Best Tool for the Job

Mind Mapping

Both my father and father-in-law have spent time extolling the virtues of Mind Mapping--basically brainstorming on paper. I have come to realize the benefits of doing it, but for me, doing something on actual paper is just too reminicent of high school or filling out a form at the DMV or something horrible like that. I prefer to do things the digital way.

The other day, I discovered Nova Mind for Mac OS X which is a way of doing it digitally. I was pretty impressed with the functionality, but due to the fact that I don't have a Mac at home (yet) it's not much use. Plus it costs $59 dollars, which I suppose isn't bad, but it's more than I'm willing to pay. I also found Concept Draw but their MindMapping software is $149 and not quite as elegant as Nova Mind, though probably more functional.

Tonight I discovered a couple Windows products--both freeware/open source that look like they will do the trick. The first is appropriately titled Freemind. It's very functional, decent looking and you can do pretty much whatever you need to do with it right from the keyboard so there's no interrupting your train of thought by reaching over and missing the mouse. In addition to it being great on the desktop, there's a feature that lets you publish fully functional mindMaps to the web in without even having to export them. Here's an example.

The next one I found was called KeyNote (not to be confused with Keynote. It's more of a tool for outlining and creating hierarichal documents (like this blog for example). So far, I've been impressed with it. It's seems about as fully featured as any Office XP application, including Macro capabilites. Hmm. maybe I should write a macro to enable publishing to this Blog. Then it would be some serious competion to MacJournal.

I'm happy. If you're interested, I'd say check them both out. You can't go wrong with free :)

Benefits of Fatherhood

Today was one of those days where being a daddy seems like the best and easiest thing in the world. We took a trip down to Williamsburg to visit friends and house-hunt and Max was an angel. He sat in the back seat talking, singing and sleeping the whole time.

Having a baby also makes trips to Burger King much more fun/interesting :) He loved it! We enjoyed watching the faces he made as he tried ketchup and mustard and how he reacted with the other kids in the play room.

I suppose it's all part of the parental rollercoaster previously mentioned here. I love the peaks like today.

X11 on Panther

Today, in an effort to connect to the corporate exchange server from my Mac at work, I've decided to try to install Evolution [http://www.ximian.com/products/evolution] an open source product similar to Microsoft Outlook. It's been an interesting process.

If you decide to try it, you'll probably have to take these steps (assuming you're using Mac OS X 10.3 Panther)
1. Install xCode (comes with OSX). NOTE: Make sure you install the X11 SDK - it's not selected by default.
2. Install Fink -[http://fink.sourceforge.net/] Just go to the download section and pick the binary package and install it. The process is pretty straightforward. Make sure you drag the FinkCommander application that comes bundled with Fink to your hard drive. I found a couple projects that seem to try to do the same thing as Fink, but none seemed as complete.
3. Find the package you want to install and wait awhile.
4. Open a Terminal and you should be able to type the name of the program you installed and have it run.

At the time I'm writing this, Evolution has not been ported to Panther. So I decided to install KMail. Since I am installing it from source and it's Friday after 6pm, it looks like I'm going to have to wait until Monday to see how it looks :).

Other things that are nice to know is that X11 is installed by default in the Applications > Utilities folder. At this point there are quite a few applications that have been ported to OS 10.2 but not 10.3. I imagine it won't be long before they are ported to Panther, especially with the new X11 optimizations made by Apple. [http://www.apple.com/macosx/x11/].

Other X11 applications I'd like to be able to use are Nautilus (a cool file manager), kedit (a text editor) which reminds me, if you haven't seen it, SubEthaEdit [http://www.codingmonkeys.de/subethaedit/] is an awesome editor for OS X (I'm all over the place) and the Gimp (an image editing package). There are others...

Fink uses a package manager based on apt-get which is used in Debian. Basically that means that in order to install any application you only need to go to the command line and type fink install applicationname. It automatically finds dependencies (other packages needed by your application) and installs them. This is one of the reasons I won't even consider Linux distributions that are not based on Debian.

If you're curious about Debian, try Lycoris, Lindows, Libranet, Knoppix, Mepis or Xandros. There are Debian based distros as well, but to my knowledge these are the most common. Of these, only Mepis and Knoppix are free. The reason I would not recommend pure Debian to anyone is because it is very, very difficult to install, though they are slowly working on that issue.

I'm beginning to like OS X even more every day :)

MacJournal

Right now, in my mental dilemma between Mac and PC, I'm still sitting on the fence. This program (MacJournal) has definitely just added a plus onto the side of Macs. The simple elegance of it is nothing short of amazing. It's this type of program that makes using a computer pleasant. So... for now chalk one up for the mac.

Rollercoaster Rides

Having a baby has been more of a rollercoaster ride than I ever imagined. It's insane to me how many times a minute he can go from completely happy to screaming mad--forgetting altogether the emotion he was feeling in the previous second but leaving his parents somewhat befuddled. For daddy, it's a feeling of strong love, then confusion and eventually... I'll admit, strong frustration. What can you do?

He doesn't understand in the least what he's doing, It's just how babies are. I think as time goes on, my patience lasts longer and longer, but when it gets to a point, I just have to leave the room. Ahh... the life of a first time daddy :).