I’m using Vista for more than five minutes for the first time today. Here’s what I noticed so far:

1. A single Win-Tab does nothing. Great work there, guys. Guess I’ll keep using Alt-Tab.
2. Minimise animation is OK I guess.
3. No way to switch Ctrl/Alt/Win/Shift/Caps Lock in the GUI.
4. On a 3.2 Ghz P4 with 1 GB RAM, everything is slow. Sometimes it’s something like Explorer taking 2 seconds to display Documents or everything else taking 0.4 seconds. Slow is not that bad except there’s an empty window with no indication that there’s even anything loading. So I try to go somewhere else, which is also slow.
5. I guess I was just used to instant on Windows. Those were good days. But it looks like they’re gone.
6. Hey! Search now mostly works!
7. Word is still a Pit of Evil. Why do my friends use it, anyway?

I still think we should switch to Linux servers instead of Mac servers at the linguistics department, but until that happens, I need to find out what is the difference between OS X and OS X Server. The difference is smaller, I believe, than between Windows 2003 and Vista (Windows 2003 and XP?). As far as I can tell, we don’t really need OS X Server for our modest server needs, which include:

1. An experiment server for people to write programs and run them on corpora.
2. A web server for running the CL web site and various ICALL programs. Plus a wiki
3. A file server for various internal and external projects

Nothing fancy, basically just ssh, sftp, apache, mod_python (or mod_wsgi) and rsync*.
This is somewhat important since we can get OS X licences for $70 through the educational discount and I haven’t figured out how to do the same for OS X Server.

Here are the additional features of OS X Server as far I can tell from Apple’s page:

1. Useless gewgaws: podcast producer, iChat server, iCal (CalDAV) server (in increasing order of utility, I suppose)
2. Stuff we do manually: wiki, spotlight server, time machine, and file sharing
3. Stuff we don’t need: mail server, LDAP, client management
4. Future features: ZFS in 10.6, read only ZFS in 10.5.

1. Nice things : Apache/OpenSSL integration by default. I don’t think the ICALL stuff will need this but it might.

*Notice the distinct lack of the i- prefix on any of this software.

One reason: dt.. That’s “delete forward up until you see a period, but keep the period".

Emacs commands assume you are writing lots of new code, while vi commands assume you are editing existing text that isn’t necessarily in a programming language. So Emacs’ latex-mode has no command kill-to-end-of-sentence, while dt. is the ad-hoc equivalent. Super useful when you’re rewriting a draft of a paper.

(Ad: I advise you to still use emacs, however. Check out viper-mode.)

All my friends are better at writing about the important things in life than I am:

• Jeremy McNeal: The Stuff Most Christians Don’t Agree On
• Kaleb Captain: Man’s Best-laid Plans

But…uh…if you want to keep on reading uninformed critiques of programming languages, stick around.

Oh, so it looks like Spaces, the virtual desktop solution in OS X, was updated in 10.5.3 to have a ‘be less stupid’ check box. I have it turned on and the desktop switching animation is very cool…but I’m still not convinced it’s useful, at least for flenser, which is running two real 20″ desktops. I will probably start using it on peregrin, though.

The other stupid parts of 10.5 got their “be less stupid” check boxes in 10.5.2, mostly.

Also, here’s a cool tip: to quickly get rid of unwanted menu bar icons (the Mac equivalent of Windows system tray icons), just Cmd+drag them to the desktop. They disappear in a puff of smoke and you will probably never be able to find the Preference panel to turn them back on again.

Here’s a call for comments. I’ve always wondered why you would want virtual desktops–the only person I know who uses virtual desktops is my advisor. Is there a really good justification for them? Let me know if you have one.