A very cool new utility included in Tiger is Grapher, which draws lovely graphs of equations in 2d or 3d, and does a whole lot more too.
This is z = 1-sin(x)+sin(2y), but there are some much more complicated and beautiful examples in the ‘Examples’ menu:
What you can’t see here is the fact that it’s rotating gently, and you can turn it in any direction you want using the mouse…
Worth investigating.
Found this wonderful story on Tony Price’s blog:
A Nazi SS trooper accosts an old rabbi, points a gun at his head, and demands, “Tell me, who’s to blame for all the world’s troubles?”
The old rabbi knows the right answer, and trembling he admits, “The Jews.”
The SS man smiles and nods.
“And the pretzel bakers,” adds the rabbi.
“Why the pretzel bakers?” demands the Nazi.
“Why the Jews?”
It struck me today that any opposition trying to get into power has a real problem if the populace as a whole is not too dissatisfied with the status quo. Yes, well, of course, that’s obvious, but my point is a little more subtle. Not very – I’m a Bear of Very Little Brain.
The party in government just has to keep enthusing about how good everything is. They have, essentially, a positive message. The other parties have to persuade people that everything is very bad at the moment and so they must start with a negative spin which makes them less appealing. I mean, who wants to hear from people who are complaining all the time?
Mind you, this is probably balanced very neatly by the phonomenon of people wanting a change because the grass is always greener…
Not very deep really. It must be bedtime.
Bonjour, Bonjour!
Apple’s Rendezvous technology, largely an implementation of the Zeroconf standards, has been renamed to ‘Bonjour’ for trademark reasons.
Following yesterday’s not-entirely-smooth upgrade process, I now have my main machine running Tiger, and, apart from a few wrinkles, it’s great. (Here’s a very minor wrinkle for UK users: if you install the weather widget in Dashboard, it’ll cleverly select London as the location for the forecasts. Unfortunately, I think it’s selecting London, Ontario, or one of the other Londons; the forecast certainly isn’t right for us. Specify “London, United Kingdom” and it’s fine) Two and a half years ago, after installing Jaguar, I wrote that one of the good things about Apple software updates is that they generally make your machine faster, where Microsoft ones (in my now rather distant experience) tended to do the opposite. Well, the trend continues, and though there are some things that take more time in Tiger, in general the system seems noticeably snappier.
The following is an account of my experiences upgrading my Powerbook to the new “Tiger” version of Mac OS X – a long spiel which is probably of very little interest to anybody not likely to be doing the same thing… and probably not of much interest to them!
This turned out to be a very long post and only suitable for those with great stamina, so I’ve moved it into the Comments. Summary for the rest of you: Buy an external firewire drive if you don’t have one, do a complete bootable backup onto it before starting. Then reboot with a system CD and use Disk Utility to verify/repair your disk. Then do the install. Then reboot with the Tiger DVD and ‘Repair permissions’. That’s my recommendation, anyway, and you can read the rest if you want to know the reasoning.
Who Should You Vote For? is a site that I think all UK voters should at least try. It asks for your views on various key subjects and tells you how they match up with the views of the various parties. I was certainly surprised by the results it came up with for me, but I could see the logic behind them.
It has two major problems, from my point of view.
A friend recently joked that there was a discernible patten in my life: Any organisations I was involved in starting, I would leave just before the web site said anything meaningful!
Well, this was true of Ndiyo, but now, thanks to sterling efforts by John & Seb, the new site is live. More information will no doubt follow soon!
We’ve been almost ready to launch for a long time, but things like being mentioned on Slashdot tend to concentrate the mind.
Now that Tiger, Apple new version of Mac OS, has been released, those of us with developer licences can talk about the cool new stuff, and there are more new articles and websites to read this weekend than ever before.
Anyone with an interest in the underlying techie details as well as the visible might enjoy John Siracusa’s 21-page review at Ars Technica.
A very significant new feature for me is not much talked about – the ability, at last, to rotate external displays and use them in portrait mode. This is a godsend for anyone who spends a lot of time reading or writing pages of text. I’m not sure whether it’s supported on all Macs or just those with certain graphics chips, but it works on my PowerBook.
Buzztracker is rather a nice idea.
Thanks to David Orange for the link
There’s a good article on the BBC web site about the Ndiyo project and the hardware we’re using from Newnham Research.
The London Underground lines overlaid on a satellite image. (Click image for bigger version).
© Copyright Quentin Stafford-Fraser
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