February 27, 2007 by kirkjobsluder.

I’m a download junkie. Sometimes I find a tool that takes some twiddling to discover what it is good for, and sometimes I open up a tool and find an immediate use.

GrandPerspective is a disk space visualization tool for OS X that shows you how much space is taken up by individual files and directories. Immediately when I opened it up, I noticed a big, obsolete VirtualPC disk image that was taking up 15Gig of space. Among other things it gives you a nice idea of the relative size of various files.

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February 3, 2007 by kirkjobsluder.

The procrastination exercise for today involved converting my thesis into a more readable form than requested by the graduate school. I find double-spaced text and narrow margins to be rather irritating to read. And the surprising lesson of the exercise was that good typography and margins does not necessarily save you much in paper. What you save by single-spacing is lost to the sensible margins. (I could go even more sensible, but I really don’t want to plow through and reformat all the tables and graphics.)

In the process I found TeXniscope which is a nice pdf/dvi viewer for OS X. It automatically reloads changed pdf files, an issue that drove me crazy with OS X Preview, and it has functions that allow to click on a section of a PDF document and automatically open the LaTeX source file. There is also a function that will automatically open a PDF file to the proper section from an Emacs LaTeX buffer. Unfortunately this doesn’t quite work out of the box with Aquamacs. I hacked together an alternative configuration file (11KB zip) that should do the trick. Unzip and follow the directions in the txs-search.el header.

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January 26, 2007 by kirkjobsluder.

A while ago I switched my email over to Apple’s creatively named Mail.app to take advantage of applescript integration with other software packages. One of my frustrations with it though was the poor performance of the default junk mail filter. Over the last two weeks, JunkMatcher has proven to be an effective bit of software for catching those unwanted spam messages. I am also interested in the fact that it’s developed using PyObjC which builds applications with the Macintosh look and feel in Python. I’ve been wanting to get into Macintosh GUI programming but have not wanted to learn yet another language to do it.

Another bit of freeware/donationware I’m experimenting with is RPN Calculator which is purely a geek thing. It is a nicely well-designed cross-platform Reverse Polish Notation calculator which will probably be very handy when I start my taxes.

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