Reading about Juha's dream reminded me of my own from a couple of nights back.

In the beginning it was a bit like a bad re-make of BSG. We were heading for a destination of unknown location, on a big Battlestar-esque space ship. Somehow magically me and some other dude was on a smaller ferry ship, travelling through some worm-hole-like tunnel that was made out of metal. We landed on some unknown planet, with grass and stone plates laid out in plaths on the ground. We followed one of the paths and ended up in a candystore. A girl worked in the candy store. I noticed that they had Ahlgrens Bilar, a typical Swedish candy, which I found odd for what was presumably an extrasolar planet. I commented to the shopkeeper girl that I liked that candy, and she replied that she had never tasted it, and went to do so. Soon she had eaten all of it, delighted by its taste. I was a bit sad that I got none myself. I also found it odd that they accepted Earth currency and credit cards, and I noticed that she had received mail from Earth, with postage stamps from some Earth country. I even think she had a phone connected to the Earth GSM network. I asked her about it, and she explained that she was part of an intergalactical conspiracy, where her kind had infiltraded all layers of society in, among other worlds, Earth, like in Fight Club but with no malicious intent. Instead it was just a practical thing to be able to communicate and trade intergalactically, also in worlds that were not intergatactically aware yet. I don't remember her name exactly, but I remember her telling me that if someone wanted to mail her from earth, all they had to do was address the envelope to "Her name with-the- Hat" and people of her kind at the post office would make sure that it made its way to her little candy shop in a completely different part of the galaxy.

Following sti's shell history meme, here are some meaningless shell history statistics from my home computers. (By the way - I would've done that one-liner like this: history | awk '{print $2}' | sort |uniq -c | sort -rn|head - two more pipelines out of habit.)

My home Mac:

$ history|awk '{a[$2]++ } END{for(i in a){print a[i] " " i}}'|sort -rn|head
127 ssh
52 ls
45 ping
32 cd
26 sudo
13 open
12 mount
10 top
10 cat
9 df

Surprise: mount - turns out I often use mount without parameters to see which device a newly attached hard disk appears at.

My Linux gateway box

$ history|awk '{a[$2]++ } END{for(i in a){print a[i] " " i}}'|sort -rn|head
47 ls
40 cd
39 screen
38 sudo
24 ps
20 w
19 ping
17 mount
15 cat
14 tuxgdg

No surprises, really - I mostly use this box for IRC in a screen session - but lately also for playing with my Tux Droid, hence tuxgdg.

My work laptop (Linux)

$  history|awk '{a[$2]++ } END{for(i in a){print a[i] " " i}}'|sort -rn|head
92 sudo
76 ssh
41 echo
38 ping
31 ipsec
22 tail
22 cd
21 ls
16 cat
14 vi

This computer is mostly used for remotely connecting to the work VPN (hence ipsec), and through that connecting to work servers using SSH, and the rest is done through Gnome or a web browser.

ping appears everywhere, most likely because my ISP is quite unstable at times. Also, I'm more vi than I thought.

I started watching The Big Bang Theory, a TV-series centred around a few geeks and a hot girl. It's quite humorous at times, and quite stereotypical all the time. In the second episode, they are trying to assemble an IKEA media centre piece and one of the guys says "this is why Sweden has no space program". Of course, as the resident expatriate Swede I have to set the record straight: Sweden has had a space program for 35 years (if not even longer). It's certainly not big or anything, but at least it's something. :-) Nowadays they're even dabbling with commercial space flight - we'll see how that turns out.

A friend of mine has been bugging me to compile a list of Mac software so that he can start using his own Mac properly. So I thought I'll just jot down a few programs that I find make life with Mac bearable, in no particular order.

