It seems there is a workaround available via the good old Terminal!

The explanation is in Dutch, but the Terminal commands are as is, check the site of www.apple4ever.nl.

Do this in Terminal

To make Lion stop replacing characters, do this in Terminal:
defaults write -g ApplePressAndHoldEnabled -bool false

I tried this, and it finally works!

To switch back to the old situation, do this:
defaults write -g ApplePressAndHoldEnabled -bool true

(Here are my previous ramblings)

The problem: following my own solution didn’t seem to be working, at least not in TeXShop, the graphical interface I use for writing in LaTeX: vowels keep disappearing because by typing on I did something to make the software think I made up my mind and decided to skip the letter …

Hopefully, TinkerTool, which has been an asset ever since it came around, does the job.
Needless to add, per the picture above: uncheck “Hold key to select diacritic characters”.

I hope this is now settled …

I am on a real computer and I simply hate this feature. Whenever I finished typing a sentence I find that many vowals will simply have have removed from it. Apparently, if you simply go on typing at a more or less high speed, the device thinks you want none of the alternatives… Below you find a picture of the thing.

Since I am writing a book in LaTeX, which has no use for accented letters, and at a reasonably high typing-speed, you understand my frustration.
Just now I grabbed all my anger and started off to the internet for the umpteenth time to find a solution, again to no avail. But a remark got stuck in my head: that the feature pops up when you hold down the relevant letter.

The solution

So I checked my keyboard settings in System Preferences, and found I had specified the Delay Until Repeat as “short”—I changed it to long, and bingo. I hope this helps all of you who are as frustrated as I have been for the last few weeks.

Maar er zijn websites die voor hun gebruikers bedoeld zijn — die zijn daar de afnemers, consumenten van. Daarvan zie ik twee typen. Vergelijk het met een winkelstraat, twee typen.

Twee typen

1. In St. Petersburg is alles te koop, maar het is niet gezegd dat je het kunt vinden door rond te lopen en om je heen te kijken. Integendeel, vanaf het straatniveau zie je slechts gebouwen zonder reclame-uitingen of naambordjes. Loop je een gebouw in, door wat gangen en wat trappen op dan kun je ineens in een zeer uitgebreide groentenmarkt staan, of in een prachtig museum of supermarkt.

In zo’n context heb je een probleem wanneer je iets heel specifieks zoekt, bij voorbeeld groenten of kunst. De enige manier om dat te vinden is door het vooraf reeds te weten. Maar hoe kom je aan die kennis? Vraagbaken, instanties, boeken, mensen vragen?

Dus, je loopt rond, bedenkt dat je een bloemkool wilt hebben, en moet dan op je schreden terugkeren, naar instantie, boek of mens die je kunnen vertellen waar je die kunt halen.

2. In Utrecht loop je in de binnenstad en zie je aan de panden waar je langsloopt waar je wat kunt kopen. Het gros van wat je wilt aanschaffen is vindbaar door rond te lopen en om je heen te kijken.

Met enig gevoel voor drama kun je het eerste type winkelstraat dictatoriaal noemen (omdat externe instanties beslissen over wat individuen mogen weten of doen) en het tweede open en democratisch.

Websites

Deze twee typen vind je ook op internet. Ik ga geen adressen geven, maar er zijn websites waar je alsmaar om je heen kijkt en hoewel je voelt dat je “in de buurt” bent, geraak je toch niet verder, kom je niet aan op de preciese plaats die je zoekt. In plaats daarvan word je geacht een menu te volgen dat evenwel niet in jouw preciese zoekvraag geïnteresseerd is, maar jou de structuur wil laten volgen.

Het gevolg daarvan kan zijn dat je na vier keer klikken weer op je beginpagina terugbent (maar dat kan ook na een wilde zoektocht na acht keer klikken alsnog gebeuren).

With the migration to WordPress my blog has been restyled, and shuffled. I also added a new category, “papers” which assembles papers and presentations as soon as they are available. The idea is to give you the abstract and a link to the file. And as of now new additions to this category will be like that.
I have started by putting in all the papers and presentations that have been available through my website before, so it is already neatly filled.

I hope to have more to say about my blog, soon.

Helpful LaTeX beamer suggestion

Also expect an explanation about how to make several kinds of output in the LaTeX beamer-class: one to present in class; one to print out your notes (the sheets projected included, plus notes for your eyes only); one to hand out in class, consisting of the text of the sheets, but not your personal notes—all on the basis of one input files and a few tricks.

