Today I finally received an Apple MacPro I ordered several months (!!!) ago. I thought I would quickly review my first impressions.

• The machine is sexy. There is no other word for it. My Linux box looks like a russian car (not insult intended toward the russian folks) in comparison.
• The machine is fast, but it takes forever to boot up. It takes longer to boot than a slow Linux box that has 12,000 boot-level services.
• Took me some time to find out where the console is, but once you have it, you can create a link on your desktop. The console is good, comparable to what you have under Linux. It looks like it uses bash by default. However, I do not seem to have color support in the shell. No hint anywhere how to turn it on. (Update. Will says to check an article on macosxhints for the color support, but says he prefers iTerm.)
• The on-disk help is pretty good. Clearly, Apple cares about helping you find a solution to your problems. Unlike Microsoft who is happy to confuse you into depression. (And Linux, well… Linux has Google as documentation…)
• The machine comes with lots of preinstalled software. I don’t know what any of it does so far, but it looks like Apple is not cheap software-wise.
• The keyboard French Canadian layout sucks. It differs from the established standard found in both Windows and Linux.
• I could not find the equivalent of the “Home” and “End” keys. I still don’t know where they are. This means that it takes five minutes to select the content of a text box.
• Having the menu all the way to the top of the screen is really a drag when you have two screens. When my application is on the second screen and I need to go in its menu, I have to go back to the first screen, move up and click on the menu.
• It took two of us about 15 minutes to even find out if I had a DVD reader. Turns out I do, but it does not appear anywhere. I can open it by pressing one of the keys on the keyboard (the “eject key”).
• Setting up a ssh server was not too hard. It looks like I can manage my Mac from home just like a Linux box. So far so good. Though I don’t have gcc up and running yet. My main problem is that the connection speed with my lab. is not great, but the sysadmin, Mihai, says it will get better.
• You can configure the mouse so that you have an actual right button. Very nice. You can even configure it as a 3-button mouse. Excellent! Those of you who don’t know why you need 3 buttons clearly are missing on some great classical software such as xfig.
• Installing Firefox (first thing I did) created some kind of “mounted disk” that now resides on my desktop. When trying to put this useless icon in the garbage can, the machine complained that it could not unmount the disk. Which disk? I suppose that what I downloaded was some kind of disk image that MacOS mounts as a virtual disk. Fine. But how do I get rid of it now that Firefox is installed? There must be a trick to it.
• Security seems weak. It appears that I can install everything using my initial account. No root account? (Or maybe I have both a user and root account? I’m confused.)
• The second thing I installed was Fink. Fink is the MacOS equivalent of “apt-get” (debian) or “portage” (gentoo) or “rpm” (redhat/mandriva). Took me some doing to get it running, and it seems very useful, though, by default, very few packages are available. I tried moving to CVS access which opens up many more packages, but it said, quite rudely, that I needed something called dev-tools. Alas, doing sudo apt-get install dev-tools fails with a comment to the effect that there is no such package. The command sudo fink install dev-tools is more informative as it tells you to go and register as a developer with Apple. You are supposed to guess that dev-tools is “Apple talk” for a package called xcode. I did find it, sold my soul to Apple, and now I’m downloading a huge image of what I hope is the dev-tools thing. This file is really gigantic (1GiB!). By the way, I do this remotely so I had to do sudo apt-get links to use the links browser (links is really a good browser). So far so good. I just hope I’ll be able to mount the disk image I’m downloading through my ssh access. The command hdiutil attach allows one to mount dmg files. It looks like cd /Volumes/Xcode Tools; sudo installer -pkg XcodeTools.mpkg -target / will install Xcode without any need for a GUI. Oh! And fink install python cvs svn gnuplot gnuplot-py xfig kile tetex transfig anacron numeric wine pdftk imagemagick swig koffice kopete looks like a decent way to start. I still don’t know whether it will work, but there is a detailed page on building KDE on Mac.

References:

• Great list of open source applications for MacOS
• Google software for MacOS

Scott asks whether Smart People Dumb? He tells the tale of when he joined Mensa and found out that, while these people have high IQ, they may not be the winners you expect them to be:

It turns out that the people who join Mensa and attend meetings are, on average, not successful titans of industry. They are instead – and I say this with great affection – huge losers. I was making $735 per month and I was like frickin’ Goldfinger in this crowd. We had a guy who was some sort of poet who hoped to one day start “writing some of them down.” We had people who were literally too smart to hold a job. The rest of the group dressed too much like street people to ever get past security for a job interview. And everyone was always available for meetings on weekend nights.

