Mike Cantelon

After hearing of the BeOS-like Syllable operating system, I wanted to check it out. I'd played with BeOS in the early 90s and appreciated its speed, simplicity, and rock solid multitasking.

After an unsuccessful attempt to install Syllable as a Parallels virtual machine, I decided it was time to upgrade Parallels to the latest build (5160). I downloaded the installer, installed with no issues, attempted to reboot and waited. My Macbook would not boot, staying stuck on an endless display of the OS X boot activity indicator. Parallels, it seemed, had killed my Macbook.

I've never had the patience nor inclination to really get into math, but when there's software that provides some non-mathematical audio/video output to an equation I can't help but poke at it.

Mac OS X comes with a neat little application for doing just that. It's called "Grapher" and resides in the "Utilities" folder (inside "Applications").

Not only can you create 2 dimensional graphs from equations, but you can also graph in 3 dimentions and create Quicktime animations of equation parameters changing incrementally. The "Examples" menu provides a number of sample equations to tweak an