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: