Whether you love or hate computers, they're a necessary tool in today's world. I gave up on Windoze back in the days of Windows 3.1 and have never really looked back. My day-to-day computer use is with a Mac (MacBook Pro 13.3", 15", or a MacPro quadcore at my desk). I am always amused when people sneer at my use of Macs and say that they're "too expensive."
I have done many cost comparisons of Macs vs. generic laptops and the costs are about the same for equivalent horsepower. Yes, you can get a cheaper tower or desktop from the PC world and run Linux and you'll have a machine that's roughly equivalent in reliability and speed to my Mac. I can work fluidly in both the Mac and Linux worlds because they're both *nix-based environments and I'm very comfortable using *nix tools.
One reason I have no trouble moving back and forth between Linux and Mac is that I use, essentially, the same tool-set on both platforms. I use Emacs, LaTeX, Python, Firefox, Gimp, Inkscape (though on the Mac I prefer Illustrator as Inkscape just isn't quite there yet), and OpenOffice. Yes, these programs also run in Windoze but I haven't had any need to use Windoze for my daily work in over a decade.
There are a few programs that I find quite handy in the Mac world that don't have direct equivalents in the Linux world: Kaleidagraph, IgorPro, and Skim (a pdf viewer/editor). I also use a program called Papers for managing my voluminous collection of pdfs. There may be roughly equivalent packages in the Linux world or the Windoze world but I haven't found them yet and I haven't needed to go looking.
My lab personnel are perfectly happy using Windoze and I haven't made any strong efforts to pull them away from the platform. We have one section of our lab that is very computer ignorant and they have weekly problems with viruses and hardware failures, largely due to their unwillingness to do the things that I (and my support engineer!) have suggested to prevent their computer headaches. They suffer because they refuse to be more sensible and learn how to use the tool more effectively and safely.
Contrary to popular belief, I don't hate Windoze—I just find the user environment (yes, even Windoze 7!) unnecessarily obtuse and illogically organized. Yes, I'm sure I would "get used to it" over time if I were forced to use Windoze but, luckily, I'm not in that position. I can use whatever operating system and applications I like as long as I'm productive. I choose to use a computing environment that makes it easier for me to be productive and Mac/Linux/Unix tools are the foundation for my productivity.
Sunday, December 12, 2010
Tuesday, November 23, 2010
Winter falls....
I just got back from one of the BIG annual meetings (in San Diego this year) and it was a blast. I met a lot of great new people, saw some good work, and learned some new things about Python and some other good scientific software.
The weather here in Cleveland has been very warm since I got back from the Left Coast and that's always surprising during this time of year. Even though Winter is the most challenging season for us since we aren't particularly keen on a five month period of grey and cold, we DO have our indoor hobbies to keep us occupied. I have two guitars to build this winter, well one to finish and one to start and complete. So, with the Winter hobbies, the long cold-grey is at least bearable.
In other news, I now have a car. For the first time since 2004. I'm not a big fan of cars in general because they end up as money pits and I find driving with four wheels on the ground quite boring. My motorcycle will always be my favorite form of transportation. In this case, because my wife and I are zooming around with crazy schedules, a second car is going to be very handy. We had already been talking about buying a second car when a deal came along that I couldn't pass up. Ruth's friend Walt was visiting from Florida and mentioned that he needed to unload his Audi A4 due to neighborhood association rules (typical BS!) and did we happen to know anyone that would be interested in buying the car? I quickly made him aware that we were keen on buying it and would be happy to help him out.
Walt drove the car up last Friday and I took it to the shop today to get it checked out and have some small things fixed but it looks like a nice little car. I'll let you know how it does. I find it strange to drive a car after being without for so long and having Ruth do most of the driving. Yet, like riding a bicycle, it comes back quickly.
The weather here in Cleveland has been very warm since I got back from the Left Coast and that's always surprising during this time of year. Even though Winter is the most challenging season for us since we aren't particularly keen on a five month period of grey and cold, we DO have our indoor hobbies to keep us occupied. I have two guitars to build this winter, well one to finish and one to start and complete. So, with the Winter hobbies, the long cold-grey is at least bearable.
