Making a disk image

After reinstalling my most beloved applications on my iBook, I decided to make a CD containing them all in case I ever needed to load them all at once again. Some of the applications are large, so they needed to be compressed in order to fit on one CD. In the process I learned that zipping or tarring and then gzipping certain OS X binary files renders them unreadable by OS X (I think this only applies to Carbon applications, but I’m not sure what the underlying reason is).

So, in order to get everything on one disk, I had to create a new disk image, which I had never done before. Here’s the basic process:

1. Copy them all to a folder
2. Open Disk Utility and create a new custom-sized disk image
3. Copy the entire folder to the disk image
4. Eject the disk image then zip the entire thing using DropCompress to get it to fit on one CD

The last step was only necessary because I couldn’t fit all of my files onto a CD-sized disk image.

What’s there

As a result of my Ubuntu meddling I did a clean install and decided to strip my /Applications folder down to the bare necessities. So, minus the factory-installed stuff, here’s what’s there:

CMacTeX 4.3 — TeX distro
DesInstaller — Uninstaller for pkg files
DropCompress.app — Compression
Firefox.app — Browser
Microsoft Office 2004 — Office suite
OnyX.app — System optimizer
Quicksilver.app — File and app launcher
Stata — Stats app
TextWrangler.app — Text editor
ecto.app — Blog client

I ditched, for example, the second and third office suite, and the extensive graphics programs, since Preview and iPhoto do the job. There’s also a lack of Unixy apps, but I’m sure that temptation will kill that in time. The point is that the above is what I think is really essential for me doing research and wasting time on the web.

Jolie

I just got back from the Jolie Holland concert. I won’t bother to explain who she is or what her music is like. I’ll just post a link to my favorite song from the new album. It’s not for everyone, but it’s definitely for me.

Ubuntu, iBook and ethernet

When I first installed Ubuntu Dapper on my iBook, I couldn't get the ethernet connection to work. Searching the forums gave this pearl: add the lines

genrtc

bmac

to the top of "/etc/modules." Beautiful, it worked. I'm not sure what it all means, but it worked. 

Got Ubuntu running

Sadly, it's just the live CD. Can't get anyone to let me trash an old laptop, and I don't have time to dual boot on the iBook. Still, surprisingly effortless. This laptop has 3 wireless cards. Only one of them works and it's in a slot, not built in. It detected it and everything worked perfectly.

Cool features of Dapper so far:

• The theme looks kinda like the new Aero (or whatever it's called now) interface on Vista. Much slicker
• When a window needs your attention, it flashes in the taskbar

Here's my blog through Ubuntu's eyes:

Futurama

New episodes of Futurama coming to Comedy Central … for real! – TV Squad

But — finally! — we have some confirmation that Futurama is indeed coming back.

Confession

I’m really jealous of people who get to blog for a living. If I got paid to do it, I’d be way better at it, too. Maybe even part time.

My Wikipedia contrail

Kottke.org talks about “Wikipedia contrails” (the Wikipedia sites still in your browser’s history) this morning. Sounds like an interesting way to sum up your recent web browsing. Here’s mine:

• Ann Coulter — I was looking for the name of her new book so I could defame her in a post
• Achewood — An online comic that a friend recommended. Apparently the back story is pretty complicated, so I read the Wikipedia entry to catch up
• Archibald Putt — Putt’s law: “Technology is dominated by two types of people: those who understand what they do not manage, and those who manage what they do not understand.” I read this somewhere
• Father’s day — I was looking into the history of the holiday
• Footnotes — I was looking for hard and fast rules about whether a footnote has to go at the end of a sentence (I think it should)
• Geometric Series — Some idiot on Reddit.com was arguing that .999(repeating) doesn’t equal 1. It’s easy to prove that it does by summing the geometric series {a_n}_0^infinity=(9/10)*(1/10)^n
• GTK — It’s what powers the graphical display on the Gimp and Inkscape. A native version for OS X is in the works, and I wish it would hurry up and come out
• Infinite Monkey Theorem — A million monkeys typing infinitely would produce the works of Shakespeare
• Kola Superdeep Borehole — Deepest hole ever drilled, via Reddit.com
• List of problems solved by MacGyver — This was on Reddit or Digg or something. I don’t even know anymore
• Pareto Efficient — What WordPress.com’s theming solution is, since it makes those without web design knowledge better off without hurting those with it
• Scientology versus the internet — I’m fascinated by Scientology. It was a really big deal when the stuff about Xenu was posted to the net
• Snakes on a plane — Not coming out until August. I was looking for the trailer
• Stephen Wolfram — I was curious where Wolfram Research was located. It’s in IL
• Universal binary — Somewhere I saw a comprehensive list of Universal Binaries. I was hoping to post it to my Nifty OS X apps page since people claimed that it was “useless” unless it listed whether an app was a UB or not (seems a little strong since 99% of PPC apps run under Rosetta, and every website will say whether the thing is universal)

So there you have it. What I’ve been wp’ing lately.

Fewer econ PhD’s

According to this episode of the Radio Economics podcast, the number of new econ PhD’s in America is in decline, since (a) a lot of PhD economists are getting ready to retire and (b) an accelerating proportion of the new PhD’s awarded are given to international students, half of whom do not stay in the US. In addition, there are more opportunities for economics in the private and government sectors.

It’s a good time to be getting an economics PhD.

MacScience is updated

MacScience.net is a website that lists Mac OS X software with science and research applications. From the website:

MacScience aims to promote the Macintosh and OS X in the domain of scientific research. It also offers alternatives to commonly used applications (e.g., web browsers, word processors, spreadsheets). Java and Darwin/X11 applications have been added following suggestions by readers. It is clear that UNIX and Windows X applications are important to scientists, so this is reflected in the products we choose to present.

There are plenty of links to applications for word processing, statistics, math, reference managment, etc. Part of why I like this site is that, in the listings, it doesn't discriminate between open-source or commercial software. It just encourages you to try different tools and evaluate them on the basis of how well they work. (It does distinguish between native applications and ones that require X11 or Java, since those can have a big difference on performance).