Universal Rule

Book Reviews

Friday, January 10, 2003

Maintaining your bookmarks regardless of the browser -- Comment()
JMTee's Noteworthy Weblog contains a hint on how to maintain your www bookmarks regardless of the browser you are using on Mac OS X. A nice trick. But perhaps I'll try to stick with Safari for some time, and not change my habits once again.

Coping with Safari -- Comment()
I believe I'm once again switching browsers. I can manage without tabbed browsing. The Mac OS X shortcuts Command-< and Command-> make it easy to navigate between windows. Writing weblog posts is more convenient in Safari than in Chimera, which had several problems with editing text in www forms. Thanks to Safari Enhancer, I managed to get the SSL certificate from an intranet server working in Safari. The speed is still impressive, although I'm starting to get used to it. So far I haven't had a single crash.

Switching browsers is becoming a tradition. I have been using Mac OS X since version 10.0. First I was using IE for some time, and then switched to OmniWeb (and paid for it). Then I experimented with Mozilla, but returned to a new beta of OmniWeb. A couple of months ago I discovered Chimera and started to use it. Now I'm moving to Safari. I wonder is the switch is worth the effort of converting bookmarks and learning new tricks? I certainly hope so.

Burning DVDs with PowerBook G4 -- Comment()
I have burned one DVD with my new PowerBook G4. It seems that getting the SuperDrive version of the PowerBook was a good decision after all. I made a backup of my home directory, various job-related files, and certain important documents. The total disk space required was 3.9 GB, which left some room on the 4.7 GB DVD-R disk.

Reviewing the Keynote presentation software -- Comment()
I'll be reviewing the Keynote application here as soon as I get my hands on it. Keynote is an alternative to PowerPoint, but I doubt that Keynote really is a much better application.

However, if Keynote imports PDF files made with PdfLaTeX (including all the mathematics), then I might start using it. Now I'm using PdfLaTeX (with FoilTeX) for presentations including mathematics, and PowerPoint for other presentations. Lately I have been using PowerPoint less and less, because the user interface is not what I want, and the results are often visually terrible.

Testing Safari -- Comment()
I decided to try out Safari as my default browser on Mac OS X. There are some problems still. The tabbed browsing of Chimera is a feature which I'll probably miss. But in other respects this is a fine browser even in beta. And the speed is indeed impressive. I even managed to import all of my bookmarks from Chimera.

Lecturing to press officers -- Comment()
Yesterday I lectured to 73 press officers from the Finnish universities about Computational Science: Supercomputers and Databases. This was a nice experience. I used examples from drug discovery, cosmology, etc.

I have been giving lectures to all kinds of audiences, but this kind of audience was the first for me. I hope I managed to give some idea of the possibilities and challenges in this area.