Arriving Somewhere

An interesting post-mortem of the Russian cyber attack on Estonia this past month. In Estonia, what may be the first war in cyberspace

I’m going to test out an idea that has been around for a long time, that is writing in the margin. That’s what this space is for. Snippets of thoughts, or small things worth sharing but undeserving a proper post.

I have been using the Macintosh almost exclusively at work for two weeks now. I would say that’s pretty successful! I can see why Mac fans are such diehard fans. The biggest appeal to me is the user interface. It is obvious that much more effort has been put into the Mac OS X interface than M$ Windows. I have found that most tasks I attempt can be completed very intuitively.

So far, some of the programs I have been using regularly:

• Thunderbird – email client
• Firefox – web browser, see previous post for add-ons that I use
• Open Office – open source M$ Office replacement, requires X11
• GIMP – image editing a la Photoshop, requires X11
• iChat – chat client that handles multiple services (e.g., AIM, GTalk, etc.)
• TextWrangler – a text editor that a colleague turned me on to. I do a lot of coding and had been using Dreamweaver on the PC. The only thing I really miss is the robust validator. You can supposedly get extensions for TextWrangler but that portion of their website is being updated.
• X11 – Other programs that don’t compile natively in OS X will run in X11. This is a minor annoyance, but one I’ve adapted to.
• Automator – This program allows you to design an automated workflow that involves multiple programs and files all with a drag and drop interface. For starters I created a workflow that logs me into all of the development servers I use, and I told it to run at login. Now when I log onto my computer it automatically connects me with all of the servers. Nice.

Today I finally found the time to get started on my new Mac. The first thing I did? Shrink the pesky dock and “undock” most of the applications that are on it by default. And move it to the left side of the screen. Then I changed the screen resolution and fixed the mouse speed. Ah, much better! On to more exciting stuff.

I began by installing two critical applications… Firefox (the best web browser!) and Thunderbird (an email client).

Thunderbird was a breeze to set up. Check.

After installing Firefox I installed my favorite add-ons (extensions) as well as a few new ones I haven’t tried yet.

Favorites:

• del.icio.us – to use with my social bookmarking account
• Facebook Toolbar – gotta stay connected!
• fireFTP – an FTP client built into your browser!
• Web Developer – has a handy toolbar
• Zotero – a citation management tool, in your browser! My 2nd fav add-on
• Google Browser Sync – my favorite Firefox add-on. Allows you to sync bookmarks, passwords, etc. across multiple computers. Throw it on a flash drive with Portable Firefox and you can have the same browser experience regardless of where you are.

New (to me) Stuff:

• Firebug – web development tools
• Link Checker – just like it sounds
• Server Switcher – easily switch between live and development servers

Great! One more essential thing to do, set up iChat. Getting my AIM account on it was a breeze. I also added my Google Talk account using Jabber. You can find the instructions here: http://www.google.com/support/talk/bin/answer.py?answer=24076