In other news, I now have a car. For the first time since 2004. I'm not a big fan of cars in general because they end up as money pits and I find driving with four wheels on the ground quite boring. My motorcycle will always be my favorite form of transportation. In this case, because my wife and I are zooming around with crazy schedules, a second car is going to be very handy. We had already been talking about buying a second car when a deal came along that I couldn't pass up. Ruth's friend Walt was visiting from Florida and mentioned that he needed to unload his Audi A4 due to neighborhood association rules (typical BS!) and did we happen to know anyone that would be interested in buying the car? I quickly made him aware that we were keen on buying it and would be happy to help him out.
Walt drove the car up last Friday and I took it to the shop today to get it checked out and have some small things fixed but it looks like a nice little car. I'll let you know how it does. I find it strange to drive a car after being without for so long and having Ruth do most of the driving. Yet, like riding a bicycle, it comes back quickly.
Saturday, June 19, 2010
Summertime, and the living ain't easy...
Forgive my bastardization of that classic standard's first line but, as I've mentioned before, Summer is the busiest time of the year for me. My laboratory takes in students from various programs and I have promised my chief tech that I would back off from taking in more students. So, I did—by one when compared to last year. ;-) However, in my defense, we have some EXCELLENT students in the lab this Summer.
Aside from trying to get them up and running, all is proceeding apace and I hope to even get some time in the lab for my own experiments. We have the newest version of RTXI up and running so we'll FINALLY be able to do some of the dynamic clamp experiments I've been dying to do for a few years.
In other news, I'm trying to figure out what my "minimal software set" is for my Macintosh. I have a laundry list of proprietary and open source software that I use and I want to pare that down to the minimum. I'll keep you posted!
Aside from trying to get them up and running, all is proceeding apace and I hope to even get some time in the lab for my own experiments. We have the newest version of RTXI up and running so we'll FINALLY be able to do some of the dynamic clamp experiments I've been dying to do for a few years.
In other news, I'm trying to figure out what my "minimal software set" is for my Macintosh. I have a laundry list of proprietary and open source software that I use and I want to pare that down to the minimum. I'll keep you posted!
Sunday, March 28, 2010
Work, work, work...
I am still catching up from the trip in February! That's life. My rule of thumb has been that, for every day I'm gone, it takes me three days to catch up. I think that ratio may no longer be true and it may be more like 1:4 or 1:5. I am not sure why this has shifted, frankly. Much of the blame probably relies with me and how I process my tasks.
I have been working on improving my efficiency so I have been reading a lot of management-type books that are focused on streamlining task management and improving one's ability to deal with a "To Do" list. Dave Allen's "Getting Things Done" method is useful and, while I've read the book before, I have a renewed commitment to using his methods to handle my work load more effectively.
A big help in this area has been org-mode for emacs. I've been using emacs for about a decade now and I find it the most sensible way for me to work. I like using plain text for all of my files but I have a difficult time getting collaborators to work with LaTeX/TeX files that I produce and, after using org-mode for a few months, I've moved away from writing straight LaTeX and instead, I'm using org-mode for my note taking and outlines for manuscripts. I haven't yet played with the spreadsheet features in org-mode but I am getting more interested in using webdav to publish my To Do list to my iPod Touch so I have the updated version on hand all of the time.
I use iCal at work on my main desktop computer so I am tied to an Apple product for my calendar needs (at the moment). Org-mode has a nice agenda minor mode that would probably be more sensible for me to switch to since I use various computers throughout the week and they aren't all Mac OS based. So when I'm using Linux or (on very rare occasions) Windoze, I need to have some way to deal with my calendar that is multi-platform. I do have my iCal calendar publish to my Google cloud apps so I have access to it as long as I have web access but it would be more sensible to have it pushed out to a device (either my CrackBerry or the iPod Touch that I carry). I'll keep you posted on how this all goes.
