Archive for June, 2007
I know, many of you probably don’t want to hear about the iPhone – but hey, the IRAF installers and IDL tips are all still here, so I can post about what I want. You don’t like it? Make your own Mac IRAF site. 
Anyway, I’m not really going to post about the iPhone persay, but I was thinking on Friday how Apple much has transformed in the last 10 years. Would anyone have believed it in 1997 if you told them massive lines and massive media attention would surround the release of any Apple product? OS X didn’t exist, the Mac was struggling, the Newton was .. not a success.
Now, the Mac is healthier than ever – Apple rules the music player market with the iPod and is set to, at the very least, transform the expectations of mobile phone users. Personally, I don’t think the $600 iPhone is going to change the world, but the $300 iPhone Nano (or whatever they’ll call it) sure will. Just as it took a while for the iPod to truly explode, I would imagine the same is true of the iPhone.
There was a line in this sci-fi TV show, back in the 90s, “Seaquest DSV,” which referenced some future buyout of “Apple Computer” buying Microsoft, and – especially at the time (and even, frankly, now) it was laughable. I remember thinking “no way the Macintosh will ever be that big.” And, it probably never will be. But, it never occured to me Apple would create other, non-Macintosh things that would prove so succesful. (Though, arguably the iPhone is Mac-like in that in runs OS X.)
Obviously, here at Mac Singularity we care about OS X and the boon it is the productivity of our astronomical research. But for me, as a lifetime Apple user, it’s quite a trip to see them create so much attention and in general, have so much success. It’s been quite a ride from Wired urging us to pray for Apple’s survival.
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The problem – your department’s network won’t let you ssh or connect directly to your work Mac, you can only ssh to one special computer, and then from there you can ssh to your Mac. But, you’d like to be able to use Apple file sharing or sftp directly to your work Mac.
Well, SSH Tunneling (Port Forwarding)[sic] is great, clear, explanation of how to use SSH tunneling to directly connect to an ssh-enabled machine that doesn’t allow ssh connections from people offsite/off-campus, etc. It shows how, even when you can only access the work machine through the “gateway” machine (a situation I face here at UF), that you can setup an ssh tunnel through the gateway machine to access your work machine directly.
The best part about this? I can now use sftp (specifically fugu and its ability to edit external text files in TextWrangler) on my work quad core mac from home. I always knew this sort of thing was possible but … now at last I’ve figured out how to do it!
Update Oh, it gets so much better. Because in addition of using port 22 to forward ssh to your work machine, you can also forward port 548 (appleshare).
So, a variation on the tip from the site would be like so (where work is the Mac on your desk that has ssh and appleshare running (actually for this tip, your Mac only need be running file sharing, not ssh) and gateway is the one machine you’re allowed to ssh into from off-campus.
ssh -l myuserid -L 7778:work:548 gateway cat -
Then minimize this terminal window, and then use the Finder to “Connect to Server” in the Go menu. Enter “localhost:7778″ as the server address and boom, you should see the standard apple file sharing login window for your work machine. Enter your user name, password, and choose what you want to mount. Nice. (I use 7778 here, but you could use 7777. Obviously, if you use 7777 for forwarding port 22, you need to use a different port to forward 548).
Tags: apple, appleshare, networking, port forwarding, ssh — .
Updates at the bottom
The somewhat poorly named Papers 1.1 won an Apple Design Award today. The program is designed to help scientists track the bazillion PDFs of various journal articles we download. Unfortunately, it integrates with PubMed (I don’t even know what that is but presumably for medical journals?) but not ADS. However, it has a plugin architecture and an SDK so maybe somehow someone can make a NASA ADS plug in for it. And, the developers are taking suggestions for other databases.
However, in any event, it’s $39. (Try doing a google search for for papers ads plugin and you’ll see what I mean by not being named well … ADS isn’t the best abbrevation either.) Updated – Students can get a 40% discount.
A more generic “iPhoto for PDFs” is the $34 Yep. You can tag, search the content, and organize your PDFs. No attempt at helping you build bibliographies, etc., though. (Papers presumably can export to bibtex, but I don’t know how well that’ll work if it’s not grabbing tags from ADS).
I plat to try out both programs and then write a little more. Yep, for example, will just find all the PDFs in folders you specify. You can include specific folders or exclude them too. Perhaps you don’t want Yep to keep track of figures … or perhaps you can never find where you saved the PDF figure you made and you do want it to track figures.
While I’m mentioning these programs, there’s also the more generic “store anything” program Yojimbo which has a much broader scope but also can store and catalog PDFs, though it doesn’t just track all the PDFs you have wherever they are, the way Yep does.
Update 1 Ok, Papers may actually be pretty good. I imported my dissertation .bib bibtex file and it parsed it without any trouble. Now, it of course didn’t magically know where the local PDF was, but it did have the URL which was in the .bib file. So, it has its own webkit powered web browser and took me to the journal’s page (say, ApJ). At which point if I clicked on the PDF link it automagically downloaded the PDF, stored it locally, and associated it with the proper entry in Papers’ library. Nice. Though, it doesn’t understand the NASA ADS based bibtex abbreviations so things look like \apj and such.
Update 2 Apple doesn’t give their design awards to chumps. The full-screen PDF viewing feature of Papers is nice; the whole program seems quite useful.
Update 3 Ok, it actually doesn’t use the URL in the bibcode entries but uses the DOI, so papers without a DOI (namely, several PASP papers I tried) Papers could not find online. Even though, the bibtex had an adsurl entry that would point it to the ADS abstract. So, that is somewhat disappointing, but presumably it’s something they can fix without much trouble.
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This is an excellent article in ComputerWorld comparing the value of Macintosh hardware to similarly configured PCs from Dell, Sony, etc.
The comparisons show, that for the equipment you’re buying when you buy a Mac, you’re getting a good deal. As I like to say, there are cheaper PCs than the cheapest Mac, but … you’re getting less computer.
The author says that the 15″ macbook pro (which, incidentally, is what I think my next Mac will be… sometime in late 2008 though) and Mac Mini aren’t good values in his mind, but he didn’t quantify this. Another site that compares Macs and PCs of similar price feature by feature is System Shootouts.
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