The hint quoted above explains how threaded view helps sort your in-box, and how once it is sorted you can command-click the sent-box and its contents will be sorted with the threads, which can then with only one click be moved to the special box, as desired.

I don’t know whether Windows users can do sucht things too, but this is really a time-saver!!

As of a couple of days ago, everything should be in order again.
(This is just for those who are worried about finding old entries presented as new.)

In fact, what this change means, is that I won’t be able to fool my readers anymore. Blapp, the software I used to manage my blog with (and which was turned obsolete due to the server change, to WebDav technology—as it disallows the very safe ssh-uploading that Blapp made use of) enabled one to make small changes without changing the modification dat of the file more than a couple of seconds. The result was: the retaining of the temporal file hierarchy even if the file was changed. Of course, this is in a sense cheating, and it has always relied on the author’s sincerity. I mean, I could change typos in this manner without anyone having to pay attention to the changes, or strengthen my arguments (both of which are in everyone’s interest), but I could also change my views retro-actively on the basis of arguments stolen from others (which is, obviously, against rational sincerity).
Well, those days are over again. From now on, I really have to check my typing and thinking before submitting.

You can run prosper in TeXShop, pick menu Typeset/TEX+Ghostscript
or in the Terminal
prompt:: simpdftex latex --maxpfb filename.tex; open filename.pdf

As always, it is bit of a pain to get everything installed and working (I was successful on my Powerbook, but not yet on my desktop G4 ….), but once it works, it works, and provides one with beautifully typeset presentations.
I am a still learning its tricks, but first impressions are promising.

Make sure to also check this message on the beamer-class.

The first option

I first read how Internet Explorer cannot deal with spaces surounding code-tags. I removed all whitespaces that are not linguistically functional, in over 4200 files. This didn’t do anything. Nor for the bad BTW, in some places things seem to be dealt with in more elegant manner.

The second option

It is a Microsoft-problem. Suggestions like the following supposedly help:

• - You can try this : start-run-msconfig-startup – uncheck PrevADServe.exe from list, ok. Reboot.
• - This may not work for you, but for me I went into c:\winnt\inf folder and deleted all the “IE” related files. In may case there were 4 files with names like “ie.inf” “ie.pcf” “ie2.inf”. Those aren’t the exact names….but it’s names like that. Delete them all then reboot. Problem solved.
• - I deleted all the “IE” related files. Rebooted and the error is gone.
• - the problem was solved on re-installing the application 3-4 times. but this doesn’t help in the other cases.
• - Uninstalling MS IIS (Internet Information Services (IIS)) might help

Microsoft has something to say about it as well, in their Help and Support-pages.

I am probably the only one who spent precious hours of my life understanding all this.

To me, that sounded plausible enough to give it a try. I found the reset button, pushed it, closed the casket and waited some 20 minutes, to be on the safe side. After that I plugged it in, saw the button light change to orange, heard a pffffft, and dead it was again. The thing is, you don’t just throw away these machines, do you?

and that work flawlessly too, like MS Excel, Camino (replaced Firefox, on Arno’s advise. Thanks!), Safari, Preview, Mail, Interarchy, Adobe Reader, Terminal, GraphicConvertor, NetNewsWireLite, iTunes, TexShop, MicroSoft PowerPoint, Calculator, ScriptEditor, FileMakerPro 8, and Chronosync. These are all five-star apps.
There are also a lot of applications on my computer that I have used at one time, but fully neglect nowadays for obvious reasons. Apart from MS Word and Internet Explorer, I shall not name these.

Like the previous time,

I am not going to explain exactly why and how I use these applications, but ask you to take my word for their great strength. I have in almost all cases tried out many of the available alternatives, and picked the ones mentioned below for their ease of use, their power, and most importantly: for their doing their job as expected.

iTunes iPod-scripts enable me to pluck tunes from the iPod.

To show yourself what IP-address your computer is working from, I use IP in menu bar, which provides the IP-address in the menu.

Today I heard there is a solution for the winmail.dat files that MS Windows’ MS Outlook turns its mail attachments into—and which cannot be opened by normal earthlings like myself: TNEF’s Enough.app.

