Flashes of Panic

I’m taking a web programming course this semester which is resulting in me downloading and installing a few dozen software packages to my long-suffering Powerbook. (I’m surprised I haven’t mistakenly tried to install MPI on it yet.) I already mentioned AquaPath; here’s a rundown of the (many) packages I have downloaded for installation in the not-too-distant future.

• DeerPark: I’ve previously noted my dissatisfaction with the official Firefox builds for the Mac, with my biggest beef being the inelegant form widgets. DeerPark offers “unofficial” builds tweaked for specific Apple processors (in my case, G4,) and including the option of Aqua form widgets. So I’m giving Firefox yet another trial as my primary browser (once I get some lingering open tabs in Safari read.)

• While I’m at it, Camino 1.0 is out. Maybe they’ve solved whatever instability they had that drove me to Safari in the first place. (Safari is a fine browser, I’d like to add, and nicely standards-compliant. But it’s also largely closed-source and controlled by a big corporation; in that respect, I might as well use IE.)

• We’re moving in to a unit where we’re working on a set of Windows 2003 servers, which we can only reach by Remote Desktop (and, if outside the CS network, via VPN.) Earlier in the semester it was suggested that we’d need to do this from Windows clients, but it turns out there’s a Mac OS client for Remote Desktop. From outside the network, we can even skip the VPN by creating an SSH tunnel (which Windows can’t do; for some reason, the Remote Desktop client refuses to open a connection to localhost, even if it’s the local end of an SSH tunnel.) So I’m setting up for the surreal experience of Windows on my desktop.

• And even though I probably won’t need it, I’m installing Tunnelblick, which is a Mac build of OpenVPN.

• Going back to the last unit (whence I got AquaPath,) the inestimable Marc Liyanage has, on his OS X packages page (also the home of OS X builds of PHP and MySQL,) an app called TextXSLT for “playing around” with XSLT and XML transformations. From there are links to a number of (also largely open-source) transformation engines which I have also downloaded, but not yet installed… there’s a lot going on which isn’t software, and dammit, I can’t hack all the time.

Now Playing: Calling America from Balance of Power by Electric Light Orchestra