An article from InfoWorld, not just blatant fanboyism but an analysis supported by solid ground. Read “Why developers prefer Macs“.

Its been two weeks now since I have been using OS X and I find it an extremely stable and interactive operating system to use.

One of my gripes while using it was that in Finder window, there was no displaying of the path from the root to the current folder or file, something I find useful sometimes.

Turns out, you have to write the following command in Terminal to activate the display of the path in the top of the Finder window:

defaults write com.apple.finder _FXShowPosixPathInTitle -bool YES

Press return after typing the above line, hold down the ‘option’ key and right click on the Finder in Dock and click relaunch. To undo the change just replace the YES with NO in the above line and do the whole procedure again.

If a problem can be divided into separate and unrelated parts , those parts can be run separately. That way, The problem is solved faster than if each part is run sequentially from the computer. This approach is known as parallel processing (doing more than one task in parallel to another). Now multi-core processors in a computer can perform this processing very easily.

But true parallel processing is very difficult to achieve. Many tasks have some kind of relationship with one another and can not be easily separated. Object oriented programming helps here because processing for a single object can be separated out from that for the others.

I found this very interesting paper written by ‘Boleslaw K Szymanski and Charles D Norton‘ titled Object Oriented Programming in Parallel Scientific Computing - An Overview of the Special Issue which you can read here. It really explains the topic a lot in detail.

X11 for Mac OS X is an implementation of the X Window System that makes it possible to run X11-based applications in Mac OS X, for eg. Open Office or GIMP. If you are not using any of such applications in your Mac then it’s better to uninstall X11 from your Leopard installation so as to save up on the disk space. If ever you feel like installing it again then you can use your Leopard DVD to do so.

But the standard (move to trash) uninstall won’t work here, so we have to uninstall it completely using the terminal in OS X.

Write or copy & paste the following command in your terminal:

sudo rm -rf /Applications/Utilities/X11.app /private/etc/X11 /usr/X11R6 /usr/bin/open-x11 /usr/lib/X11 /Library/Receipts/X11User.pkg

That is one single line. Be very careful as a small typo can cause problems and you may have to reinstall OS X. Therefore do this at your own risk.

This is in remembrance of Michael Crichton (October 23, 1942 – November 4, 2008), one of the most intelligent authors I have ever read.

Image Credit: Time magazine