Assorted Experience

I don't deal with political topics here. But there were some thoughts I had on this fad going around on income inequality. If you take a look at this report by the economist the claim is that while the income disparity between 99% of the people in the US hasn't changed much that between the 99% and the 1% has changed a lot. I can see in my mind's eye some person or persons with a definite political agenda sitting at their software and moving a slider control. They first split the population 50/50 and grunt with dissatisfaction. They move it to 25/75. Still not so good. Then they get all excited and move it all the way to 1/99. Yay! Look at THAT income disparity. I have a few concerns about this graph. Perhaps someone can enlighten me? If I took the top 1% of a distribution MOST measures I would make using that 1% would be biased in some extreme way. There is no way I could stop that, because I took an extreme part of the population to start with. I'm taking a f...

Open image in Preview.app, "print" and save as pdf Open pdf you want to add to Open the pages pane Drag and drop the image pdf you just created into the pages pane (in whatever sequence you want it) Preview.app will show the pdf to be "edited" Save the pdf You can directly drag and drop the image file from the Finder into the pages pane. This will, however, add a white border round the image.

iTunes is annoying because clicking "+" (maximize) moves it to mini-player mode. Holding down "option" when clicking "+" will make it work like mazimize

Holding down "shift" when you press "reply" or "forward" causes emails to be composed in HTML in thunderbird. Probably the most useful tip I have seen.

From here On client Mac startup X11.app and check preferences->Security->"Allow connections from network clients" Open an xterm from the X11.app menu ssh into host machine with the X flag (from the xterm) ssh y.y.y.y -X -luser Everything works (even with firewall on), no need to set DISPLAY etc.

New HDD was cut into two partitions and win xp was installed on one. Ubuntu was installed off a USB stick "Install alongside Win XP" was chosen. This correctly used the empty (unformatted) partition for Linux, with appropriate swap space choice. Ssh needs to be installed - can be installed through the package manager. I used a metapackage to install both client and server. The changes took effect immediately (no restart or manually starting server). I went from not being able to ssh into the machine from my mac to being able to. Python 2.6 comes installed sudo apt-get python-pip sudo pip install ipython sudo apt-get install python-matplotlib The Unity Launcher cannot be configured to be at the bottom. Idiots. sudo apt-get install aptitude install kubuntu-desktop via aptitude (picked kdm as display manager) Muon package manager has authentication problems (can't authenticate - Muon creator says it is a policykit problem). Idiots Uninstall KDE and go back to Un...

Follow the instructions here . For Lion /etc/hostconfig seems to be going away.

Most impressed by migration: just needed to hook up my time machine disk to the new machine in in 2 hours my WHOLE computer was transplanted onto the new mac, including applications and frameworks. When I went to run eclipse (Helios) I was asked to install java runtime, which the OS installer found and installed by itself. The fast login switching, not so useful for single user laptops and also takes up menubar space with your name can be removed from system preferences ( here ). Spaces threw me: from here , we see that the way to add new spaces is to go into misson control (middle click) and then move the pointer to the top right hand corner to add a new desktop. To use the existing time machine backup (so you keep your history etc), however, all the files seem to be copied over afresh - so you get a new snapshot which uses a lot of space - the first new backup is not incremental. The screen looks different - the colors are brighter - but perhaps my old macbook's lcd was jus...