mac osx 10.6

is it worth upgrading from 10.5?

the cost is not much (~US$30), and the time it took was not too long (less than 1-2hr). i did not notice the improvements apple advertised (faster this, faster that...), and i had to download and installed developer's tools to be able to code.

overall, i don't think this is worth the time and money. if os 10.5 runs fine on the computer already, i think it's better not to touch it. i consider myself lucky that upgrading didn't break things (so far... fingers crossed!).

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after using it for a month, my feeling is that what apple does best is advertising. using terse phrases to attract customers.

after installing 10.6, from time to time when i compile codes the compiler would strangely be switched from gcc to lex, which then overwrote my code!

gmail

i mainly use two email accounts: one at work, the other gmail. for some reason i cannot access to my work account from home, so i have to rely on gmail at home. i thus have to cc/bcc to my work account work-related messages i send via gmail (using the custom "from" address so it looks like being sent from my work account). i also set up my work account so that it forwards messages to gmail. bottom line is, when i send a message from gmail, both my work account and gmail get a copy of it.

this system worked for >1yr, until recently. i no longer see the mails i cc/bcc'd to my work account in my gmail inbox. after spending several hours trying to figure out what's wrong, i learned from this discussion that it was due to google's decision to make gmail "more self-consistent".

basically, if the "from" and "to" (or cc/bcc) address are the same (in my case my work account), gmail regards the message as being sent to a mailing list and it will automatically remove the "inbox" label of the message, so the mail can only be found in the "all mail". one can add the "inbox" label to the message by hand, but it's annoying.

a workaround is to set up a filter, so that for all messages from my work account are treated "never send it to spam". for some reason this put the messages back to inbox.

google should have warned the users of gmail such change, however minor it may be seen to them!!!

citeulike

how to search for papers with multiple tags:

to find papers tagged with "gf" and "radio_galaxy":
in the personal library, type in the search box
+tag:gf and +tag:radio_galaxy

or directly from the url:
http://www.citeulike.org/user/AAA/tag/gf,radio_galaxy
where AAA is the username

see some discussions here