Confusticate this landlord

After a very pleasant weekend, and a large Sunday meal (wholemeal and normal pancakes, with tomato-and-bacon, mushroom-and-cream and chocolate ganache toppings; I'd suddenly felt the urge to cook, and it's more liturgically sound to celebrate Shrove Tuesday early rather than late) with my housemate Ed and helenbr, Ed went out and discovered that the "for sale" signpost which has stood outside our house for months now reads "sold".

I don't think this is the usual way to learn that.

Not a great end for what was a curate's egg of a week; Monday I went to London, purchased shares, and visited the fantastic Turks exhibition, whereas Thursday I was feeling sufficiently tired and down that I took the day off and spent three hours asleep in the afternoon. My MiniMac arrived on Friday morning, I nonetheless worked a long day Friday, but have been playing with my new toy perhaps over-much in the evenings.

Saturday we went to Julius Caesar at the Swan in Stratford; a very energetic modern-dress production, taking full advantage of the staging with audience on three sides and lots of places for actors to run in and out, with some well-done video effects: after all, it's about coups d'etat, and those are things (thankfully) that we see only on TV. The programme had rather more rude remarks about Vladimir Putin than might be expected. Lots of restaurant food, too; nice wild-mushroom risotto in Stratford, and in the evening I went out for a huge Mexican meal with a very nice (LJ-less) lady I'd met while helping out with teaching at an engineering workshop in Bristol at the beginning of the year.

We've looked at a fair number of houses already; as you'd expect, one can pick precisely two of large, affordable and pleasant. I've got another three to organise viewings for early next week; I suspect I will have to start commuting by bus rather than on foot. At least it'll provide an excuse for another house-warming ...

LJ is clearly not the right place for newbie OS X questions; I suppose I should put up a Web page of some kind.

As threatened, newbie Mac questions

1. Is there a sensible way of resizing a window whose resize handle is under the Dock?


2. Could someone point me at an XCode tutorial? I'm at the trial-and-error stage, and I can't even understand the error messages


3. Are Python-to-Cocoa bindings available, and adequate to write applications which look reasonable?


4. If I'm missing Excel, and find gnumeric from fink hopelessly ugly, kludgy and incompatible, is there any better move than picking up Office X? I don't need anything more than Excel97 gave me on Windows, but I feel I want at least that. For word-processing, I'm reasonably happy with TextEdit - I don't need more than a couple of styles and spell-check


5. I take several thousand photos a year, at 2.5MB each with my new camera, and my archive is 10,000 or so images. Picasa coped nicely on the PC; will iPhoto?


6. Where can I get a 'macish' (IE small, square and white) USB hub? Palm, compact-flash reader, Webcam, mouse and keyboard have used up all my ports


7. Is there a way to get fvwm2-under-XDarwin (or, if you prefer, some other window manager under some other X server) to do solid window drag and resize? Currently I don't even get an outline box; with twm I got no feedback, with fvwm I get a teeny little box with coordinates in.