Audio-video apps

I am converting all sorts of audio and video files of late. There is lot of Open Source software around for this.
Unrar.app unpacks .rar files.
xACT.app unpacks a lot of the other formats.
To view video files, I use VLC.app.
To synchronise subtitle-files with avi-movies (or other formats), I use an impressive and impressively simple app, SubSyncX.app.
Sometimes it is difficult to add the subtitles to a movie. VLC.app (which is great for viewing) does not help. djoPlayer.app does!!
To view series of pictures, such as scans of Manga novels: CocoViewX.app

These I may start using as soon as I found out how they work:

ffmpegX.app (it is based on Unix apps, and is supposed to be able to convert all sorts of video formats into each other, but I haven’t succeeded yet).

Internet-stuff

With Enkoder.app I encode my mailto: links in my websites so as to prevent spam-bots from using the addresses. It looks good but I am not sure whether it is doing me any good. It is my procmail spam-filters that keep the spam away.

To automatically turn a web-address into a link to past into HTML-pages, I use BlogAssist, which provides an icon with a menu in the menu bar.

I recently installed a JavaScript that prints a footnotes-list of all the links on particular page (when it is printed), and adds footnote reference numbers to the text where the links appear: footnoteLinks (by Aaron Gustafson). Works great; took me some time to install though.

Stuff that looks interesting

I have downloaded and installed Flock.app, which is a webserver that somehow has me share my bookmarks over the internet, but I haven’t found out how to do it. It looks interesting though.

Older recomendations that still hold

iPod ripping: It took a while before I found out how to extract songs from my iPod. There are several small applications, often freeware, available on the internet, but they have their drawbacks. For instance, Robs iPod Exporter does not, by far, show all the songs that are on the iPod. Apparently, the solution was available a long time already, small, elegant and efficient: iPod tracks. It is a set of AppleScript scripts, with an installer, that allows you to extract single tunes, groups of tunes or the whole set, to whatever place on your harddisk you want.

Batch renaming: With Renamer4Mac (a cocoa application) I can rename a whole bunch of files in one go! That is, without using the Terminal.

I haven’t used this one for long: XHTML-code checking: I now check the code of my website in amaya, a browser developed by the W3C-institute, working under OS X’s X11. This is not a normal browser, but one which checks your code, and does a better job at this than W3C’s online validator.

Unix software installer: To install amaya, I used FinkCommander, a cocoa application, based on Fink, which updates all things Unix available to Terminal, and elsewhere.

Weblogging: My weblogging software still is: Blosxom and Blapp.
Maintenance, until recenly I did by hand, until I found out that Blapp can upload changed blog-entries without changing their date to today. In fact, you can ask it to merely add a few seconds to its old last-modification date. This works only if you edit your entries in Blabb, but that is okay.

HTML-editing: BBEdit, still the best.

MySQL and php: I am trying to apply MySQL and PHP to my websites, starting from tips from Dutch magazine, MacFan. For the small database I have set up, this works fine. The challenge, of course, is to make it work for a complex site and produce real interactivity. It is a bit too early to decide, but I’ll be back.
“The PHP Function Index (PHPfi) is a simple browser to quickly look up any PHP function.” Works great; provides examples, explains all php commands in clear language. Beautiful cocoa interface.
The MySQL-databases I manipulate with phpMyAdmin and/or CocoaMySQL both open source from sourceforge.

PostgreSQL: ICT colleagues who are in the know have presently advised me to switch to PostgreSQL, on account of that software being more dependable, and “cutting less corners”. I made the switch, but unfortunately got nowhere. What doesn’t help either is the absence of cocoa-software. Any help appreciated.

Other helpers with web-building: To decide about the colors of my websites:
DigitalColor Meter
4096 Color Wheel
And, of course, DigitalColorMeter, one of Mac OS X’s utilities, which helps me pick the finest colours off anything on my screen.
Apache (webserver, both local and online): very flexible and utterly stable
Interarchy (to automatically mirror my websites between local and online). (commercial, dependable)

Terminal: Learning the power of the Terminal every day. It is addictive. A book recommendation: O’Reilly’s “Unix Power Tools”. Brilliant, helpful.
I use htpasswd to lock certain folders on my website; this is managed in Terminal.

Alternative for MS Word: My present research project is written in LaTeX from day one. Again, perfect software! And BibTeX for the bibliographical stuff. (I wrote a short script in Terminal (tcsh) that converts my bibliography from TeX to XHTML and puts it someplace in my web-directory, where I can show it to myself all around the world).
I have just installed OpenOffice.org (like Amaya an X11-app), but haven’t tested it. It looks good at first sight.
Now, there is also NeoOfficeJ, which has a rather Windows-kind of feel, but seems to be able to achieve everything Word can (and maybe even more).
This is a great Online English Thesaurus: Nisus Thesaurus: very helpful.

