And now for something completely different.
I’ve spent a few hours these last few days going through my digital address books and trying to sync them up. We’ll see if the system maintains itself. That’s the key — that I don’t really want to have to think about it much going forward other than the occasional adding/changing of an address. More details below the fold for those of you who want to skip to the baby pictures (I don’t blame you).
…is slowly taking over my life.
There you have it — the life of a Googaholic.
We’ve heard from a few folks that they’ve had trouble submitting comments due to the CAPTCHA word image not loading (this is the little thing where you have to type in a word before submitting a comment to prove that you’re a human and not an evil spamming robot). Those pesky not-loading images have been disabled and we’re trying out a new spam catcher that works behind the scenes. Please let us know via email if you have any trouble posting a comment. Happy reading!
Finally — and this seems like a new feature because I’ve looked (and even paid) for something similar before — Google has enabled the syncing of iCal with Google Calendar. Check out this page for more details. I’ve set it up and so far it seems to be working. Now I can add events to my iCal calendar using the awesome one-click date-recognition software of MacMail and then they are synced up perfectly with my google calendar. This is especially handy now that I’m hoping to leave vespa at school and use agrippa as a “home computer” — leaving me calendarless unless some handy solution like this worked out.
Much more exciting things than this have happened in recent weeks, but this little utterly useful and puny tidbit couldn’t go by unmentioned. I just upgraded to Firefox 3. My sense is that it runs a lot faster and more efficiently than the old version 2. But it inspired me to fix one thing that has driven me crazy since day one of web browsing on Macs. When filling out an online form, for example, if you hit tab to move between fields, you skip over any drop down menus and have to go back and enter them by hand. However, this blog post showed me the light. Now I can fill out forms without leaving the confines of my keyboard! A freedom befitting our nation’s glorious day of independence. Kind of.
There’s a movement afoot in the Biostats department to get a wiki up on the department webpage where students (and others too) can create a master cheat-sheet for how to get the most out of your computer: compendium of tips and tricks for the casual user but with a focus also on programs that all of us stats students know and love, like Emacs, LaTeX, R, etc…
Since the last time I had to build the machine up from scratch (back when I got agrippa in the spring of 2004), things have gotten a lot easier. There were many things that I had to hack in one way or another last time that this time work like a charm out of the box. While it’s nice to know that if something goes wrong, I might know where to turn to fix it, it’s also nice to not have to deal with it and spend time focusing on more important stuff.
So, here’s a link to Nick’s official Mac installation notes. They’re rough and not fully explained in places — feel free to email me or drop a comment on this post if something doesn’t make sense or links have been updated, etc…
On Monday, my new 15″ MacBook Pro arrived. She’s replacing ‘agrippa’, my four-year-old 12″ PowerBook G4. I’ve decided to call her ‘vespa’. Something about sexy European names ending in ‘a’. Think about it.
But now I’m in this weird limbo-land. Double-fisting my two laptops, using agrippa for some stuff, vespa for others. I haven’t moved everything over to vespa yet, so I’m stuck doing most school work on agrippa but now that I’ve tasted the speed and luxury of vespa, I don’t want to work on agrippa at all! Oh, the agony. 
In any case, my main resolution is to try and use more of the native Mac applications for things (rely on Safari instead of Firefox for browsing, Mail instead of NetNewsWire for RSS feeds, Address Book instead of Palm, iCal instead of GoogleCalendar via Firefox, etc…). So far this seems feasible. Most of these applications were underdeveloped in past versions of the Mac OS but now they seem pretty well put together and evolved. When I get back from Hawaii on the 18th, I’m hoping to be on vespa full-time. Can’t wait!
I’m going to try to keep the number of miscellaneous technical posts to a minimum (and all of them will have the bulk below the fold), but occasionally I will throw up some installation notes or some other such gobbledy-gook either for myself down the road or for anyone else that might find it useful. In any case, about six months ago I installed Beamer, the package for the LaTeX typesetting program that allows you to make pdf presentation files. It was not as straightforward as I thought it should be, so I tried to write down my steps as best I could…
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