Author: matt

Sheepshaver and the Intel Mac

I’m a little behind the bandwagon on this, but I haven’t had the need to mess around with OS 9x on an Intel Mac. Now I do.

We recently got new computers for the paleo lab, one of which is a mac. The mac was purchased so that we could run PAUP*. Unfortunately for us, no one checked to make sure PAUP* would run on an Intel Mac. It will not, and I hope they get around to fixing that soon.

Anyway, I am currently trying to install Mac OS 9.0 on this new Mac Mini. Rather than spell out the instructions here, I will direct you to some better tutorials:

—Run MacOS 9 on an Intel Mac
—How to use TomeViewer

Extracting the ROM image from my current installation of OS 9 as Classic on my Powerbook G4 was simple, as was setting up the new volume to emulate the PowerPC chip on the Intel Mac.

Installation of OS 9.0 initially has gone smoothly. One thing that the first tutorial above does not mention is that you will get a “disk is unreadable” notice when you start up SheepShaver to install OS 9. Don’t worry, it’s just asking about the new disk image you just created, not about the rest of your hard drive.

I had a couple false starts. The first time I installed OS 9, it made it nearly to the end of the installation and told me I didn’t have enough free space, even though it had said that 200 MB was good enough. I increased this to 400 MB, and I’m waiting on results.

Problems: The first time I attempted OS 9 installation, SheepShaver just quit, so I restarted it and it worked fine (except for the memory problem). I increased the memory to 400 MB and tried again. SheepShaver quit out at the beginning of installation (the part where the progress bar has barely started to move) numerous times.

I think the cause of this problem was running SheepShaver from the “Start” command in the GUI, after which the GUI did not quit entirely and messed something up. This persisted through a restart and a new virtual 400 MB disk, but this last time it worked when I quit out of the GUI and started the SheepShaver program properly manually.

UPDATE: It seems to be installed. 400 MB was enough. I’ll see what I can install now that will work.

UPDATE: PAUP* installs, but I am not a PAUP* user. I will try convince someone to test it out, since PAUP* is the reason we got this new machine in the first place.

UPDATE: Since there has been some confusion, this post refers to running PAUP* with a GUI. There is a version of PAUP* that will run on an Intel Mac from the command line.

UPDATE (again!): Cool reader Ricardo (in the comments to this post) has pointed out a trial version of a GUI PAUP* for the Intel Mac. I have installed it, opened it up, and that’s about it. It opens fine in Tiger (10.4), but my PAUP*-using colleagues have not attempted to run anything on it. UPDATE: This version has expired; I have not been able to get it to work using devious means.

Ichnowiki

[EDIT: Ichnowiki is no more.  2014-02-11]

Ichnowiki will be offline for a while, as I have had little opportunity to add information or to promote it, and it makes me feel bad to leave the computer in my office running all the time “just in case” I should have the time to do either of the above.

If you are searching for something like Ichnowiki, I can let you see what I have so far if you ask.

under something so light and feathery as to be the starlight off of dust

As you can see, I am well on my way to getting things done. Today I have no classes, and so I feel pretty sure that I can be very productive. Today’s goal: Be Very Productive.

The chemistry exam was simple–I either knew it or I didn’t. There are a few I may have gotten wrong, or may have gotten right, but overall I either knew the answer without thinking, or had never seen the information presented in the question (sometimes, there were new words to me!). This made the exam short (only a little math) but dicey. That’s all I am going to say right now. I do, however, feel much better than I did on Tuesday night (as the GirlFriend will attest).

I received consensus on my idea for how to do PCA on Fourier coefficients from the man who should know, since he did this for his (Doctoral? Masters?) Thesis. The method, if you are curious, is to set up your table thus:

Sample 1 a2 b2 a3 b3 a4 b4 . . . an bn
Sample 2 a2 b2 a3 b3 a4 b4 . . . an bn
Sample 3 a2 b2 a3 b3 a4 b4 . . . an bn
.
.
.
Sample n a2 b2 a3 b3 a4 b4 . . . an bn

Use the a and b coefficients as individual variables when running principle component analysis.

On to the Things I Need To Do Today:
Finish arranging all my specimen images on the computer, make sure I have all the outlines I can get (the conservative ones, at least), do the computer thing with the outlines, and run PCA. Since my advisor was so kind as to give me his interpretations of my outlines as well, I figure that adding a comparison between my outline and his outlines would fit nicely in my paper.

Make sure all my specimen numbers are up to date and make a copy of the identity sheets to give to my advisor.

Do the paleontology lab that was due yesterday.

Work on my statistics exam.

And the Things That Would Be Fun But To Which I Will Not Get Around:
Add information to IchnoWiki.

Add an arcade button to Dakota Roar.

Pick a color scheme and make new buttons for the same.What can I say? My priorities are very skewed.

I have not read these yet

Posted by Mike Taylor, DML

I’d like to draw your attention to the most recent sequence of four
posts on Darren Naish’s blog:

http://darrennaish.blogspot.com/2006/07/angloposeidon-unreported-story-part-i.html
http://darrennaish.blogspot.com/2006/07/angloposeidon-unreported-story-part-ii.html
http://darrennaish.blogspot.com/2006/07/angloposeidon-unreported-story-part.html
http://darrennaish.blogspot.com/2006/07/angloposeidon-unreported-story-part-iv.html

Which together tell the background story of the _Sauroposeidon_-like
brachiosaurid cervical vertebra MIWG 7306, known informally as
“Angloposeidon”. Aside from the fact that these posts are about an
interesting specimen, they’re also just about the best account I’ve
ever read of how palaeontology actually gets done — the way from the
specimen’s initial discovery and years of being ignored, through to
the inevitable mispresentation in the press.

If any of you know or teach kids who are interested in palaeontology,
I think this series of posts could be a real eye-opener for them.

More fun with Tiger

From Ed at Small Dog Electronics:

Did you know that you can trigger Apple’s built-in dictionary in almost any system application, such as TextEdit, Safari, and Mail? This allows you to quickly get spelling and definitions for tens of thousands of words. If you are reading this newsletter in OS 10.4 Mail, hold down the command-control-d keys, all at the same time with your mouse over a word (the command key is the Apple key, next to the space-bar.)

a brief answer to a comment

Anonymous says:

In order to expect data sharing, you have to be open to collaboration, yes? Just wanted to point that out. Science is ruthless in its own way, or at least, the scientists and publishers make it that way.

I can be completely opposed to collaboration and still expect data sharing. This does not necessarily mean that I will get it. It also doesn’t mean that I won’t. Now to address what you think you said: it depends on what data you want to share, and how open everyone is with it, depending on what the value of the information is to each person. If I found some interesting new metamorphic structure somewhere, there is no way that I would be able to publish on it or even collaborate, simply because I don’t have the background to deal with the technical side of things past an elementary level. But someone else could. There is no need to sit on something you find out of jealousy if NO ONE is ever going to get a paper out of it because of you.