BTW, Did I tell you that all of this (apart from BBEdit and Interarchy) is Open Source, free software? Most of this I get through Versiontracker, who send you a weekly email with downloadable new software.

Installing beamer is a piece of cake. Apart from pgf and xcolor (which are on offer on the same pages), there are no dependencies on particular packages. In a normal tex installation everything apart from beamer should be in place.
In TeXShop, one can keep using the typesetting default of pdfetex, without having to switch to Ghostscript just to typeset your presentations.

The styles that are available for beamer (included in the CTAN-package, or, in the Utrecht-case, available on the internet) are mostly gorgeous!

What is more: beamer is far easier to manipulate than prosper!

Arthur van Dam’s Utrecht-theme
Home of the beamer class (and pgf and xcolor). Explanations and installation instructions are all transparent.

Seems like I solved my issues with Internet Explorer. The culprit: some perfectly correct CSS-code (a pseudo-class).
p:first-letter { font-size: 2em;
font-weight: bold;
border: 1px solid #ddd;
padding: 0;
line-height: 1.2em;
color: #069;
margin-right: 2px;
font-style: italic;}


Probably there is some conflict or other with some other perfectly correct CSS-code.

Well, I stop complaining. At least, those interested can, once again, browse freely through my sites.

If you want to know the history of this issue, read these entries:

Microsoft’s Internet problems

BTW, this means I restored (to my satisfaction) the CSS-dropdown-menus and the javascript footnoteLinks (from Aaron Gustafson), which indeed seems to work fine in all browsers.

Got this tip from Xiffy = thanks again.
The link above is from web.archive.org. Thanks to Thony!

In texmf.cnf (on my computer I found it here: sw/share/texmf/web2c/texmf.cnf) I changed:
into
save_size = 8000 % for saving values outside current group

This did the trick!

[BTW, this is important for me because I can now make use again of the shell-script I wrote, which turns the bibtext file in a large XHTML-file that I can access on internet. Apart from latex, bibtext and tex4ht, I use osascript to open BBEdit, and to tell BBEdit to use an AppleScript which strips all the codes I don't want, and change it those I do, so that the end-result can be included by a SSI, under Apache.
In all, with a single Terminal command I produce an always fully up-to-date bibliography.]

Only afterwards did I find this pdf from Eric Beitz explaining solutions like this (but not this particular one) for a variety of operating systems.

Mittelbach, Frank, and Michel Goossens. 2004, 916. The LaTeX Companion. Second Edition. Boston, etc.: Addison-Wesley.

Cheers.

iPod ripping: It took a while before I found out how to extract songs from my iPod. There are several small applications, often freeware, available on the internet, but they have their drawbacks. For instance, Robs iPod Exporter does not, by far, show all the songs that are on the iPod. Apparently, the solution was available a long time already, small, elegant and efficient: iPod tracks. It is a set of AppleScript scripts, with an installer, that allows you to extract single tunes, groups of tunes or the whole set, to whatever place on your harddisk you want.

Batch renaming: With Renamer4Mac (a cocoa application) I can rename a whole bunch of files in one go! That is, without using the Terminal.

XHTML-code checking: I now check the code of my website in amaya, a browser developed by the W3C-institute, working under OS X’s X11. This is not a normal browser, but one which checks your code, and does a better job at this than W3C’s online validator.

Unix software installer: To install amaya, I used FinkCommander, a cocoa application, based on Fink, which updates all things Unix available to Terminal, and elsewhere.

Weblogging: My weblogging software still is: Blosxom and Blapp.
Maintenance, until recenly I did by hand, until I found out that Blapp can upload changed blog-entries without changing their date to today. In fact, you can ask it to merely add a few seconds to its old last-modification date. This works only if you edit your entries in Blabb, but that is okay.

HTML-editing: BBEdit, still the best.

MySQL and php: I am trying to apply MySQL and PHP to my websites, starting from tips from Dutch magazine, MacFan. For the small database I have set up, this works fine. The challenge, of course, is to make it work for a complex site and produce real interactivity. It is a bit too early to decide, but I’ll be back.
“The PHP Function Index (PHPfi) is a simple browser to quickly look up any PHP function.” Works great; provides examples, explains all php commands in clear language. Beautiful cocoa interface.
The MySQL-databases I manipulate with phpMyAdmin and/or CocoaMySQL both open source from sourceforge.

