About the tigerrrrrr

About the tiger.

My orkut profile claims that I am busy taming the tiger. To make things somewhat more clear; my boss has recently bought two new Macbooks for the lab. I am using one of them. The mac OSX.4 is called Tiger. And trust me, it needs some taming.

So coming around to this topic. My blog frequently deals with the love-hate relationship I have with my computer. With a Windows, all I have is a hate-hate. With a Linux, its a love-hate,which sometimes becomes a hate-love. Go figure!! Anyway, the new Mac OS is built on a commercial strength UNIX foundation. Which gives you the power of the command prompt. And that, of course is the entire point of the machine..

But the command line, or the shell comes with a few quirks of its own. Any UNIX machine can be a smart speed demon, in fact, my labmate D looks upon his Mac (and this is a bloody 2 processor G5 monster) as the next best thing after Starship Enterprise. But these machines are bloody finicky. Its not quite as simple as firing up Media Player and then hunting for files. The UNIX filesystem lets the experienced user do almost anything. It also acts as an apparently unsurmountable barrier to the novice (read Akash).

The biggest stumbling block is when the shell refuses to run a certain command for you. As in, tells you that you are barking nuts. Instead of pulling out my hair (which is currently not too easy, me having gone from longhair to skinhead) I used to go camp outside our IT expert's door. Now he has just shown me how to set environmental variables. Which may just be the cure to half my problems.

You don't know half of it. Right after getting the Mac, AND being told that the .cshrc has a path set for me to be able to run Matlab, Mathematica and all those good things from the prompt, I sftp'd a totally different .cshrc from a linux machine in. You know, the usual shortcuts, aliases.. and of course,now nothing works!! Panic. Go down to the expert. Get him to open up the .cshrc and freak out. 'Where did all this stuff come from'.. well, more egg on my face.

Regarding computers, there are two conflicting statements in my life:
1.A little knowledge is a dangerous thing.
2.Practice makes perfect.