In the mean time, please feel free to send any ideas or comments about work efficiency. I really need to become more productive just to keep up with my work responsibilities. Of course this would help me keep on top of things that I need to get done at home too! :-)
I have been working on improving my efficiency so I have been reading a lot of management-type books that are focused on streamlining task management and improving one's ability to deal with a "To Do" list. Dave Allen's "Getting Things Done" method is useful and, while I've read the book before, I have a renewed commitment to using his methods to handle my work load more effectively.
A big help in this area has been org-mode for emacs. I've been using emacs for about a decade now and I find it the most sensible way for me to work. I like using plain text for all of my files but I have a difficult time getting collaborators to work with LaTeX/TeX files that I produce and, after using org-mode for a few months, I've moved away from writing straight LaTeX and instead, I'm using org-mode for my note taking and outlines for manuscripts. I haven't yet played with the spreadsheet features in org-mode but I am getting more interested in using webdav to publish my To Do list to my iPod Touch so I have the updated version on hand all of the time.
I use iCal at work on my main desktop computer so I am tied to an Apple product for my calendar needs (at the moment). Org-mode has a nice agenda minor mode that would probably be more sensible for me to switch to since I use various computers throughout the week and they aren't all Mac OS based. So when I'm using Linux or (on very rare occasions) Windoze, I need to have some way to deal with my calendar that is multi-platform. I do have my iCal calendar publish to my Google cloud apps so I have access to it as long as I have web access but it would be more sensible to have it pushed out to a device (either my CrackBerry or the iPod Touch that I carry). I'll keep you posted on how this all goes.
In the mean time, please feel free to send any ideas or comments about work efficiency. I really need to become more productive just to keep up with my work responsibilities. Of course this would help me keep on top of things that I need to get done at home too! :-)
Thursday, February 11, 2010
Two weeks
The last two weeks have been tough. My grandmother and my great uncle both passed away. They were in their late 80s and had been devoted and hard-working. They had good lives and I was very gratified to see so many people come for the funerals and share their stories and appreciation for my grandmother and uncle.
We drove down to Florida for my grandmother's funeral and then we came up through Georgia, S. Carolina, N. Carolina, and Maryland (I was to give a couple of talks at Johns Hopkins) before heading for Cleveland last Thursday morning. Friday was spent catching up on emails, to the best of my abilities, and then Saturday I received the call from my Mom about my uncle passing. I made reservations to fly down to Dallas, meet my Mom, pick up a rental car, and then drive to Corsicana for the funeral on Monday morning.
The funeral was sad but it was very good to see my cousins and more extended family, many of whom I haven't seen in over 20 years. So we helped each other get through the sad parts and enjoyed catching up with each other.
One ripple triggered by these events has been a renewed commitment on both Ruth's and my part to put our families and friends higher on our list of priorities. We feel like we've neglected many people whom we have been close to and have been very supportive of us over the years. Frankly, we need to change and do a better job of showing our appreciation for people we care deeply about. I'm afraid that we're both bad about writing and sending "thank yous" and holiday cards. We will have to do better.
We drove down to Florida for my grandmother's funeral and then we came up through Georgia, S. Carolina, N. Carolina, and Maryland (I was to give a couple of talks at Johns Hopkins) before heading for Cleveland last Thursday morning. Friday was spent catching up on emails, to the best of my abilities, and then Saturday I received the call from my Mom about my uncle passing. I made reservations to fly down to Dallas, meet my Mom, pick up a rental car, and then drive to Corsicana for the funeral on Monday morning.
The funeral was sad but it was very good to see my cousins and more extended family, many of whom I haven't seen in over 20 years. So we helped each other get through the sad parts and enjoyed catching up with each other.
One ripple triggered by these events has been a renewed commitment on both Ruth's and my part to put our families and friends higher on our list of priorities. We feel like we've neglected many people whom we have been close to and have been very supportive of us over the years. Frankly, we need to change and do a better job of showing our appreciation for people we care deeply about. I'm afraid that we're both bad about writing and sending "thank yous" and holiday cards. We will have to do better.
Tuesday, November 24, 2009
Long time no see!!
Well folks, I realize it has been a very, very long time since I updated ye olde blog. One reason it has been so long is that I've debated keeping everything up and running on my old xrismon.org site. I finally decided to shut it down and archived everything that was on the site. Tough decision as I had that site up and running basically continuously since 1999. Oh well. Blogspot seems like it's a bit more stable than the hosting companies I 'rassled with over the last decade.