PostgreSQL: ICT colleagues who are in the know have presently advised me to switch to PostgreSQL, on account of that software being more dependable, and “cutting less corners”. I made the switch, but unfortunately got nowhere. What doesn’t help either is the absence of cocoa-software. Any help appreciated.

Other helpers with web-building: To decide about the colors of my websites:
DigitalColor Meter
4096 Color Wheel
And, of course, DigitalColorMeter, one of Mac OS X’s utilities, which helps me pick the finest colours off anything on my screen.
Apache (webserver, both local and online): very flexible and utterly stable
Interarchy (to automatically mirror my websites between local and online). (commercial, dependable)

Terminal: Learning the power of the Terminal every day. It is addictive. A book recommendation: O’Reilly’s “Unix Power Tools”. Brilliant, helpful.
I use htpasswd to lock certain folders on my website; this is managed in Terminal.

Alternative for MS Word: My present research project is written in LaTeX from day one. Again, perfect software! And BibTeX for the bibliographical stuff. (I wrote a short script in Terminal (tcsh) that converts my bibliography from TeX to XHTML and puts it someplace in my web-directory, where I can show it to myself all around the world).
I have just installed OpenOffice.org (like Amaya an X11-app), but haven’t tested it. It looks good at first sight.
Now, there is also NeoOfficeJ, which has a rather Windows-kind of feel, but seems to be able to achieve everything Word can (and maybe even more). Since I have chosen for LaTeX I am not going to pursue this.

Local data-management: I am not exactly sure about its powers and functionality, but Webmin seems deeply helpful to manage whatever can be done with what is on my local discs.

English ThesaurusOnline: Nisus Thesaurus: great, very helpful.

BTW, Did I tell you that all of this (apart from BBEdit and Interarchy) is Open Source, free software? Most of this I get through Techtracker, who send you a weekly email with downloadable new software.

Unfortunately it took me much time to realize this and I had to take my sites off for almost a day (yesterday). I sincerely apologize for that.

I made a switch to particular software running on the Unix foundations of Mac OSX. This software is highly manipulable and utterly trustworthy! The following fall into that category:

LaTeX (I finally did away with MSWord.)
BibTex (This is exactly the bibliography software I need)
TeXShop (to work with LaTeX and BibTex)
Excalibur (as a LaTeX spell checker)
i-Installer (to install LaTeX packages)
FinkCommander (to install Unix software)

There is abundant support for the use of this software on the internet, for starters: The TeX Users Group. Many extra software enhancements (so-called packages) are available at CTAN.
This is all Open Source, free and much, much better than Big Brother’s products.
LaTeX, etc. is not a text-processor though, it is much more: it is typesetting software enabling you to produce print-ready pages that look marvellous. LaTeX can produce PostScript or PDF output files.

XHTML-editing (including CSS2)

I have decided to introduce one JavaScript at the top of all my web-pages directing MSIE to MSIE-specific CSS-stylesheets, to stop my suffering. Now I can develop my web-sites the way I want to (complying to web-standards) and leave MSIE-browsers with a dressed-down version of them.
Last, but not least: I use Apache‘s Server Side Include’s (SSI), for easier site-maintenance. SSI enables me to make changes to the specifications of many pages, by changing those of a single, included, part of these pages.
I have upgraded to newer versions of the browsers I use to my satisfaction, such as Mozilla 1.6, Safari and Camino 0.7, adding to these: Firefox 0.8.
As the favourite text-processor for XHTML-editing, I have upgraded to BBEdit 7.1.2, and for SFTP site maintenance: to Interarchy 7.0.
4096 Color Wheel (a fascinating utility to pick web-savvy colours for your website).
Connectivity
For reading RSS-feeds of weblogs all over the internet I use NetNewsWire Lite 1.0.8.
Nisus Thesaurus is an online thesaurus which helps me out through a very neat clickable interface.
SSH Agent, my trustworthy companion, absolutely crucial for creating that safe tunnel from my home-situation to my departmental harddisk and website host.
To synchronize my harddisks over this tunnel, I use Synk 4.2, now free-ware. Works flawlessly.
Terminal, what can I say? I am getting the knack of Unix-programming! I love it and the love is growing with the days.
OS X, 10.3.2
Above all, Mac OS X makes it all possible! The operating system that makes computing fun and trustworthy.
Lastly, most thanks are due to that bunch of system operators who help me whenever I get stuck. Cheers.

