Moshi's PalmGuard for the Macbook Pro is perfect

Having grown quite accustomed to ThinkPads, it has been a very long time since
I have worried about the palm rest of a laptop. All of that changed when the
Macbook came into my life. My biggest concern was the resale value of the
device, and I found thta the simplest possible solution what was to just take off my
watch and use my phone to keep time instead. In retrospect, that was kind of
stupid, so I bought one of Mochi’s palm rest protectors 1,
and it has far exceeded every expectation that I had of it.

My expectations:

  • Color matched, doesn’t make the device look like a two-tone paint job
  • Protects the device, doesn’t allow scratches
  • Make it easy and comfortable to wear a watch, thin and tidy
  • Easy to apply, no hair pulling to line things up
  • Touch pad works perfectly

All of those expectations were exceeded.

The color looks just fine to me. Sure it is a tad off, but what matters is that
the device is protected for resale. The pad protects the device flat out. My
watch sits just fine on it, it is thick enough to pad the watch and thin enough
barely to be noticeable. It was shockingly delightful to apply given the often
frustrating nature of such endeavors. The touch pad works perfectly with the
pad on top. The mouse, expose, window switching, and everything just works.
This was a shock given how many ways they could have screwed up here. Instead,
it just works. Very cool.

After installation I used a credit card to work out a few bubbles and and life
went on. For anyone worried that this might not work well for their machine,
I installed it on a 15″ Macbook Pro, and the product is for sale on Apple’s
website which is enough of an explicit endorsement for me.

All in all this has been an amazingly positive user experience and the product
has worked really, really well.

The Standard Function Library

The SFL (Standard Function Library) from iMatix is a portable function library for C/C++ programs. The SFL is the result of many years’ development, and is provided as Open Source software for the benefit of the Internet community.

The SFL provides about 450 functions that cover these areas:
Compression, encryption, and encoding;
Datatype conversion and formatting;
Dates, times, and calendars;
Directory and environment access;
User and process groups;
Inverted bitmap indices;
Symbol tables;
Error message files;
Configuration files;
String manipulation and searching;
File access;
Internet socket access;
Internet programming (MIME, CGI);
SMTP (e-mail) access;
Server (batch) programming;
Program tracing.

It is free software.

How to install R on OSX 10.9 Mavericks as of 2014-06-01T19:29:55-0500

Here is how to install R on OSX 10.9 Mavericks as of 2014-06-01T19:29:55-0500:

brew install gcc
brew tap homebrew/science
brew install R

Details:

gcr@orion:~> gcc --version
gcc (GCC) 4.8.3
Copyright (C) 2013 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
This is free software; see the source for copying conditions.  There is NO
warranty; not even for MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.
gcr@orion:~> r --version
R version 3.1.0 (2014-04-10) -- "Spring Dance"
Copyright (C) 2014 The R Foundation for Statistical Computing
Platform: x86_64-apple-darwin13.2.0 (64-bit)
R is free software and comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY.
You are welcome to redistribute it under the terms of the
GNU General Public License versions 2 or 3.
For more information about these matters see
http://www.gnu.org/licenses/.

Continue reading “How to install R on OSX 10.9 Mavericks as of 2014-06-01T19:29:55-0500”

How to keep OSX awake

If you have long-running tasks you surely want to keep your Mac awake to at allow them to complete, or more. A lot of GUI applications claimed to fit the bill but the first one I tried let the Mac go to sleep! The solution is caffeinate; run it from the terminal.
ADDENDUM
Here is the flag for preventing the machine from sleeping, perhaps the most important one:

-s      Create an assertion to prevent the system from sleeping. This asser-
             tion is valid only when system is running on AC power.