I have previously noted down Watson and GraphicConverter. These are nice low-price software packages running under Mac OS X. In addition, most software made by OmniGroup is first class. I have licensed OmniWeb, OmniGraffle, OmniOutliner, and OmniDisksweeper.

I'm not fanatical about using Free Software. I'm more on the lines of Open Source, but I also support shareware and commercial software. These have their advantages and disadvantages.

Mac OS X offers users all kinds of tools. The Fink project has ported a massive amount of free and open source software to Mac. MS Office is a massive commercial package. There are hundreds (if not thousands) of small software packages offering additional functionality for Mac OS X users. I hope the situation stays the same: there is enough room for all kinds of efforts in this garden.

What I'm against is using software as a strategic weapon, which leads to monopolistic aims and practices. The Free Software Movement has a point, which however is not realistic to implement. Thus, I'm ready to support all such software development which is based on open standards, free exchange of ideas, and free competition. No software patents, please!

Since December 20, 2001, I have been keepinga personal job-oriented journal using the MacJournal software. I have saved to my journal notebooks ideas, text clippings, pictures, and web addresses. Several published texts were drafted using MacJournal.

MacJournal uses the reverse cronological sorting of entries, which is used in weblogs also. However, I didn't know about blogging then, and I did not use MacJournal for publishing my notebook. (This is possible using HTML export.)

Before using MacJournal, I have been using plain text files, Word, and bound paper notebooks for storing ideas. I think the MacJournal (and weblog) way of archiving information is rather nice. The reverse chronological order tends to emphasize the most current information, but makes it possible to search entries using various search criteria.

What is the difference between a personal journal and a weblog? I'm not quite sure about this. Perhaps it is the difference for writing to your desk drawer vs. writing for a publisher. But here the publishing is a sure thing, although finding readers is far from sure.

I feel a bit like celebrating. During the weekend I have browsed and read through about 300 pages of our book on numerical methods ("Numerical Methods in practice", written in Finnish). The second edition contains some new topics, notably Fourier and wavelet transforms and adative finite elements. We have managed to keep the book concise, increasing the length to about 414-415 pages, less than 30 pages more than in the first edition.

The update has taken on and off almost a year. Not, while finishing the book, I have become quite focused on the topic. It seems almost a pity to let go. There are facts to check, new developments to follow, and lots of things to verify. On the other hand, "best is an enemy of the good", as a professor of physics once said. Sometimes you just have to let go.

People are more and more living in this moment, for this moment. Few are doing any longer-term planning. Our technology makes us more and more rely on on-the-spur decisions. Mobile phones allow us to control our social life at this moment. Our messaging technology exists for living this moment, not for planning for the future.

Technology for the now: mobile phones, television, e-mail, web, blogs, irc, newsgroups, www chat forums. All these tools focus on the current moment.

Life was different in the countryside only about 100 years ago. You had to plan for the next summer: having enough seeds to plant in the spring, enough livestock until next summer, and enough wood for keeping warm and preparing food.

The modern age is said to be rational, but where is the proof? We are increasingly basing our decisions on non-rational shortsighted thinking, not long-term survival. Science and technology may be rational endeavours, but our way of living is not.

There is already a Security Update for OS X [MacCentral]. Apple seems to keep on posting security fixes regularly.
At least the software update system makes installing these a breeze, but every now and then an update reguires a restart. There goes a new uptime record.

My record with Mac OS X in reqular daily production use is 69 days - then the Mac went down because of a power failure which took down the whole office wing. After that I have been too keen on installing new software and updates to get much beyond 60 days.

This week I have been involved in a book project. Second edition of our 400+ page book is getting ready, but there are all those small things which require correcting at the last moment. Sometimes it seems easier to let go, but then I just push on and re-read the thing once more. And I have also learned something. One of the new topics of the book is wavelets, and that is certainly interesting. But I don't have the time to try out in practice all those nice wavelet examples.

There seems to be a flood of software updates for Mac OS X. For example, GraphicConverter was updated to 4.4.4. This was the first shareware program I registered after getting Mac OS X. Then came Watson and half a dozen other programs. Now I'm (still!) thinking about purchasing Radio. But there are 26 days of the trial period left...

Am I getting hooked on bloggin? I'm trying the Radio features, and managed to find a couple of problems. It seems that the RSS feed does not always replace the shortcuts with their texts. Also, sometimes the Radio application stops responding to commands from the local web browser.

