Full screen apps!

I have to say that I LOVE full screen. Nice move Apple! Bold, but soo nice!

I use it for everything - just wish MicroSoft would get moving an adopt their Word to proper full screen too. Sure, you can have Word in full screen, but then Word is restored to window mode every time you do something else, like change to a different space or indeed get a reference from Papers. Just awful design that..

Anyway, back to full screen apps. I feel joy and happiness now - finally I can get a terminal in full screen again. Coming from a *NIX background, this feels like coming home.

Thank you Apple!

Will watch Apple Special event cast today

Yes, I have to admit that I am more than a bit excited. :-)

The missing setup for Mac

This one should have been included by default. I you, like me, still like the old tools best and think power is king, you'll soon discover that Apple has a not provided all the glue needed to fit the two worlds together nicely. All text in OS X should be UTF-8, right? So, how come for instance an R session started within ESS of Aquamacs provides garbled text for non-ascii characters then?

Well, the problem lies in the old LANG environment variable. R expects it provide it with the LOCALE settings to use, and within an Aquamacs/ESS session, you'll get this:

Sys.getenv('LANG')
LANG 

""

which means that the session will use the default "C" locale (I think). Not very useful for UTF-8 text, as you'll get lots of funny looking double characters.

The solution is to do this in your terminal:

defaults write ~/.MacOSX/environment LANG sv_SE.UTF-8
defaults write ~/.MacOSX/environment LC_ALL sv_SE.UTF-8

(for instance, for Swedish locale and UTF-8 encoding) and re-login. (Log out and log in again)

This will push the same settings to R and Aquamacs, and the settings will stay. Nice! Finally we can all start using Emacs again :-)

Mind mapping software - XMind is excellent, byt stay away from Pro

I've been using Mind mapping for a while now, and also been evaluating a number of different tools for that purpose. Stayed with MindMeister for a while, but the limitations of it made no sense in the end, despite the nice collaboration features.

Recently, though, I found XMind - a eclipse product reshaped into a mind mapping tool. Excellent features, nice layout options and nice maps. Just excellent, for a free service. The pro account did, however, not meet my expectations: have a look at my evaluation map :-) here:

 

 

 

 

Stupid reporters

There is a story out right now concerning Apples' "traking of iPhone users". Stories like this one is circulating, and people are generally concerned about Apple being evil and that Apple might be able  to tell where and when you where somewhere. It's all very crazy.

According to more careful reporting (http://www.willclarke.net/?p=247) however, most of what is claimed in the stories is almost true, highly exaggerated or just plain wrong. It seems that the device is not tracking the location of the device itself, but rather the coordinates of cell towers it is connected too (along with connection details). This puts you, as a user, quite often anywhere within an area of 1500 m radius or more, which is hardly conclusive in most matters concerning personal privacy. It is also highly in accurate and quite often just plain wrong, which means that there are plausible deniability for anything that you may be doing which you should not be doing (or something like that.. I'm not sure about this privacy issue in general, to be honest).

Second, the data does not seem to leave your computer at any point. So, who is tracking you? I might be tracking myself without me knowing it ;-) but as for Apple, I feel quite safe. :-)

 

Stupid reporters.

What he said

Could not agree more:

http://www.terminally-incoherent.com/blog/2008/07/29/ms-office-addiction/

http://www.terminally-incoherent.com/blog/2008/08/13/no-one-uses-gpg-with-outlook/

iPhone keyboard too small? Use the one on your computer instead ...

There are applications on the iPhone that wants you to write longer things. An excellent example is the Momento App which is a very nice way to keep a diary, complete with all of your web presence. Though, of course, if you'd like to write a longer piece about your day, you quickly find that the small keyboard on the iPhone is very much a limitation. You simply do not write as much, and as quickly, on the small keyboard.

Of course, you could prepare a message and then send it to yourself through email. Too complicatd for me though, so I never to it. Also, you could buy a bluetooth keyboard, but if you really don't need it for something else.. this is a bit much just for keeping your diary. Also, a keyboard is still another thing to bring with you, and as you may have a computer and iPhone with you already, this is already becoming too much.

Enter myPhoneDesktop. Simple desktop (Mac, Windows or Linux) or even web client which connects to software on your iPhone. Through this connection, you can easilly transfer text, links and images or place a call through the phone or skype on the phone to a number that you send to the phone. Or, from your phone to your desktop.

Neat stuff. No need to carry an external keyboard around if you already have a computer with bluetooth! :-)