moonlee.org

Well, I finally got a chance to put the Weller soldering iron and Panavise that Santa brought me for Christmas to use today by assembling the tvbgone kit that I purchased from the Make store. I have to say, after using several crappy soldering irons, that using a quality iron makes a huge difference.

I don’t know if I’ll be using it very much (probably not), and certainly not to the grand effect that the folks at Gizmodo recently did, but it was fun and an opportunity to work on my soldering skills.

Of course, Zoe, after some consideration, suggested we go try it on a wall of TVs at Best buy…

A while back, I wrote about Synergy, a neat free tool that allows you to control multiple computers across multiple monitors with a single keyboard and mouse. I’ve been extremely happy with that setup, working almost seamlessly among 3 different machines and dual monitors using a single keyboard.

Now I say almost because I occasionally found myself wishing I could simply drag a window from one monitor to another, which synergy doesn’t allow me to do. The screens remain isolated spaces unto themselves. While it is nice to have the flexibility of multiple machines to work with (especially if one is churning away doing something processor intensive), sometimes you just wish all that screen real estate was somehow physically connected too.

Now of course, if you have the ability to stick another video card into your PC, no problem. But since I swore off bulky desktops several years ago, my Apple laptop and mini don’t have that option. There are hardware breakouts that might work, like dualhead2go, but those are less than ideal for a variety of reasons.

Well, yesterday I stumbled across a software product called Screen Recycler, which has finally let me have my cake and eat it too. It’s a driver for macs that basically creates a virtual external display which is then accessible using any vnc client. Too cool! So, fire up screen recycler on the host mac, connect using a fast vnc client on the second computer in full screen mode, and voila, it’s basically a seamless dual head setup. It even works pretty well with Synergy. And, since it shows up as its own display on the host’s displays preference pane, you can position it, change its resolution, wallpaper, etc., just as you would a normally connected display.

The only caveat is that for nice response times on the vnc side you do need decent bandwidth between the two – terrific on GigE, probably fine on fast ethernet, but 802.11g was definitely not cutting it.

Granted, this probably isn’t generally useful technology, but for those of you with multiple computers and monitors on your desk, hey, it might do the trick.

So last week CG tells me that he’s decided to make the jump to the Mac as a development platform from Windows after a lengthy period of soul searching. I think that’s pretty cool – the Mac is a wonderful development environment for so many reasons. And it has that magic combination of Unix and an elegant GUI to appeal to both developers from both the Windows and Linux camps. While obviously not all the same development environments are available across platforms, there are quite a few packages on the Mac that have made my life much better:

• Locomotive: A self-contained ROR container, with packages for various versions of Rails that lets you start developing right away. Just drag and drop into your Applications folder. Provides ruby, rails, some choice gems and dependent libraries so you don’t have to install/compile them yourself.
• MAMP: Basically the same thing for PHP4/5, but goes a step further and gives you a full stack with MySQL and Apache as well. This is nice because getting Tiger’s stock PHP4 install to play nice with the MySQL binary install is kind of a pain.
• TextMate: A very wonderful and powerful text editor, with bindings and macros for more languages than you can shake a stick at.

There are of course many more tools out there – stuff that I use the shell for, but you could substitute with GUI applications, like FTP clients and the like. If you have any personal favorites, definitely let me know – I’m always on the look out for better tools.

When I was a younger man, I’d often view older people with a mixture of exasperation and amusement as they would try to figure out a function on some piece of consumer technology that they owned. They would stare at the buttons for a while in complete confusion until they would give up and hand it to me. I would look at the object, quickly scan the buttons and immediately intuitively grasp the sequence of buttons that needed to be pushed to achieve the desired effect.

So you can imagine my surprise when in the past few months, I found myself having trouble working simple things like Zoe’s digital camera. After staring blankly at the buttons for a while, a weird feeling of disorientation came over me and my eyes slowly started to glaze and none of the symbols next to the buttons made any sense to me whatsoever. “Augh, I’m turning into an old guy!!” I shrieked. Man. Soon I’m going to be the one handing over that piece of new-fangled electronica in resignation to someone younger and more adept. I can just hear it now… “See, Moon, this is how you do it… just press this big green button here.” I knew I was in trouble last night, when I picked up the remote control to my stereo and I had a few seconds where I was completely drawing a blank on how to even turn the damn thing on.

Good grief.

