Useful Stuff
This page collects a few bits of software and various tricks that I've found useful in recent years. Your mileage may vary.
Mac Software
Here I list a few programs I've found very useful in day-to-day life as a scientist with a Macintosh. The first batch are freely-available:
- Aquamacs: A version of Emacs modified to be more Mac-friendly. Free, http://aquamacs.org/.
- FeynMP: A good way to draw Feynman diagrams using LaTeX. Directions for downloading and using with LaTeXit available from Taku Yamanaka.
- MacTeX: One-stop shopping for LaTeX on the Mac. Free, http://www.tug.org/mactex/. Includes a full TeX distribution (updated ~annually) as well as several useful programs:
- TeXShop: Good front end for LaTeX editing and compilation. Free, http://www.uoregon.edu/~koch/texshop/.
- BibDesk: Citation manager for BibTeX. Free, http://bibdesk.sourceforge.net/.
- LaTeXit: Excellent equation editor using LaTeX syntax. Drag-and-drop transparent PDFs of your equations for use in PowerPoint/Keynote or inclusion into PDFTeX documents, or save to various graphic formats for web pages and other uses. Free, http://pierre.chachatelier.fr/.
- NeoOffice / OpenOffice: Two versions of the excellent, MSOffice-compatible free office suite. The former is more Mac-optimized, but both now work on Intel Macs fairly well. I rarely find myself needing "real" MSOffice anymore. Free, http://www.neooffice.org, http://www.openoffice.org.
- Quicksilver: Excellent application launcher. Tough to live without once you've gotten used to it, though in OS 10.6 and 10.7 I've returned to using Spotlight. Free, http://blacktree.com/?quicksilver.
- SmartSleep: Useful little utility which puts your Mac laptop to sleep more quickly when you close its lid. Free, http://www.jinx.de/SmartSleep.html.
- VNC: An excellent way to connect remotely to a *NIX machine. I recommend either of two viewer programs, each of which adds one major feature that OS X's built-in VNC viewer lacks:
- Chicken of the VNC: A bit old, but you can set the color depth to 256 colors for use on slow connections. Shareware, http://sourceforge.net/projects/cotvnc/.
- JollysFastVNC: Does not currently support 256 colors, but does allow you to make secure VNC connections through SSH with a single click. Free trial, http://www.jinx.de/JollysFastVNC.html
- Xmeeting: Decent teleconferencing software for the Mac, which I've used this with the DOE's ESNET system. Sadly, it seems utterly broken on OS 10.7. Free, http://xmeeting.sourceforge.net/.
In addition, here are a few useful utilities which are not free. Note that I am extremely cheap, but I still think these are worth the money.
- GraphClick: Very useful program for capturing points and curves from other people's plots.
$8, http://www.arizona-software.ch/graphclick/. - Papers: Excellent solution for managing, searching, sorting, and annotating vast numbers of PDF documents. Much, much easier than organizing your files manually in countless directories. A little optimized for biomedical work, but very serviceable for physics.
€29 (only €17.40 for students), http://mekentosj.com/papers/.
(Possibly) helpful tips
- Most (though not all) papers on the arXiv are submitted in LaTeX, so the original (high-resolution) versions of the included figures are available online. You can download the figures as part of the LaTeX source, available under "Other Formats." This is very useful when referencing other works in talks or dissertations. For papers where the source is unavailable but a PostScript version is, you can extract the figures from a PostScript file using the extract-eps script.
- When writing your dissertation, be sure to back up regularly, preferably to a remote location. I wrote an alias "thback" in my .profile file that rsync-ed my thesis directory to a directory on one of my research group's machines. This kind of rsync doesn't take long to run (only files which have changed are transmitted, and most of that is text in LaTeX), so I tried to run this after each editing session on my laptop.
- Mac OS 10.5 (Leopard) uses a much-improved X11 system, but I initially had issues using the built-in version (especially with Matlab). You can download upgraded versions of this windowing system from http://xquartz.macosforge.org/. OS 10.6 and 10.7 don't seem to need this.