Work has been work. Lots of it and lots of interesting data coming up. I do need to get some papers out and have been pushing various members of the lab (students, post-docs, etc.) to finish up the holes in their projects and get things wrapped up. I need to start working on a renewal and have a few more experiments to do. We have been battling with the folks above my pay-grade to get support for the basics that a research lab needs over the last 8 months and I'm growing weary of that so I need to make sure we are as financially independent as possible.
Away from work we have had a busy year. We finally felt compelled to break down and have the house stripped all the way to the wood siding and then repainted (don't worry, it's the same cheery yellow that it was before!). That whole process took three months (crappy weather in Cleveland this year did NOT help) and nearly brought us to the point of violence. I have been told that this is "normal" when dealing with this kind of project. Hmmmm. Anyway, the house looks great and our long-suffering neighbors now tell me that it was worth it.
I have finally managed to cycle back to working on the green Telecaster project (see my Facebook page) as the weather has turned cold-ish again. I'm finishing up with the clearcoat and electronics and should have it put together in the not-too-distant future (I know, I know—I said that six months ago!). I'll post pics on the Facebook page for you all. Also, when I'm not reading work-related stuff, I've been reading through John Scalzi's work. If you're a Heinlein fan and enjoy good contemporary sci-fi, get 'em and read 'em!
Work has been work. Lots of it and lots of interesting data coming up. I do need to get some papers out and have been pushing various members of the lab (students, post-docs, etc.) to finish up the holes in their projects and get things wrapped up. I need to start working on a renewal and have a few more experiments to do. We have been battling with the folks above my pay-grade to get support for the basics that a research lab needs over the last 8 months and I'm growing weary of that so I need to make sure we are as financially independent as possible.
Away from work we have had a busy year. We finally felt compelled to break down and have the house stripped all the way to the wood siding and then repainted (don't worry, it's the same cheery yellow that it was before!). That whole process took three months (crappy weather in Cleveland this year did NOT help) and nearly brought us to the point of violence. I have been told that this is "normal" when dealing with this kind of project. Hmmmm. Anyway, the house looks great and our long-suffering neighbors now tell me that it was worth it.
I have finally managed to cycle back to working on the green Telecaster project (see my Facebook page) as the weather has turned cold-ish again. I'm finishing up with the clearcoat and electronics and should have it put together in the not-too-distant future (I know, I know—I said that six months ago!). I'll post pics on the Facebook page for you all. Also, when I'm not reading work-related stuff, I've been reading through John Scalzi's work. If you're a Heinlein fan and enjoy good contemporary sci-fi, get 'em and read 'em!
Saturday, July 4, 2009
Independence Day
Happy 4th of July!! Unfortunately, our original plans for the holiday have fallen by the wayside. We had planned on going down to Richmond, VA to spend the weekend with my cousin and his family but, alas, my wife was suffering with illness so we ended up staying in Cleveland. The weather today is great so that's at least a plus.
Yesterday was the first day in many, many weeks that I've taken a full day off from work. Even when I've traveled over the last few weeks it has been FOR work. So yesterday was very refreshing. We slept in ('til 8am—I can't sleep in longer than that any more without feeling horrible for the rest of the day) and I got up and made us breakfast, we puttered around the house, did some reading, my wife worked in the garden while I tinkered with Boxee (which really rocks!) and then we went out shopping for grocs and house/guitar repair supplies before settling in to watch a movie and have a late dinner. I managed to link my Netflix account to my Boxee account and now can watch (some, as I didn't realize that I had to actually ADD the streamable movie to my Instant queue until this morning) streamed flicks on our 22" HD TV by connecting the MacBook Pro to it.
Some of the streamed flicks look like crap and others look pretty good. I've been waiting for truly individually-selectable downloadable content for a LONG time. Ken Thompson was working on this at Bell Labs before he retired and WIRED magazine interviewed him about downloadable music about 15 years ago—long before mp3/mp4 ripping and the iPod changed the world of digital media. I know that this has been available for a while since my brother had a TiVO early on and another friend here in Cleve had a Windows Media Center BUT I was never very impressed by those options; particularly since they weren't very Mac-friendly.
