Last night, just as I was falling asleep, I heard my phone ring out a text message tone. (Incidentally, it’s this sound, a customized version of one found on the Monty Python website. It can be startling.)
I leaned over to look at it. The head node from the cluster was checking in to let me [...]

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There are whole websites dedicated to answering these kinds of questions. However, for the kind of work I do as a computational scientist, I have found some favorites over the last seven years of using Mac OS X. From now on, my current favorites with brief rationale for each one will be posted on [...]

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So far my attempt at making one post per day on average, aided by my little PHP tool is going well. Here’s a plot made with the output and Google Spreadsheets showing how I’m doing as of today:

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Beginning with version 10.4 (”Tiger”), Mac OS X has had a powerful indexing and search engine built in. This can be used from the graphical interface, which is how most mac users interact with it. However, a command-line interface allows for some powerful searching and scripting.
This article by Andy Lester goes through the basic [...]

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UNIX-like operating systems are immensely powerful. They give one access to the minutest details of the operating system with command-line utilities. The major downside of command-line interfaces is that it is not readily apparent which commands are available and what they do. One can spend hours poring through man pages looking for related program names, [...]

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