Overall, I'm quite pleased with Radio. Also, the corresponding Blog at universalrule.blogspot.com seems to keep up with the Universal Rule blog. I have also checked a couple of times the page read rankings. A few minutes ago this blog happened to be number 5 at Radio.

There is a nice article in Nature about Creating a bioinformatics nation. It seems that lots of effort is put into integrating separate systems and sources of information. I hope there will be a multi-platform system or compatible systems available for researchers. Standards, standards.

Yesterday i blogged with a pen on paper. Left the iBook at work for software installation (running the system now). Felt disconnected without my iBook. It was nice to sit in the garden, blogging with on paper with a Parker Frontier fountain pen.

I've always hated to "be in". To have "in" hobbies, to eat certain "in" foods, to visit "in" places. There is enough strangeness inside my head already, no thank you. Visit gurus, read the right things, listen to the Führer. Who needs to be in? Anyone who has survived childhood has the stuff to be a writer, or anything else.

As a writer I have always kept a list of ideas, text clippings and article outlines. Perhaps blogging is like having a shared scrapbook of ideas. But do these ideas already diffuse outside to non-bloggers?

Is anyone blogging with a Nokia communicator? That would be ideal tool to take everywhere. Like the slogan "Connecting people" says.

The Blog phenomemon is going mainstream in Finland. A weekly IT magazine had yesterday a feature story about Finnish bloggers. Some celebrities seem to have started blogging. Perhaps blogging is like having your column in a daily newswpaper, without having to have the newspaper.

Last night while watching Heaven can Wait, a Warren Beatty movie from 1978, I decided to iBlog an iSwitch poem. Here it is. Are there any composers to make the music?

Jaguar reviews are pouring in. This seems to be a powerful but unobtrusive animal. Well done, not medium or rare.

Nice comments about Unix and Mac OS X at Unix As Literature: Revisited. There are many people like me who have been using a Mac as a front-end to a Unix machine. I actually used a Mac as a front-end to an IBM 3090 VF mainframe system for a couple of years. I wrote user guides to that system as a part of my work.

The Mac ease of use combined with the scripting capabilities of Unix is a powerful combination, even though in the past the systems have been separate. Now when Unix and Mac live together, I have arrived at $HOME.

I went back to Blogger and had a look at my blog there. I realized I could mirror the posts made by Radio to the blog here at Universal Rule to the blog at universalrule.blogspot.com. Perhaps this works. I would like to have a "nice" address for the blog, if I decide to continue it.

I moved here a couple of texts I wrote during the last decade. In 1997 I had a look at the five years of my math web site. I didn't remember (until re-reading that article) that I actually started with a Gopher site in 1992. So that makes the service about 10 years old. Now I'm just barely keeping it alive, pruning away out-dated information bit by bit.

The Last Rebel Coders is a story set to happen about 10 years
in the future. I hope the article provides light but
provocative reading.

I originally wrote the story in the Summer of 2001
to celebrate the 10th anniversary of Linux. That
version appeared as a column in an IT magazine in Finland.

In the Summer 2002 I decided to make an English translation.
I had to change some wordings and shorten the text to
retain some of the flow and
style of the original Finnish version.

It seems the tabbed windows of Mozilla make weblog posting and viewing posts quite easy. Of course, I have to see, how much HTML I have to write here to make the linking to other web sites work well. Now I'm writing HTML links by hand, but I hope there is an easier way to do this. [I had to correct his post, bad HTML, no suprise.]

Ok, I'm just going to use Mozilla, until there is a tool that works as seamlessly as most Mac OS X software. Perhaps I'm becoming a bit picky about the quality of software. On the other hand, the quality on Mac OS X is high nowadays, you just need to check out Watson, OmniGraffle, OmniWeb etc. Plus all the Apple-made iApps, which make using computers almost a pleasure.

I'm trying to post using iBlog beta, lets see if this works. Technicalities, technicalities. In a way this is also nice, quite like trying to make something out of wood, a tray perhaps, so there is lot to learn before making something that actually works.

This seems both easier and more difficult than I thought. There are software problems, at least it seems that OmniWeb does not work well with the web-based blogger interface. Not good enough Javascript support, probably. So, I had to switch to Mozilla 1.1a, and this seems to work. I will also try the stand-alone weblog posting tools available on Mac OS X, to see if they make this even easier.

Everywhere: talk about blogging. The only way to find out what blogging actually is seems to do it. So here goes. My first post. Using a randomly selected blog service and a randomly named blog.