I take a lot of ribbing for being a "mac guy" but, this past week, I discovered that, by using VirtualBox, I can use Oberon, a comp-language/operating system that I used to tinker with back in the early 90's. Sweet! Unfortunately, I don't have the time to play with it much but the fact that I can run native Mac apps, Windoze (currently running the 7RC), whichever Linux distros I want to try at the time, and now Oberon really impresses people. Of course it certainly helps that I'm pretty computer savvy and don't have much trouble getting the virtual environments up and running on my Mac and don't have much trouble learning new environments well enough to get productive quickly.
The MacBook Pro is quite speedy with just about everything that I've thrown at it and seems almost as fast as my MacPro tower that I use at my desk at work. With the speed of the core-duo cpu and the ready availability of tools like VirtualBox, I can play with just about any piece of software I would like to. I don't have time for computer gaming any more so that's not a limiting factor for me (we bought a PS2 a few years ago and that satisfies all of our gaming needs at the moment though I'm tempted by the PS3 for the bluray capabilities) and I use a pretty limited set of software for most of my work. I write my papers in emacs using LaTeX (which handles layout AND bibliography generation with BibTeX), draw vector things in Illustrator or Inkscape, do bitmap editing in GIMP, data analysis in Python, and—if forced to—can access Mickeysoft Word/Excel/PPT stuff in OpenOffice. As you can see, most of these are FREELY available multi-platform tools (Illustrator is the exception but you can get that for Mac or Win). I'll freely admit that I do use lots of Mac-specific apps like Pages (which is SO much better than Word!), iPhoto, iMovie, iTunes, Papers, and some LaTeX/BibTex "helper" tools that are written for MacOS but only for convenience sake and I actually know of (mostly) equivalent tools in the Win and Linux worlds so I could pretty easily switch and still be productive. But why bother when the Mac allows me to do EVERYTHING I need to do and I don't have to sweat as many viral/security issues as the poor Windoze users deal with.
In other news, last Monday was our 8th year wedding anniversary and we had a nice dinner out at a great local Indian restaurant and my wife bought me a new money clip (believe me, this is a good thing) and a 22" Samsung monitor that is gorgeous. So I'm one step closer to having a nice media jukebox and digital audio workstation in my study upstairs. The key component of that DAW/jukebox system is currently my old PowerMac G5.
The G5 was originally my desk machine at work from 2004 through 2009. I bought the MacPro to replace it and then moved the G5 to one of my students' rigs. Unfortunately, the poor G5 couldn't run our electrophysiology software, the camera controller/acquisition software, and our digital chart recording software all at the same time without completely choking. We replaced the G5 at the students' rig with a nice quad-core Windoze box because that's what the student was most comfortable with and that level of hardware was required to do everything in near real-time under windoze. Then the G5 was moved under the desk of one of the post-docs in the lab to serve as his main machine since he was tired of lugging his laptop in to work every day. That didn't work either—too slow for the immunoimaging work that he was doing, he said. Sooo, the poor rejected G5 is back in my hands. Hooked up to the new monitor, the G5 seems to run just fine for most web-browsing, Python coding, and LaTeX stuff so I'll use it for the things I typically do and my MacBook Pro can handle all the heavy lifting that I need to do for fancy graphics and data analysis.
Alright, off to clean the house, practice guitar, maybe get a nice motorcycle ride in, and then off to friends' for social bonding and blowing stuff up! :-)
Yesterday was the first day in many, many weeks that I've taken a full day off from work. Even when I've traveled over the last few weeks it has been FOR work. So yesterday was very refreshing. We slept in ('til 8am—I can't sleep in longer than that any more without feeling horrible for the rest of the day) and I got up and made us breakfast, we puttered around the house, did some reading, my wife worked in the garden while I tinkered with Boxee (which really rocks!) and then we went out shopping for grocs and house/guitar repair supplies before settling in to watch a movie and have a late dinner. I managed to link my Netflix account to my Boxee account and now can watch (some, as I didn't realize that I had to actually ADD the streamable movie to my Instant queue until this morning) streamed flicks on our 22" HD TV by connecting the MacBook Pro to it.
