After I started running Linux and then Mac OS X, in addition to Windows,
I started on a quest to find the universal filesystem.
I had multiboot systems and external drives where I wanted to
to be able to read and write disks under multiple operating systems.
The obvious choice is FAT32,
the ubiquitous, lowest-common denominator filesystem.
FAT32 is supported out-of-the-box by
all major operating systems, digital cameras, and PDAs,
so that's a huge advantage.
FAT32 also has major shortcomings:
- Maximum file size is 4GB. I have ISOs, MPEGs, and other large files exceeding this limit.
- Fragmentation happens too easily.
- Timestamps: accurate only to 2-second resolution. No notion of timezones or UTC.
- Journaling: …continue.
Apple launched the public Safari 4 beta today.
It runs beautifully on Vista and it's the fastest browser that I've seen,
noticeably faster than Chrome.
Everything that I tried worked fairly well;
I saw only a few minor glitches.
I installed it on my MacBook at home this evening.
It crashes at startup every time that I attempt to run it.
Fortunately, it comes with an uninstaller so that I could revert to Safari 3.21.
Back to Opera for now.
I mentioned in my post on reStructuredText that I use a little command-line tool,
pbcopy, to pipe the output into the clipboard.
I finally found a similar tool for Linux, xsel.
- Mac: pbcopy (UTF-8 aware, unlike the built-in version of pbcopy)
copies its input to the pasteboard (Mac name for the clipboard);
pbpaste writes the pasteboard to stdout.
- Linux: xsel gets and sets the X selection.
- Windows: winclip reads and writes the clipboard in a variety of formats.
Use -m for UTF-8 text.
The winclip binary is available as part of the outwit package.
Last week, I gave my 2007 MacBook Pro laptop a makeover
before upgrading to Leopard, aka OS X 10.5.
A couple of months ago, I bought 4GB RAM for less than $100,
to replace the 2GB that it came with.
I wanted to upgrade the drive too,
as I repeatedly came close to filling the original 160GB drive.
It was no problem to get a 5400 RPM drive that had more than 300GB,
but the 7200 RPM notebook drives were topping out at 200GB.
Two weeks, I spotted a Western Digital Scorpio Black
320GB 7200 RPM SATA drive on NewEgg for $180.
Sold!
I installed it the night it arrived,
and it …continue.
Tomas Restrepo wrote a post about
sharing dotfiles between Windows and Ubuntu,
specifically about sharing .vimrc (Linux) and _vimrc (Windows)
and the .vim (Linux) and vimfiles (Windows) directories.
I have a different solution.
On Windows, my C:\AutoExec.bat includes:
set HOME=C:\gvr
set VIM=C:\Vim
set VIMDIR=%VIM%\vim71
set EDITOR=%VIMDIR%\gvim.exe
set PATH=%PATH%;C:\Win32app;C:\GnuWin32\bin;C:\UnxUtils;C:\SysInternals;C:\Python25\Scripts
%HOME% (C:\gvr) contains _vimrc, vimfiles,
and other stuff accumulated over many years.
This directory is stored in a personal Subversion repository at DevjaVu.
All my Vim files are stored with Unix LF endings, not Windows CR-LFs,
so that they'll work on my Mac OS X and Linux boxen.
I play some games with if has("win32") and
if has('gui_macvim') to ensure that my _vimrc
works cross-platform.
On my *nix boxes, the gvr …continue.
I ordered a 17" Mac Book Pro on Friday night.
It shipped from Shanghai on Monday and arrived at work this morning.
Scha-weet! And spendy.
I've been busy ramping up all day.
I estimate that my total lifetime usage of Macs was about one day
before today.
I definitely have some new habits to learn.
So far, I've installed Mac Vim,
Firefox (browser),
Camino (browser),
Thunderbird (email),
Quicksilver (fast launch utility),
Witch (window switcher),
AntiRSI (RSI preventer),
Adium (multi-protocol chat),
Skype (Internet telephony),
Remote Desktop Connection (connecting to Windows desktops),
StuffIt Expander (for classic archives), and
KeePassX (password manager).
Some of these have built-in equivalents of course, but I'm using these
for compatibility with my existing Windows and Linux setups …continue.
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