• Adium X is the most elegant instant messaging software ever. Comes with Growl integration, of course.
• For web browsing, Safari 3 is very usable and has all the essential features I need including tabbed browsing and type-as-you-find (Mac stylee) plus some other neat goodies such as a sweet DOM inspector and universally resizable text fields (so that I don't have to put up with Advogatos very very small textarea for writing this blog post), although I still have Firefox lying around for stupid sites that won't work with Safari (Gmail's chat, for example).
• For Safari: Inquisitor turns the Safari search field into a real-time search/suggestion thingy
• Also for Safari, be sure to install GrowlSafari to get Growl integration with Safari. This, for example, lets me have important RSS feeds in the bookmark bar, and get Growl notifications when they are updated
• VLC for watching videos
• QuickTime XviD Component - so that you can watch those downl^H^H^H^H^Hmovies ripped from legally obtained DVDs, in Front Row (tip: Front Row follows symlinks; so if you download your movies to a location - say /Volumes/BigDisk - other than ~/Movies, just ln -s /Volumes/BigDisk ~/Movies/ and you'll be able to navigate to them in Front Row)
• On the same theme, you'll also most likely need A52Codec to get some audio stimuli from those movies as well
• For BitTorrent, I use Azureus (with the classic UI). Yes, it is a resource hog, but it is also very feature-rich. In Azureus, I use the plugin RSSFeed Scanner to subscribe to RSS feeds with interesting torrents, so it will generally download everything I'm interested in automatically.
• QuickSilver is another integral part of any modern Mac. It lets you launch applications with just Ctrl- Space and the first few letters of the application name. Sleek and handy. It can also do a gazillion of other things that I've never bothered to learn about.
• Growl is one of these tiny additions that just extends OS X in a natural way. In itself it doesn't do much, but it gives other applications a method of giving notifications of important events in an elegant way.
• If you like me use last.fm a lot, then you will want iScrobbler, that is a bit more lightweight than the official last.fm client. Also, it gives you neat Growl integration of iTunes
• For the UNIX and Linux inclined, there is of course a whole world of good stuff. A good start is to install the X11 application that comes with Mac OS X, and then install Fink or MacPorts (personally, I prefer Fink because of apt-get goodness).
• Google Earth is a good time waster (but why isn't there a full screen mode?)
• For coding I use Aquamacs Emacs - however, since I moved over from my old PPC Mac Mini a new Intel iMac, it refuses to shut down properly, so I have to kill -9 it manually. I have yet to investigate it, though, since normally, once I launch Emacs, it stays up until it's time to reboot the computer some week later.
• To keep track of my computer resource usage, I use MenuMeters
• To keep track of my computer's IP adress, I use DynDNS and the corresponding DynDNS Dashboard widget
• For backup, I've used Jungle Disk and Amazon S3, although I am currently considering other options due to a few bugs in the exclusion logic in the Jungle Disk backup feature

That was the ones I could come up with from the top of my head. Well, naturally I have lots of other programs installed (hundreds of them being regular Unix tools coming from Fink such as ethereal, nmap and tcpdump for network monitoring and troubleshooting), but these are the most important ones. The only game I play is basically the old Command & Conquer Generals, which Aspyr was nice enough to release an Intel update to, so it plays nicely also on my new iMac. Most of the time I spend in OS X's own Terminal application, running irssi or messing around with shell scripts or other coding stuff (another tip: command-double click on a URL in Terminal opens it in a browser).

My vacation has started. Of course, that means sitting up all night getting red-eyed making random hacks. Pretty much the same stuff as usual, that is.

I've found myself booting into Linux on my Mac at home more often nowadays. Ubuntu 7.04 does quite a good job on my PPC Mac Mini. I noticed that IBM has a JDK for PPC - and it was even available in some repository through apt. My two biggest annoyances to date: Flash and no Compiz or Beryl. The open-source Flash implementation that is what you'll have to live with if you're on PPC (Macromedia hasn't released a PPC version of their own player) can't play YouTube videos (which is possibly the most important job for Flash on my computer) and seems to crash the browser occasionally. Also, web sites that tries to figure out whether you have Flash installed or not, tend to think that you don't. As to Compiz/Beryl, I've become so used to having wobbling windows at work, so when I sit at a Linux desktop without any desktop effects, it feels all stiff and, well, boring. It's like rounded corners: it just makes things feel more natural. I did in fact get some wobbliness out of SUSE 10.1 for PPC, however, the graphics drivers were pretty messy and my screen ended up with the colours inverted. I eventually gave up, after many hours of X configuration file editing.

Another annoyance is the lack of write support for journaled HFS+ filesystems, which is what most of my disks are formatted in. I currently haven't yet figured out a good filesystem that works reliably in both Linux and Mac. I have lots of media files that I want to access from both environments, and that doesn't work out too well. Now, I haven't checked up on the ext2/ext3 support in Mac OS for a few months, but last time I checked, there was an ext2 filesystem driver for OS X that worked OK, except that it seemed to often fail to unmount the filesystem cleanly, and then refusing to mount it on subsequent reboots (as it was dirty and there was no fsck). For now, I've been using HFS+ for my big media disk - I can at least safely read from it - we'll see if I totally mess it up if I try writing to it. For my portable hard disk, I've even used NTFS (since I need to mount it in Windows and it needs to store virtual machine images of several gigabytes, so FAT32 is a no-go) and when needed used ntfs-3g to mount it in both Linux and OS X. Very slow, but works for dropping files back and forth.