Macintosh Rules. O.K.


These hints are mostly aimed towards Mac users, but may be useful on other platforms too.
(Although why you'd want to use something else is beyond me...)
Let's use Unix, but with style! :)



GLE "Graphics Layout Engine" is a really cool way to produce amazing figures for your publications, posters and presentations.
Click here for my hot GLE top-tips..

Apple_Scripting Got a Mac? Good, then you're sensible. The best thing that any respectable Macintosh user can do, is to get familiar with AppleScript - it's really useful and can save you a lot of time if you become a power user. I'll release some some lecture notes on this at some point ...

Install_PDL An all-in-one install package for PDL (Perl Data Language) and PGPLOT (which can otherwise be a pain to configure together) created by Professor Karl Glazebrook. This is extremely useful software and it's free! Version 0.12 works great...
CPAN Check out the CPAN webpage for a whole lot of Perl fun. This particular link is where you can get hold of any PDL Module that you wish. (Again, and it's all free!). Very useful.
PDL::PGPLOT A useful quick reference for the PDL interface with PGPLOT. It's all in the man pages, but sometimes it's useful to have a quick look here.


  • MacHint1 - TCSH Aliases

    If you use the tcsh shell like me, then you might find it useful to pass an arguement to an alias that you use often. For example, I use gifsicle to create animations from a series of GIF images. The basic command would be:

    X11> gifsicle --delay 10 --loopcount --colors 256 *gif > animation.gif


    The alternative is to create an alias in your .tcshrc file such as this:
    alias anim "gifsicle --delay 10 --loopcount --colors 256 \!:1 > \!:2"
    ...where \!:1 means "insert arguement 1 here" etc. So:

    X11> anim *gif animation.gif

    would achieve the same result as above. Of course, this is only particularly useful if you use that command a lot, but you get the idea...