Category: OS X

Scripting big jobs for multi-core processors

by Jane Rigby January 12, 2011

What is the best way to solve the following problem?  Say you have a long list of individual tasks, each computationally intensive.  For example, you need to run one hundred photoionization models covering a grid of parameter space.  Or you want to perform psf-fitting photometry on a thousand separate images.   Your computer has multiple CPUs [...]

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Macworld on the Mac of the Future

by Planck December 6, 2010

Macworld has published an interesting series of stories on the future of the Mac. Anand Lal Shimpi (of Anandtech fame) writes about the Mac of the future: the CPU. One aspect I found interesting was Apple’s desire for powerful Graphical Processing Units (GPUs), which they are using not just for games and 3D graphics, but for more [...]

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Java and Mac OS X

by Planck October 25, 2010

Apple Outsider has a good piece on Java on Mac OS X. If you haven’t heard, Apple has announced that the current version of Java has been deprecated. This means that Apple is not going to keep creating their own Java VM for OS X. Apple is relying on Oracle/Sun to make a VM for [...]

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Command-` to switch between windows of current application

by Kelle October 19, 2010

For awhile, I’ve been looking for a keyboard shortcut to switch between multiple windows of one application. I’d even been trying out Switché, but really couldn’t get used to it. I prefer the native Application Switcher. The one thing I liked about it was command-’ to switch between windows of the current application. Suddenly, I [...]

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Customizing your xTerm and Terminal: I. Color

by saurav August 25, 2010

As our eyes spend most of our days looking at the xTerminal (xTerm, xgTerm, uxTerm, or Terminal.app) any relief is always welcome. Unfortunately, the default for the xTerminal (or most applications) is black text on white background which means you are staring at white, i.e., light, most of the time. In addition, your eyes have [...]

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Snow Leopard and Cisco VPNs

by Tom November 30, 2009

One of the subtle but very useful additions to MacOS 10.6 (a.k.a. Snow Leopard) is the built-in ability to connect to Cisco Virtual Private Networks (VPN), which many organizations have adopted. In MacOS 10.5 and earlier, one had to download the Cisco VPN client, which doesn’t quite fit in to the ‘sleek mac app’ category [...]

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Let Snow Leopard Roar

by Eli October 29, 2009

For those who use Snow Leopard you have probably noticed how much snappier the OS is than its predecessor. Much of the optimizations in Snow Leopard is thanks to several new and emerging tools called LLVM, Clang, and OpenCL. What’s more is that we can use these tools to speed up some of our basic [...]

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Snow Leopard is Here

by Jessica August 28, 2009

The latest and greatest version of Mac OS X, dubbed Snow Leopard, is here. This is likely to be  a good release for astronomers as the OS has been trimmed down to boost performance overall and to give you back about 7 Gbytes of disk space. However, only Intel Macs are supported. Any early adopters [...]

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New Laptop: MacBook Air

by Kelle May 6, 2009

I’m going to buy a MacBook Air today. Yes, I have money burning a hole in my pocket and yes, I want a laptop that will fit in my purse. I’m surprised it took me this long to get one. At one point, I thought my iPhone could satisfy my need for an ultra-portable, but [...]

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