I don’t know whether I’m a high IQ person, but I can tell you that I’m the typical nerd who has trouble to manage his life. It is a miracle if I have a beautiful wife and great healthy kids (actually, it is really a miracle, but I’ll tell this tale another day). Over time, I have managed to find tricks to manage my life so that it does not suck. But they are just that, tricks. The real me is very bad at the basics of life.

Money for example. I’m really bad with money. Not so much because I spend it all. In fact, spending money is work, so I tend to be very frugal. Still, I can’t manage a budget. I never know how much I have left in my bank account. My wife recently decided to handle our finances and I bet this is making me much richer.

Getting organized for example. I’m terrible at structuring my work in any way, shape or form. I improvise all the time. This, initially, made me a terrible teacher, but I have since learned ways to compensate. This has also made me a terrible researcher, initially, but again, I have found ways to compensate for this weakness.

Now, I sure hope that I have a high IQ, because otherwise, it would be depressing to have all these weaknesses without the brain power that goes with it. It would be like being Superman without the superpowers, but with the kryptonite weakness. But I sure don’t feel supersmart, so I wouldn’t rule it out.

This has been know for some time, but in vitro kids have an higher IQ than the average (whether IQ is an accurate measure of intelligence is a debate better left for another day). Even advanced in vitro techniques lead to smarter kids.

So, people, if you want to have smart kids, in vitro is the way to go!

Consider, also, as a factor, that in vitro mothers are more likely to keep their kids at home with them. Some have argued that in vitro kids suffer from delayed social development. Yet, interestingly, they don’t suffer for delayed intellectual development, quite the opposite apparently.

I think we still need to learn a lot about what makes a smart kid.

It used to be that Google’s RSS reader was a catastrophe, but it is now pretty good and pretty smart. Google has turned things around. I’ve switched to it two days ago. The UI is still trying a bit too hard for my taste, but I guess you have to account for the fact that it is still slightly experimental.

Oh! And can we, please, get over the round corners? I actually like rectangular shapes. The Web 2.0 look where everything is round and smooth is really a fad and we will look back on these Web designs, in five years, with a fair amount of disgust.

The really nice thing about Google Reader is that when you scroll down past an item, it marks it automatically as read. At least, this is the default behavior. I found that one annoying thing with most readers is how they either required me to manually marked items as read, or they used a “delay then mark read” approach. I much prefer the Google Reader approach.

See http://www.google.com/reader/.

In general, about RSS/Atom feeds, I have learn that you should not maintain more than 25 or so feeds. It is quite tempting, especially when you are bored or stressed out, to add more and more feeds. I find it is better to migrate and slowly change your list of feeds. Let us call this “RSS hygiene“. You don’t keep 50 books open on your desk, do you? You do not follow 50 TV shows, do you? You do not read simultaneously 50 novels, do you? Why is 25 a good number? Because, on an average day, you will have no more than 5 new posts to read, maybe 10 at the outmost.

One side effect of limiting yourself to few feeds is that you tend to go for quality. What about diversity? What about the long tail, you ask? I think you simply outgrow some of the feeds over time and will naturally replace them. If you are like me, your interests change over time and so will your feeds.

And this whole argument justifies the fact that “feed recommender systems” have never really picked up any steam. People don’t want lots of feed proposals, not most of the time. They want to carefully choose any new feed, and that is not something that can be done automatically.

SRU (Search/Retrieve via URL) is an interesting REST Web Service protocol.

Enough technobabble. Let’s run an example.

Suppose you want to retrieve the data that the library of congress has on a book called “First Impressions of the New World” by “Trotter Isabella Strange”, you issue the following query (follow the hyperlink for the XML result):

(dc.title=”First Impressions of the New World”) and (dc.creator all “Trotter Isabella Strange”)

You want to use this in software? Download my corresponding Perl and Python code examples: srucodeexamples.zip.

Further reading: See the wikipedia entry or even better, check the refbase entry.

(Special thanks to Owen Kaser for making me discover this exciting new technology.)