These are some screen-shots from the OS X Leopard in action on my Mac. Click each picture for a larger view.

Desktop - OS X Leopard

iTunes for music

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An article in Newsweek by Daniel Lyons aka ‘The Fake Steve Jobs’. Here he talks about how the new POTUS will use the internet army he has built. Read it here.

Now that I have made the switch to Mac OS X, I am updating my list of applications (previous post) that I use for technical as well as general purposes. When it comes to ‘getting the job done’, these applications are of great value.

• Operating System – OS X Leopard
• Integrated Development Environment - Xcode, Netbeans 6.5, Visual Studio 2008 SP1 (on XP Pro using VMware Fusion), Adobe Dreamweaver, TextMate, Terminal
• Languages – VB.NET, Ruby, C, C++, C#, ASP.NET, HTML, Javascript
• Content Manegment System – Joomla
• FTP client – FileZilla
• Blog – WordPress
• Blog Publishing – Windows Live Writer (this one has really no substitute, its excellent, although i have to run it virtually)
• Backup – Time Machine, Mozy Home
• Browser – Safari, Firefox and IE7 (for testing only)
• Mail Client – Mail
• Antivirus – Don’t need it anymore, yippie
• Firewall – Doorstop X Firewall for Mac
• Graphics Program – Adobe Photoshop
• Photo Editor – Aperture
• Others – VMware Fusion ( I Use it to bootup XP Pro or Ubuntu 8.10 virtually), iWork, Office 2007 (virtually), Evernote (for the mac it’s an excellent alternate of OneNote), Adium (all chat clients signed at once)

Mossberg Says Innovation is the Key to Success During the Econaclypse

Under worm attack, US Army bans USB drives

Microsoft to Offer Free Virus Protection Software for Windows

Mac Viruses Continue to Lag Behind Windows Counterparts

Study: time kids spend online not wasted after all

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

This guide is for keeping a consistency and code manageability in the open source projects developed by Google using C++.  As explained in the guide:

C++ is the main development language used by many of Google’s open-source projects. As every C++ programmer knows, the language has many powerful features, but this power brings with it complexity, which in turn can make code more bug-prone and harder to read and maintain.

The goal of this guide is to manage this complexity by describing in detail the dos and don’ts of writing C++ code. These rules exist to keep the code base manageable while still allowing coders to use C++ language features productively.

This guide also serves the purpose of making the beginners understand the language’s conventions. Read the full guide here.