It was around 15 years ago that I stumbed into the world of real-time virtual interaction in the context of MUDs. Back then, it was simply disembodied text floating by on a black background, as I banded together with other adventurers to hack away at monsters for fun and xp (experience points of course). A lot has happened since then, and these days, it’s evolved into things like the hugely popular MMORPG World of Warcraft. But it was from those roots that I became interested in the possibilities of the internet, virtual communities, and useful applications of the virtual experience.

So it was with some interest that I observed the rise of communities like Second Life and other similar ventures. In some respects, it’s extremely exciting: as the space continues to mature, the possibilities it presents are genuinely intriguing. However, I can’t help but think that at this stage, tremendous amounts of energy are going into things that don’t really add true value to your real life. As Second Lifers are spending and earning their virtual dollars to buy clothes, animations, houses and land, dancing their avatars in virtual nightclubs and concerts to flirt with other pixels, a feeling gnaws at me: so is this it?

This should and could be so much more that just a giant game of “The Sims”.

Are you doing something cool in Second Life? Let me know! (SL: Kaiman Oh)

Not owning a PS2 or a XBox 360 (or knowing anyone who does), I hadn’t had the opportunity to play the game Guitar Hero… until today. While killing some time at a local electronics store, I wandered over to the XBox 360 demo kiosk to see what the guitar hero hype was about. Man, I was totally sold after the first 5 minutes and about a frenzied half-an-hour later, I started getting some looks from the floor staff of the ‘are you going to buy something or what?’ variety. I was rocking out. I reluctantly put down the plastic axe and left. Easily the most fun I’ve had playing a video game in quite a while.

While unpacking my office, I dug out my flat panel LCDs, which I was psyched to use again. I hooked one up to my MacBook to use as a secondary screen but still had another panel to use. So I hooked that one up to my old powerbook and fired it up. But it wasn’t very practical to try to use 2 laptops on the same desk. So I installed Synergy on both laptops, and voila, I had 3 screens of space all controlled from my MacBook. Synergy allows you to use a single mouse/keyboard among multiple machines – pretty neat. If you’re using it on a Mac, I would suggest SynergyKM, which wraps the program into a preference pane.

Another neat gem I found while cleaning out some old desktop PCs that are bound for donation is Darik’s Boot and Nuke, which you can use to boot your machine and automatically securely wipe your hard drives, a must if you’re getting rid of a computer.

Well, after quite a number of years at Serverbeach, I think the time has come to find another solution. Chugging along happily on Fedora Core 2, my dedicated server has functioned without a hitch from Day 1. But FC2 is getting a little stale, errata updates have gone away, and so I’m looking to migrate over to Ubuntu, and I’m also looking for a new provider that can offer me more options for less money.

Enter Slicehost. If you don’t mind being on a virtual machine on a shared host (you get guaranteed memory and processor-time minimums), these guys seem like a good crew that really know what they’re doing. They don’t oversell their resources, and you get a lot at a reasonable price: decent bandwidth, a range of sizing options, choice of distro, RAID1, daily snapshot backup/restore, and even console access.

This could be the start of a beautiful friendship…

If you’re even mildly interested in web development, you’ve probably heard the hype over Ruby on Rails that’s been building over the past few years (if not, you have got to get out from under that rock :-). Being predominantly a Perl hacker, it took me a while to download it and take it out for a spin on some projects. Well, after about 3 weeks of intensive work in the framework, I can honestly say, it’s made web development fun for me again. It was so inspiring, I rewrote my blog software in Ruby just for the hell of it! (Speaking of which, if you notice anything weird with the site, please let me know). Kudos to Rails and its developers, I drank the kool-aid and you guys have blown me away.

Since I’ve been living a fairly transient lifestyle for the past three years, I’ve definitely come to appreciate things that make it easier to handle the mundane things like receiving my mail, paying bills, calling friends, doing my banking, etc. Now that I’m heading home, I thought I’d give you a list of things that have helped me out in this regard, in case you too would like to take a romp and live out of a suitcase for a few years…

Mail Management

MBE: First on the list has got to be Mailboxes Etc. I’ve had a box there for going on three years now, and it’s allowed me to keep a stable address where I can receive all my mail no matter where I might be. Once a month, I usually get the mail forwarded (for a small fee plus the forwarding cost) to wherever I physically am at the time.

Remote Control Mail: If only this had been around a few years ago… I haven’t used this service, but it takes the idea of using MBE as an address proxy to the next level. Remote Control Mail will actually allow you to view your mail pieces online, have envelopes discarded, shredded, or opened and scanned for reading online. You can then elect to have mail selectively forwarded to you physically should you choose to do so. Pretty nifty!

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