Mailund on the Internet

I got an iPad a few weeks ago, and I was a bit disappointed to find out that the notes application there doesn’t automatically synchronize over an IMAP mail box. Notes in Mail can be synchronized that way.

Some sort of “Cloud” is a must for me when it comes to most files, and especially to notes. I have a stationary computer at work and at home, a laptop when I’m traveling, and now an iPad that I plan to use when at meetings and such. If I have to manually synchronize these machines, it is a show stopper.

So, since it seems I cannot add iPad to the machines where I can just use Mail, I looked around after alternatives.

First, I tried SimpleNote.  There’s a website interface, apps for both iPad and iPhone, and several options for desktop applications (JustNotes, shown below, is the one I liked the most).

It’s a pretty simple service. Just text notes with some labels and such for categorizing notes. As far as I can see there aren’t any ways of formatting notes or adding files and such to them, but on the other hand, simple is sometimes just the right thing. Fewer things can go wrong, and there is really no learning curve.

I’m also trying out Evernote, though. Again, there are apps for iPad and iPhone and a desktop application for the Macs. I’m not sure about a web interface, but I don’t really need that if I have useful apps on every platform I’m on.

Evernote is in the complete opposite end of the feature scale. It looks like you can put just about anything in there as a note. There is rich formatting of notes and different ways of organizing them.

I doubt that I will ever use all the features of Evernote, but if I use enough of them to compensate for the more complex interface — and it doesn’t get much simpler than SimpleNote’s — then I am probably still going for that.

Haven’t quite decided yet, though.

Are there other note taking tools I should consider?

These days I find myself converting between “coalescence units” (a time unit of 2Ne generations) and “substitution units” (time measured in expected number of substitutions) several times a day.   It is not really much of a problem to do, but my brain is simply not wired to do arithmetic in my head, so I usually fire up R or Python for this.

I am learning Objective-C and Cocoa these days, more for fun than anything else, but I figured that I could write a small unit conversion application to get some use out of it.  I mentioned this to Kasper, but he suggested that I write a dashboard widget instead.

I have never used Dashcode before, but I fired it up this morning before I headed for the office, to get a feeling for how it works, with the intention of writing a widget during the week.  It turns out it is extremely easy to work with, though, and within half an hour I had a complete conversion widget coded up.

The only thing I don’t quite like about it yet is that when I do the conversions it doesn’t present the results in the text field in scientific notation, so I get stuff like 1000000 instead of 1e6 or 0.0001 instead of 1e-4, which makes the conversions somewhat harder to read.

I’m sure there is a way to format the numbers, but my Javascript-fu is not up to it.  This widget is the first Javascript I have ever written.

I converted some old slides from OpenOffice to Keynote for my lecture this morning.  I had to go through a PowerPoint format for this, since OpenOffice cannot export to Keynote, but Keynote can import PowerPoint, but that wasn’t so much of a problem.

However, the conversion messed up one of the fonts.  In particular, it replaced a mono-space font with a proportional font, which messed up my pseudo-code examples completely.

Changing the font to a mono-space one isn’t much of a problem, except that there are tens of pages where I had to do this.  Plus, I couldn’t simply change it on one page and copy it to the other, since I’m changing the colour of various parts of the text between the pages.  You can see the slides here if you are interested.

So I had to click all the text boxes one at a time, go to the font drop down, and select the new font.  Not only is this rather tedious but for someone with RSI like me it is actually physically painful…

Do any of you Mac folks out there know if there is a way to search and replace a font in Keynote?  If not directly, then how about through Automator or AppleScript?

The replacement for my broken office machine came this morning.  I got a nice Mac Pro this time, to get some more computing power to add to our Xgrid.

It’s a rather nice machine, but the screen, although 24″ as the iMac, seems a bit small, though.  Probably just because there is not much of a border around it, so to compensate I connected two screens… which reminds me that I need to go and get a new converter for the display port before I need one for connecting my MacBook to a projector…

It was also a rather nice surprise when iStat Menus showed 16 cores instead of the previous two.

There’s actually only 8 cores (it is two quad core CPUs) but with hyper threading that is what it looks like.

So far so good.

I configured it by extracting everything from my Time Machine backup from the crashed iMac.  That turned out to be a mistake, though.

When I tried to configure it for Xgrid – the reason why I got a Mac Pro rather than another iMac – I ran into trouble.

I need this machine to run a controller (because my iMac ran as the controller for our grid earlier, and the grid had been down since it was smashed), but I just couldn’t start the controller daemon!  It flatly refused to read the database file (/var/xgrid/controller/datastore.db).  I was under the impression that if I deleted this file it would just create a new one, but no such luck for me.  There was absolutely nothing I could do to get it to accept this file (or the absence of it) in the hours I worked with this…

I gave up late afternoon and decided to just reinstall everything from scratch, so I reformatted the disk and installed again.  This time I extracted Applications and Users from Time Machine only (which is all I need anyway), and finally I could start the Xgrid controller.

Now I was ready for the next problem.  Configuring the controller.

I don’t remember exactly how I managed to do this the last time, but I seem to recall that I could do it with Xgrid Admin, so I downloaded that.  I couldn’t set up the authentication that way this time around, though.

As a side note, configuring agents – the machines that can run jobs on the grid – is pretty easy.  It is all built in, and you just go to Sharing > Xgrid, pick a controller and set a password.

There is nothing similar for the controller.  There might be for the Server OS, but I couldn’t find anything on my machine.

For telling the controller which password to use, I found this blog post.  Basically, you need to copy the password file you created when you configured the agent over to the controller.

That just wasn’t enough.

I still needed to tell the controller to actually use password authentication rather than any other option.  Googling for an hour or more finally let me to the file /Library/Preferences/com.apple.xgrid.controller.plist for configuring the controller.  Now I just needed to figure out how to tell it to use password.

In the corresponding file for agents, /Library/Preferences/com.apple.xgrid.agent.plist, there’s the field

<key>ControllerAuthentication</key>
<string>Password</string>

so I tried setting the same in the controller configuration.  That didn’t work, so I tried

<key>AgentAuthentication</key>
<string>Password</string>

and that did the trick.

Finally, the controller was up and running.

My machine, as an agent, only provided four cores to the grid, though, but I knew what to do about that, so I updated the agent configuration to provide 16 cores (there’s really only 8, but with hyperthreading that should probably be considered 16).

As soon as I get the other agents configured with a new controller (the new machine has a different IP address than the old one), our grid should be back up and running.

All in all I wasted an entire day getting this up and running, but without the grid there really isn’t that much of my current data analysis I can get done, so it had to be done.

Ok, I have finally figured out why I had problems with xcodebuild most of today.

I use the Xcode project files built from CMake, and I was expecting

$ xcodebuild -configuration Release install

to install my libraries — since it looks like that is what I’m asking it to — or at least complain if I did something wrong.  Apparently there is nothing wrong with that command line, it just doesn’t install my libraries.  It builds them ok, but it doesn’t install them.

What I wanted to run was

$ xcodebuild -configuration Release -target install build

that builds the install target that then installs the libraries.

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