I hoped to have some new math pictures for you (or at least for me) today, but my attempts to install a code library that I need have come to nothing. The makefile invokes gcc with options that version 3.3 won’t take. I try to install gcc 4, and Fink says before I can do that I need to recompile Fink with gcc 4.

So I’m having a depressive episode instead.

But I can tell you anyway about what I wanted to do. ( . . more . . )

Jamie Zawinski has ported his gorgeous screensaver collection to MacOS.

My favorites are Demon, a colorful cellular automaton; CloudLife, a fuzzy variant of Conway’s Life; Substrate, whose randomly growing arcs suggest the street plan of an old city; Galaxy, a simulation of gravitic interactions; Polytopes, which displays one of the six convex regular polychora, rotating in 4-space.

Having made the plunge and ordered Knuth’s third edition, what should I do with the volumes I bought twenty-odd years ago?

It seems so straightforward: I get an external HD, copy the internal to it, wipe the internal, reinstall the original system software, then copy back my personal directory (and whatever else I find I need) from the external.

(The reason for all this is that some change in the past year has impaired my Mac’s ability to play sound, and I’d like to at least find out which change it was. Also, Cyrillic doesn’t display since I went crazy and installed my old font collection.)

If I drag the “Macintosh HD” icon to the “External” icon, Finder creates an alias rather than a copy. If I open the Macintosh HD and drag all the top-level folders, Finder objects because I, as a plain user, lack permission for some of the files. (Is there a way to run Finder as superuser?) Disk Utility won’t make a disk image of Macintosh HD: “Resource busy,” presumably because it is the startup disk.

So I run cp -Rp and come back eight hours later to find that the target disk is full, presumably because of a loop: /Volumes/Macintosh HD/Volumes/ contains both Macintosh HD and External. (The GNU version of cp has an option cp -x to ignore subdirectories on other filesystems, but MacBSD’s cp lacks that.) I guess I’ll use a shellscript that enumerates the top directories (except Volumes) explicitly.

I probably won’t need to save anything other than Users, Applications and Library — and life would be simpler if I could be sure of that.

next day: Okay, the script apparently worked, until it came to the folder Applications (Mac OS 9) — I had forgotten that the shell would be unhappy about the parenthesis. But now the external disc (which is on USB) has unmounted itself.

later same day: Well, it’s all done now. iTunes still won’t make noises, but now (after updating Quicktime) I can hear YouTube for a change.

Is there a standard Unix shell command to pause for a given amount of time? One wouldn’t use this from the prompt, of course, but it might have its uses in scripts. Mine is to open a large number of files (local or Web), but not all at once:

cat list-of-files | xargs slow-open &

where slow-open looks like

#!/bin/sh
for i in $*
  do
    open $i
    pause 60
  done

It seems like unnecessary overkill to write pause in Python.

In unrelated news — I’ve heard that you can discourage vermin from stealing your pets’ food by setting out a sample spiked with emetic. Have you tried this, does it work? What drug is appropriate for a cat? A neighborhood tom has recently found our cats’ dish, and drops in every night as if he owns the place (if I’m not watching).

Somewhere in MS Word’s infinitely deep dialog boxes there must be a checkbox whose default setting is Do what I explicitly asked you not to do.

Since moving back to MacOS from Red Hat, I do miss a few features:

• ability to resize a window by dragging any edge, not only the bottom right corner
• ability to send the current window to the back with a single stroke (a feature of the Sawfish window manager)
• gftp, a good ftp client