Some of the streamed flicks look like crap and others look pretty good. I've been waiting for truly individually-selectable downloadable content for a LONG time. Ken Thompson was working on this at Bell Labs before he retired and WIRED magazine interviewed him about downloadable music about 15 years ago—long before mp3/mp4 ripping and the iPod changed the world of digital media. I know that this has been available for a while since my brother had a TiVO early on and another friend here in Cleve had a Windows Media Center BUT I was never very impressed by those options; particularly since they weren't very Mac-friendly.
I take a lot of ribbing for being a "mac guy" but, this past week, I discovered that, by using VirtualBox, I can use Oberon, a comp-language/operating system that I used to tinker with back in the early 90's. Sweet! Unfortunately, I don't have the time to play with it much but the fact that I can run native Mac apps, Windoze (currently running the 7RC), whichever Linux distros I want to try at the time, and now Oberon really impresses people. Of course it certainly helps that I'm pretty computer savvy and don't have much trouble getting the virtual environments up and running on my Mac and don't have much trouble learning new environments well enough to get productive quickly.
The MacBook Pro is quite speedy with just about everything that I've thrown at it and seems almost as fast as my MacPro tower that I use at my desk at work. With the speed of the core-duo cpu and the ready availability of tools like VirtualBox, I can play with just about any piece of software I would like to. I don't have time for computer gaming any more so that's not a limiting factor for me (we bought a PS2 a few years ago and that satisfies all of our gaming needs at the moment though I'm tempted by the PS3 for the bluray capabilities) and I use a pretty limited set of software for most of my work. I write my papers in emacs using LaTeX (which handles layout AND bibliography generation with BibTeX), draw vector things in Illustrator or Inkscape, do bitmap editing in GIMP, data analysis in Python, and—if forced to—can access Mickeysoft Word/Excel/PPT stuff in OpenOffice. As you can see, most of these are FREELY available multi-platform tools (Illustrator is the exception but you can get that for Mac or Win). I'll freely admit that I do use lots of Mac-specific apps like Pages (which is SO much better than Word!), iPhoto, iMovie, iTunes, Papers, and some LaTeX/BibTex "helper" tools that are written for MacOS but only for convenience sake and I actually know of (mostly) equivalent tools in the Win and Linux worlds so I could pretty easily switch and still be productive. But why bother when the Mac allows me to do EVERYTHING I need to do and I don't have to sweat as many viral/security issues as the poor Windoze users deal with.
In other news, last Monday was our 8th year wedding anniversary and we had a nice dinner out at a great local Indian restaurant and my wife bought me a new money clip (believe me, this is a good thing) and a 22" Samsung monitor that is gorgeous. So I'm one step closer to having a nice media jukebox and digital audio workstation in my study upstairs. The key component of that DAW/jukebox system is currently my old PowerMac G5.
The G5 was originally my desk machine at work from 2004 through 2009. I bought the MacPro to replace it and then moved the G5 to one of my students' rigs. Unfortunately, the poor G5 couldn't run our electrophysiology software, the camera controller/acquisition software, and our digital chart recording software all at the same time without completely choking. We replaced the G5 at the students' rig with a nice quad-core Windoze box because that's what the student was most comfortable with and that level of hardware was required to do everything in near real-time under windoze. Then the G5 was moved under the desk of one of the post-docs in the lab to serve as his main machine since he was tired of lugging his laptop in to work every day. That didn't work either—too slow for the immunoimaging work that he was doing, he said. Sooo, the poor rejected G5 is back in my hands. Hooked up to the new monitor, the G5 seems to run just fine for most web-browsing, Python coding, and LaTeX stuff so I'll use it for the things I typically do and my MacBook Pro can handle all the heavy lifting that I need to do for fancy graphics and data analysis.
Alright, off to clean the house, practice guitar, maybe get a nice motorcycle ride in, and then off to friends' for social bonding and blowing stuff up! :-)
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