As of now, when you view one of my pages with any of these pre-6 IE-browsers you will be presented a no-IE icon, which links to a page explaining why you are experiencing such poor rendering:

I sincerely hope that this was the last time I had to break in to the blog logic. I’ll do my best to make it happen.

Troubles, no. 1

This iMac isn’t Airport-ready. Previously, I used the Proxim Skyline 747 USB Adapter to connect an antenna through the USB port, which connected wirelessly to my Airport base station. (Described in this MacCentral-article).This works fine under OS 9.2, but it doesn’t seem to work under OS X’s Classic OS 9.2. Now what?
This is how I ‘solved’ the wireless problem. I decided to keep the iMac running under Os 9.2, even though there is enough RAM and diskspace to run OS X (damned). The wireless works fine over the Skyline USB Adapter, and we live.

Troubles, no. 2

In fact, this was my first problem, but I solved it, so, no need to put it first. I succeeded in installing OS X, 10.2, as well as OS 9.2.2. And, watching things from the OS 9 installer disk I could even see how the hard disk was filled with exactly the files I’d expect. Yet, the computer didn’t boot from it.
I did some hard thinking to find out what was wrong, even tried to upgrade the firmware (How does one do that if it must be upgraded from the local disk holding the startup system, and your trouble is that you cannot boot from the local disk? I solved that by removing the HD, replacing the old one, and … finding out there was no need to upgrade the firmware.)
I removed OS X and installed OS 9.2 only, with no results.
I talked to people in the known, but we were flabbergasted. All we could come up with was the idea that, possibly the HD was the cause of the problem.
One phone call to MailaMac, where I bought the HD taught that that, indeed, was the case: there is a dip switch on the HD which standardly is set to ‘slave’. It should set to ‘Master. (I wish they had told me up front). So the booting problem was solve.

Troubles, no. 3

There is a problem with the RAM chips as well. You’ll need a so-called low-profile chip for the lower slot, and a high profile chip for the top slot. I found me a 512 Mb chip for the bottom slot and placed it there, and a 128Mb one for the top slot and placed it. The chips work, but the iMac apparently cannot perceive more than 256Mb at the bottom slot. Well, it works, so I’ll quit complaining.

Yet, if anyone among you all knows how I could reconnect this computer, if it runs under OS X, to my wireless network, please tell me.

MP3 and the Internet

I’ve been looking for ways to strip MP3s legally from the internet. I’ve tried StreamripperX, which is great software. Unfortunately it rips streams of a certain format only, Shoutcast streams. StreamripperX comes with a tuner of shoutcast broadcasting stations, and it works great. StreamripperX downloads the streams and cuts them into relevant pieces, which are neatly named after the song that is in it. Of course, the broadcasting stations are the ones responsible for sending a sign to StreamripperX where to cut, and here is the drawback to this system: some do it correctly most of the time, but not always, some never do it the ways we want it: they include their own shouting.
Last caveat: these shoutcast stations seem to have acquired the rights to send only a few tunes, as a consequence of which, after you have ripped one of them streams for a day, say, you shall have all the tunes on offer. And these shall not be exactly the hot shot tunes that you were after in the first place.
My advice to Shoutcast: grow up or start asking money, but stop playing tricks like these.

All my good work is done on a Macintosh G4, running under OS X 10.2.6. I have my local Apache web serving installed in such manner as to be able to see for myself what the server side includes and cgi-scripts do, before uploading my pages.
Things work as expected, for mainly two reasons: MacIntosh, Open Source, and Unix software on the one hand, and a bunch of system operators who help me whenever I get stuck. Cheers.

Software, both Open source and commercial

All of the software I use is reliable, highly manipulable and intuitive, in a word, Mac-like.
As my main HTML editor I use the beautifully crafted BBEdit.

Browsers

My main browser is Netscape 7.0 and Mozilla, based on open source Gecko-machine. Apart from this, I use Safari, IE (if need to) and Navigator.

Blapp

I use Blapp to synchronise through the unix-command rsync, which uses SSH, my blosxom weblog-files from local to public.

Fugu

Now and then I use Fugu to synchronise my sites from local to public, also over SFTP. Brilliant software, Unix-based. Get it. For free.

Interarchy

But I standardly use Interarchy, which is great! Apparently (I only just found out), it can check all the links, both internal and external, of your website and present a clear overview of faulty links per page! Wow.
I also bought RBrowser to do SFTP (which is great too, but has a few quircks).
Oh, I almost forgot: SSH Agent, to build the tunnels to SFTP over.
Thus, we make do. And happily ever after.