Friday, October 31, 2003

The winners of the informal first tracks of the season contest were the Maine gang, who skinned up the Sugarloaf trails last weekend and mailed pictures to prove it. The Utah gang promises to try to catch up this weekend. 11:52:37 PM

This music is pretty old for me. I just got around to listening to it again. I play different selections as students come in for my MWF lectures. I end up spending more time selecting music than I probably should. It's fun, though. Yesterday I was preparing today's lecture while trying to find a suitably spooky track for Halloween. It was harder than I thought it would be. I finally went for the third track of Stockhausen's Mantra. I used to listen to this a long when I was in college, in a different and for me much better recording by the Kontarsky brothers that I only have in vinyl (I just discovered that it has been reissued in CD, I'll try to get it; I attended a mind-blowing live performance of Mantra by the Kontarskys in Lisbon in the early 70s and it still resonates). However, I don't think the students found it spooky enough. It's maybe a bit too intimate for our lecture hall, to demanding of attention for that time of relaxation between classes. I seem to remember the Kontarsky interpretation as more forceful, but maybe that's just the glow of an old but intense experience. That track is spooky if you listen to it closely, as I did several times last night before deciding (the runner up was variations on Tales from the Farside from Frisell's Ghost Town). Really new for me, and recommended in their different ways: Ghazal's The Rain Richard Galliano's Piazzolla Forever Yo La Tengo's And then nothing turned itself inside-out Biréli Lagrène's Gypsy Project Charles Mingus's Cumbia and Jazz Fusion I'm listening most to Ghazal and Lagrène. My daughter was strong on Ghazal but now Galliano is ahead. 11:40:04 PM

OS X 10.3 after one week: Exposé is cool, but I find myself using it less than I thought I would. My eyesight is not good enough to discriminate among the many similar windows on my Powerbook G4 desktop, and moving the mouse around to identify the windows takes too long. It's easy to go to the dock and bring up the application I want. Spell as you type was messed up for a while. A free spell checker service, cocoAspell, that I had in 10.2 didn't like 10.3, and it wasn't easy to remove all traces of its presence. I followed some suggestions in the TeX on OS X mailing list to remove the offending service. This cured the worst symptoms, which included spaces turning into two spaces and peculiar problems editing quoted material in Mail. But now all words were underlined as mispelled. It turns out that I had not removed completely the traces of cocoASpell on the hidden properly file ~/Library/Preferences/.GlobalPreferences.plist. I've done that now, and spell as you type seems to be back in order. Everything still feels faster than on 10.2. Mail handles network switching and going offline much more gracefully. If just puts a nice informative icon by the accounts it can't access, but it doesn't pop dialogs about failed connections as the previous version did. This is great form my nomadic PowerBook, which sometimes is on four or five different (wired and wireless) networks in the course of a day. Power management seems more reliable than both on the notorious 10.2.8 and on 10.2.6. Lots of changes in printing that I've not yet decided are improvements. For example. the old Duplex print dialog option was folded into Layout. I couldn't find it in the cluttered print options until Fei showed it to me. Safari and X11 seem rock-solid and much faster. Both used to crash every other day or so. No crashes so far in a week of use. The new Preview is very good: fast, legible, convenient. The only puzzle is that sometimes the forward-back buttons on the toolbar are inactive when they should not be. Cmd-left and cmd-right arrow do fine. I read many PostScript and PDF files (research papers) online, and it performs flawlessly. I've not used Acrobat Reader once since. Most of the 3rd-party applications I use regularly — NetNewsWire, PowerPoint, OmniOutliner, OmniGraffle,TexShop , Dreamweaver MX, Radio, Retrospect Express 5, Emacs 21 under X11 via Fink — survived the changeover unscathed. Keynote 1.1.1 seems a bit more fragile than previously, but maybe I was just unlucky. It's still beautiful, though. Keynote+OmniGraffle+TextShop creates the nicest technical slides. 10:57:16 PM