and then used the migration assistant to restore data from my Time Machine backup The install was relatively smooth, and restoring the data from my Time Machine backup also went without any issues. However, post-install, some of the glitches started appearing: ...

Off late the Mail.app email client on OSX has been acting up on me. It often stalls or displays the spinning beach ball of death till a forced quit is required. Also, it seems to have display rendering issues when a mail classified incorrectly as junk is moved back to the inbox. I tend to use the Mail.app as a local email client for three main purposes: Offline mode for reading my emails when there is no Internet connection available Easy desktop search for the mails via Spotlight, and Easy archival of important mail in my project workspaces (either in Devonthink or plain text export) The other features (TODO and Notes) are nice, but not really useful for me as I use other tools for these items. The mail itself is served out via gmail accounts and IMAP synchronization. ...

My time-management revolves around email, Calendar and to-do lists. While tools definitely help, it is more important to understand that we are processing information and acting on them, and it is just managing or tracking the items. A few pointers on what I use for Emails: Email The newest computer can merely compound, at speed, the oldest problem in the relations between human beings, and in the end the communicator will be confronted with the old problem, of what to say and how to say it. - Edward R. Murrow ...

The latest beta of NetNewsWire (3.2b13) has removed the annoying advertisements that were a major distraction. Also, they have brought back the clipping feature - which is really one of the most useful functions for storing interesting RSS articles for reading later. However, the resurrected clippings do not sync with Google Reader, which cripples the function. In my usual use case scenario, I used to use the Newsgator online web interface to store long articles for reading later at leisure at home. Looks like this is not going to be possible. ...

So today morning I got an email from http://www.newsgator.com, makers of the excellent NetNewsWire RSS Reader for OS X. NetNewsWire was originally a paid for application and a best of the breed at that. It was made a free download last year and has been my primary RSS Reader till date. The main USP I found in NetNewsWire was the companion http://www.newsgator.com/ngs/subscriber/WebEd2.aspx online RSS feed aggregator site, and the excellent synchronization between the local client and the web edition. This basically meant that I could read RSS feeds where I wanted to - even when away from the OSX laptop, and my reading history would be in sync when I fired up the OSX client. Heck, there was even a iPhone client to do the same sync up. ...

Finally managed to move over the entries from the old site! Adieu X10Hosting. It was definitely NOT nice knowing you.

I have had the need to produce charts and graphs for my work lately - and wanted to start using gnuplot. Should be easy right? After all, there is a darwinports port available, and install should have been a breeze, with just a: sudo port install gnuplot Or so I thought. For some unknown &!@^% reason, darwinports with its immense intelligence decided that it needed to download 75 other ports that I did not ask for, including its own version of X11, even though Apple does provide a perfectly decent implementation that I have installed. ...

Twitter is one of those Web 2.0 applications that at first glance seems to beg the question: why? But first, a description of the service from its home page: Twitter is a service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing? In short, it allows you to post a short description of what you are doing right now (or in fact, any short phrase at all - the trend seems to be for posting witty or funny comments). The next obvious thing is to track what others are doing - which can be a limited set of your friends, or for anyone who has chosen to make their status public. Another interesting use is to use it as a virtual SMS mechanism on the web - you can choose to only track your friends, and use the service to keep in virtual touch with each other. Twitter offers tracking and update via the web, IM as well as SMS via a cell-phone. The service has already gained a large following, and many web celebrities such as Marlin Mann of 43Folders fame or Cali Lewis from GeekBrief TV are on board. Yours truly is also testing the waters right now, and has the handle evolve75 on the service. There are also quite a few tools already available to make the usage easier. A Firefox extension called twitbin enables live tracking via a side-bar on your browser, and OS X dashboard widget called Twadget is available for updating Twitter from your Mac desktop (for Vista users, an alternate version for the sidebar is available here). Whether Twitter is just another Web 2.0 meme - or here to stay - remains to be seen. The service is useful, but carries the risk of the novelty fading away to becoming a chore :-( ~ Anupam