On 6/9/08, James Propp <jpropp@cs.uml.edu> wrote:
(One thing I'd like is a simple way to create an m-by-n array of small cells with specified colors. What's the right tool for that job?)
This is something I like to do a lot of --- I spent ages coding up an OpenLook (did someone say "yerwot?") interactive viewer for number walls modulo a prime to display them in this fashion --- now I don't use a Sun any more, the software is U/S. I also wrote an interactive cellular automaton simulator in Java, using the same display technique --- that at least is pretty portable, though the display would not stand alone without some modification ... In any case, I presume you want to output to some file format (e.g. PDF), rather than interactive display? Though one could always screen grab, in small quantities anyway ...
I've been quite happy with my Mac OS X running shell-script windows that look like any old UNIX system. (I can think of one exception to the previous statement: I was pretty annoyed when I found out that OS X puts all the files and directories in one's Desktop into RAM at startup. Aside from the fact that it's undocumented, it's just not the sort of thing a UNIX system would do.)
That's gross! How did you find out about it? The Mac Desktop has other problems as well. There's an associated reference file which apparently goes on getting larger, more convoluted, and slower indefinitely; and can't be deleted without super-user / root privilege [tricky if, like mine, your SU password mysteriously fails to work]. Fred Lunnon