I’ve not yet seen Master and Commander (I’m going on Thursday night) so I’ve been avoiding all of the blog posts about it that are floating around. But here’s a neat post about the warships of Jack Aubrey’s day.

In general, I like it.

If you’re a Mac nut, you’ve probably already read reviews and descriptions of Panther, so I won’t try to hit all of the details. I’ll just hit a few highlights.

First of all, the new appearance is nifty. Some folks really dislike the “brushed metal” look of the window frames, but I think it’s cool.

Second, “Expose” is too cool for words. Here’s the easy way to switch between the dozens of open windows on your desktop: press F9. Instantly, all of the open windows on your screen shrink and jostle about until all of them are completely visible. Click on the one you want; everything gets big again. That sounds awfully complicated, I suppose, but it’s fast. And it takes much less thought than mousing over to the dock to find the little icon for the window I want. Then there’s the F10 key. Press that and it’s just like F9 but only the windows belonging to the current application are affected. And finally, there’s F11. Press that, and all the windows scatter just past the edges of the desktop–leaving your whole desktop visible, so you can find that one important icon. It’s going to take me a while to get used to using Expose, but it’s a good habit to pick up.

X11 is nicer, too, in addition to being a 1.0 product instead of a Beta. It’s mostly like it was in the past, but has some new options: you can invoke X11 programs from the Finder, and minimize them on the Dock.

The other two programs I’ve played with so far are the Safari web browser (which is mostly unchanged) and Apple’s Mail application, which is mostly unchanged but has a few important additions. First, it’s faster, which is nice. Second, it now gives you a threaded view of your e-mail messages, which makes finding things easier…I think. You can turn it off if you don’t like it. And finally, it makes a nifty zooming sound when it sends an e-mail message.

They say Panther is faster than Jaguar, and that may be so; I’m not sure.

So, so far, so good!

This is the second of the two essays I promised, inspired by an e-mail exchange about Creationism vs. Evolution. The first is The Two Books.

In my first essay I talked about the relationship between the Book of
Spirit, the Bible, and the Book of Nature, the universe around us. Both,
I said, were created by God, and both reflect God’s character. Also,
both require interpretation. I explained a little about why I consider
the Bible to be authoritative; but I also said that I do not neglect the
Book of Nature.

In this essay I’ll talk explicitly about the problem of creation–just
how God created not only we human beings, but also the planet Earth
and the universe in which we live.

Continue reading →

Golly Gee!! You are NORMAN ROCKWELL.
You are a painter of simple, everyday happenings.
You tend to avoid the outrageous and stay well
within the guidelines of society. Your friends
count on you for your loyalty and level-
headedness.

Which famous artist most reflects your personality?
brought to you by Quizilla

Sure enough, once I installed the new Developer Tools and rebuilt X11 Emacs, it works just fine! So we are now good to go for future development work, and I can go to bed with a happy heart.

Total time spent installing Panther and related tools, plus recompiling Emacs: two and a half hours.

Most serious problem: boredom while waiting for the installers to finish.

Only glitch encountered: I had to ask Fink to recompile Emacs for me.

I’ll probably have a little more to say about Panther tomorrow. But for sure, Expose is way cool.

I’ve got Panther installed; I simply requested an upgrade from OS X 10.2, and everything went swimmingly. All my data is available, and all of my applications appear to be working just fine.

Of course, there is one fly in the ointment: my Emacs isn’t working! Wouldn’t you just know it. The version I downloaded the other day simply isn’t working. I’m going to try rebuilding it as soon as I get the Apple Developer’s Tools installed.

The X11 version of Gnu Emacs is working just fine; better, in some ways, than what I’d been using. So I think I’ll probably try installing Panther tonight.

If you don’t hear from me tomorrow, you’ll know what happened….

So last week I went out and got a copy of the new version of Mac OS X, code-named Panther. I was all prepared to install it on my PowerBook and experience the joy of faster code and prettier windows.

And then, before I installed it, I discovered that my Emacs wasn’t going to work properly on Panther.

You clearly do not appreciate the gravity of that statement. Let me repeat it.

My Emacs wasn’t going to work properly on Panther!

Well, OK, let me explain. It’s like this: I’m a programmer. I write software for a living. I write software for fun. And for a working programming, the one essential tool is his text editor. It’s like the drill sergeant says to the recruits at Marine boot camp: “This is your weapon. You will eat with it, you will sleep with it, it will be your best friend.” Except that in my case, that tool is a text editor.

And my text editor of choice is called Emacs. I can do amazing things with Emacs without conscious thought that would take ten times as long with any other editor. I’ve got Emacs on every computer I use regularly (at present that’s my PowerBook, my old Windows laptop, my Windows desktop at work, and two Sun workstations, also at work). It works pretty much the same on all of them, and it makes my life ever so much smoother.

So the danger of being bereft of Emacs is serious enough that Panther is still in its box.

Today, though, things are going better; I’ve worked out an alternative.

See, the Emacs I’ve been using is a binary I downloaded of an old build of Gnu Emacs only partially made over to use the native Mac windowing system. It’s out of date, which is why it won’t run on Panther. A much better version is available, but the guy who’s been porting and maintaining it has consistently refused to make any binary or source distribution available (possibly because it isn’t officially released yet) and has been telling everyone to just download the latest code from SourceForge and build it. I’ve been unwilling to do that; the latest code might be stable, and it might not. On top of that, for it to run on Panther I’d have to build it on Panther, which means that there’d be a hiatus in the availability of Emacs.

(If there are any other diehard OS X users out there reading this, they are no doubt thinking that OS X comes with Emacs pre-installed. They are right, but it’s a non-GUI version that only runs in a terminal window and doesn’t support the mouse. Not good enough.)

But today I realized that there was another alternative. In addition to Aqua, the native windowing system, Mac OS X also supports X11, the windowing system used on most Unix computers. And Emacs has run perfectly well on X11 for years. And there’s a group of people called the Fink Project (Fink is German for “Finch”, i.e., the bird, so you can stop snickering) who’ve been packaging lots and lots of Unix software for use on the Mac. And one of the packages they provide is the X11 version of Emacs.

So I spent the day first downloading Fink and installing it, and then (via Fink) downloading and building and installing Emacs for X11. I had to do a little fooling around, but now I’ve got it configured just the way I like it, and I think it’ll do the trick.

I’ll spend a few days using the X11 version to make sure it really works for me…and then the Panther can prowl freely.

I just overheard my four-year-old playing quietly by himself:

They’re going to take over the world! Better call 911….

It’s good that he knows what to do in a situation like that.

I’ve written a rough draft of my follow-on to Wednesday’s The Two Books; I want to let it sit over night, and then proofread it for foolishness tomorrow.