MAC INSTALLATION NOTES

general use stuff

1. Gave my computer a name "vespa" (by "get info" on hard drive icon and in SystemPrefs:sharing.)
2. downloaded and installed quicksilver from Blacktree, the most indispensible mac program.
3. Ran software update.
4. synced iCal and Google Calendar with Spanning Sync (although it does cost money -- I hear GSync might be cheaper and just as well).
5. Installed Smultron as my text editor.
6. downloaded and installed cyberduck, the sickest freeware FTP program ever. It interfaces with Smultron most smoothly.
7. firefox, downloaded and installed. Indispensible plugins: Flashblock, and TinyURLCreator. Also, created the quick-search links by right clicking on any search box and choosing "add a keyword for this search".
8. set up Mail and Gmail IMAP servers. Good tips here.
9. installed the iPhotoToGallery plugin for uploading photos to Gallery.
10. Installed ImageMagick with download and instructions from this page. Used Applications as the home folder.
11. Turned of the dashboard using the following commands:
    > defaults write com.apple.dashboard mcx-disabled -boolean YES
    > killall Dock
    to make it come back use:
    > defaults write com.apple.dashboard mcx-disabled -boolean NO
    See this page for more details.

stats/computing stuff

1. downloaded and installed MacTex package for running LaTeX. Also, created a few standard templates for beamer presentations and any academic file that I write in /Users/nick/Library/TeXShop/Templates. Furthermore, I discovered that the natbib style for LaTeX was already installed at the path /usr/local/texlive/2007/texmf-dist/tex/latex. Seems like there are a lot of packages that come pre-installed with the MacTex package. also, used the command "find . -name *.sty" to find .sty and .bst files that were previously installed.
2. downloaded and installed aquamacs as my default emacs client.

   to get new R help windows to open in new frames for Aquamacs:

   • create the directory /Applications/Aquamacs\ Emacs.app/Contents/Resources/site-lisp/site-start.d/
   • create the file /Applications/Aquamacs\ Emacs.app/Contents/Resources/site-lisp/site-start.d/emacs-ess-init.el
   • based on this website the .el file should look like this ('-----' are just indications of where it's starting and stopping, they should not be included in the file):

     -------
     (require 'ess-site)
     (setq inferior-ess-own-frame t)
     (setq inferior-ess-same-window nil)
     
     ;;create a new frame for each help instance
     
     ;; use this one if each help window goes to a new frame
     (setq ess-help-own-frame t)
     
     ;; use this one if you want all help windows into one frame!
     ;; (setq ess-help-own-frame 'one)
     --------
     
     and I added the following lines to the site-start.el file in the site-lisp directory:
     --------
     ;; load site-start.d/*.el
     (mapc 'load (directory-files
     "/Applications/Aquamacs Emacs.app/Contents/Resources/site-lisp/site-start.d" t "\\.el\\'"))

3. created .emacs file in /Users/nick/ to give some better shading, spacing as defaults.
4. installed R from CRAN
5. Set up passwordless login for Enigma.