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The mac os x icon for .pyc files is a document with a background of ones and zeros but the foreground is a 16 ton weight. WTF?! What's the 16 ton got to do with anything?

Perhaps I got it all wrong. Maybe this is the icon used for many different files but I had a look around and couldn't find any other file that uses the 16 ton image in the icon.

I rarely use Safari when I'm on my mac but the reason is just because I'm not that bothered. At work I'm 100% Firefox and when I do any web development I use Firefox because it's extensions and bits and pieces makes it superior bar none for that purpose. Tonight I was using Safari actually to blog about Richard Feynman. I had written quite a long text and since I have several tabs open that I wanted to link to I went to one of the other tabs then back to the blog-adding-window. But, because I stumbled a bit with my mouse I accidently pressed the close icon. Result: I lost all of my text I had written :(

It's stupid because it's so easy to trip over the close icon. I prefer the way Firefox does it where they have one close icon for all (or actually the current highlighted tab). Another disadvantage of having the close icon for each tab is that it takes up valuable space for writing the page title out with more letters. Example screenshot

What a silly rant this has been. I'm sorry for wasting your time. I just thought I'd let you know that Safari wasted a lot of mine.

Finally I have a sensible editor installed on my Intel iMac. It's called Carbon XEmacs (aka. just emacs :)

All thanks to Andrew Choi. He's prepared two patches that makes this possible. The version I got was XEmacs-21.5.23 plus two additional patches from Andrew for Intel support and proper "Quit Application" connection with the OS. Thankfully nothing was difficult because everything went smoothly without any error messages anywhere. I did have to do some reading, searching and downloading. The hardest task was to find Andrews Carbon XEmacs site to just get started. If you also have an (Intel) mac os x and want to install XEmacs too, here are some notes on what I did:

1. Download xemacs-21.5.23.tar.gz from this site
2. Download xemacs-sumo.tar.bz2 from this site
3. Download the matching version diff (with highest "b" number) from this site (eg. xemacs-21.5.23-carbon-b4.diff). Also download intel-mac-encoding-fix.diff and quit-application-apple-event.diff from the same repository.
4. Unpack the downloaded files and follow the instructions from the bottom of this page Note1: You need to do all the patches before you run sh < build-app.sh from the carbon directory. Note: To do the patches, I found I had to use'-p1' for the carbon file and no -p for the smaller ones. You might need to cd into the correct directory.
5. When it's been installed, it's created a file called XEmacs.app. Copy this manually to your Applications folder.
6. The last thing to do is to install all the necessary packages such as python highlighting. Unpack the file xemacs-sumo.tar.bz2 into /Applications/XEmacs.app/Contents/Resources/lib/xemacs/
7. Enjoy!

Here's what I had to do to get VNC working between my mac and my ubuntu linux machine here on this home network.

On the mac tiger, I went to http://sourceforge.net/projects/cotvnc/ and downloaded and installed the latest Chicken of the VNC.

On the ubuntu linux, I had to do this:

$ sudo apt-get update; sudo apt-get install tightvncserver
$ xset -q | less # look for the list of font paths and copy
$ sudo jed /etc/vnc.conf
# set $fontPath = what-you-copied-from-the-last-command
$ xrandr -q 

You can use xrandr -q just to find out a) what your current screen resolution is in Linux and what your alternatives are. With all this ready, then start the server.

$ tightvncserver -geometry 1280x1024

That's all you need to do. Now, just start cotvnc on the mac. It asks you for the hostname (192.168.bla.bla) and display and the display number (most likely 1 is shown to you when you start tightvncserver on the linux)

And the result is as you can see in the screenshot here. I haven't found a genuine need for it yet but it'll be good to have available once I tuck my old PC away switched on with only a power and network cable. It's still got some 700Gb of harddrive space and my mac only has 500Gb.

You can read more about xrandr here

Worth noting, linux uses geeky cryptic names like xrandr in contrast to the mac world where it's Chicken of the VNC :) PS. Don't read in to that analysis too much. Mac is good but Linux is still superior in many aspects. I use both heavly.

UPDATE (Jan 2019): Read this newer blog post instead https://www.peterbe.com/plog/encrypt-with-emacs-on-macos-ccrypt

With the ccrypt program for Linux and some Emacs settings you can achieve the following:

You create or open a file called passwords.cpt. Then Emacs asks you for a password. Once you've entered the password you can word with the file like any other file to for example write down all your passwords to various websites or bank accounts.

When you close Emacs and try to read the file with any other program you get the binary encrypted output which is useless. What's important to Emacs is that the filename ends in .cpt which is a bit clunky. In vi you can get the same effect simply by passing the -x option when opening a file. But I don't like vi.