Posts published by “centaur”

Created via Automotivator, which I found after seeing a Livejournal post (itself found via Planet Lisp) in which its creator, Zach Beane, created a motivational poster for all the smug lisp weenies:

I may not program in Lisp much anymore - probably less than once a month or so, compared to my Top Five (currently Javascript, Java, C++, Bash and Python) - but I do now have this poster hanging in my office at the Search Engine That Starts With a G. Already it's gotten quite a few questions ... :-)

So, on the note of doing things wrong and personal insignificance ... here's some random bits about some changes in the works.  This is one of the first blog posts I've done on my new Macintosh, which replaces my beloved but fried Blue Slab of Coolness and my beloved but stolen old Powerbook.  Having used it for a month or two now, I do so wuv my my Mac and it's crappy user interface, which does just enough right to almost make me ignore its massive gaffes (like switching between two windows and the screen suddenly reshuffling the z-buffer heights of all open applications).

But it's really flipping over into usability thanks to a trick I learned combining Spaces and VMWare, letting me switch back and forth between Windows Vista and Mac OS X Leopard with ease.  (Apparently the new MacBook Pros are some of the best laptops to run Windows Vista.  Who knew?)  VMWare is slick because it lets you run Windows Vista on your Macintosh in a virtual machine - it's even smart enough to use the partition set up by Apple's Boot Camp dual-boot solution - but it really didn't get hyper useful until I learned the Spaces trick.  Spaces (a warmed over version of the virtual desktops feature popularized by the X Window System) lets you create several "virtual desktops" you can switch between via control arrows - and once you do that, you can give one of them to Vista in full screen mode.

I can't remember the blogger who recommended this trick to me (Mossberg? Some Lifehacker article?), but using Space's control-arrows to switch desktops actually has proven easier in practice than using VMWare's (admittedly hyper-slick) Unity mode.  Unity, like Parallels' Coherence mode, sounds great because it puts your Windows windows on your Macintosh desktop like any other Mac app.  However, using Spaces to put Vista on its own desktop means the Mac apps and the Windows apps get their own OS desktop features like the taskbar, destktop icons, etc.  Looking at the Lifehacker article on Parallels I linked to above, I suspect that I could make Unity work much better; but this is working well enough for me to get stuff done now.

Also this is a first post using Qumana, new blogging software which narcissistically inserts some adware which you can see here to the lower right. --->

Powered by Qumana

Qumana has been so nice to me so far (WYSIWIG mode, automatically snarfing URLs out of the keyboard when you insert links, etc., etc.) I'll leave the ad in just this one time. 

SO click on some links above and give our "sponsors" some love. :-)

-Anthony

What the heck? While I slept, Microsoft has apparently released an OCaml clone called F-Sharp.

For those not in the know, OCaml is a frighteningly efficient functional programming language that is the intellectual child of my former college nemesis, ML. (Since then ML and I have become friends, teamed up, and fought supervillains together, but that's another story for another time).

Even though I don't use functional programming all that often, it's an important way to think about programming and you can do a lot in it - so the more we do to put powerful functional programming tools in the hands of the masses, the better.

Hence the significance of Microsoft porting this to .NET. "Dot NET" a library of software for Windows platforms that includes the Common Language Runtime, Microsoft's answer to the Java Virtual Machine. The great thing about the CLR is that it's very, very easy to port new languages to, and those new languages immediately have access to lots and lots of Microsofty goodness. Note to the fruits-and-birds crowd: that was not a joke. Microsoft makes a lot of good shit, and thanks to Mono more and more of that is becoming available in the Linux world.

In short, the vast library of Microsoft tools is now at the tender mercies of functional programming devotees. Bwah hah hah haaaaa! Language geeks will rule the world!

Way back when I started work at the search engine that starts with a G, I tried a number of new programs including Synergy, a program to sync the mouse and keyboard of two computers.

The claimed magic was this: you set your laptop computer next to your desktop computer and plug into your network, take your mouse from your desktop and MOVE THE POINTER OVER ONTO YOUR LAPTOP SCREEN (!) and then just start typing. When you want the keyboard to move back to the desktop, you just move the mouse pointer back and when it leaves one computer screen and reappears on the other, magic, whoosh, you're back in control of your desktop.

Well, that was the claimed magic; it didn't work so well with the versions of Linux and Windows we were using at the time, or perhaps the release of Synergy that existed then is not as good as what exists now. Regardless, I never got it to work then, but a year later, with a new Linux distro and a brand spanking new Mac laptop, I got it running like a charm in just a few minutes.

The kindly folks who run the computers at the search engine that starts with a G preinstall synergy on our Linux desktops, so all that remains to do at work is download a Synergy client like
SynergyOSX or, even better, its recommended replacement SynergyKM, install it, and set up the configuration.

I liked this so much I wanted to try this at home - but there was only one snag. At home I work in primarily PC environment. Yes, yes, I know, I should make better use of my two Macs and my Linux desktop and my Palm Pilot and my Newton and my Apple IIc, but let's stay focused here people on what I do use every day, which is the nice Windows laptop and its big brother desktop with the 24-inch LCD screen.

However, I found on the PC, in some ways Synergy is even simpler except for a typical Windows snag. All you need to do is download one Synergy binary for Windows and install it on both machines. On the server, you get a nice desktop icon for Synergy, and clicking on it gives you the option to listen to another machine's mouse and keyboard or else to share this one's. Clicking on that enables a dialog box where you can list the names of your two machines and set up "links" between screens that the mouse pointer can travel on. (Note: these links did not appear to be symmetrical, so if you specify that your laptop is to the left of your desktop, you actually need to specify the vice versa link as well or your mouse may become trapped after it crosses the border.) On the client you do a similar procedure, specifying what machine name it should listen to as it server.

However, the snag is that these are machine names, not IP addresses. At work the kindly techfolks have set up the whole infrastructure for you to resolve names to IP addresses, which Synergy depends on; at home, on a simple router, you may need to set this up yourself. Trying to specify the IP addresses causes Synergy to throw errors and not work, and ignoring the problem just means your Synergy client won't be able to find your Synergy server.

A simple way around this problem is with a hosts file, which tells Windows how to map names to IP addresses on your local network. This enables you to specify a few lines that say (for example) that the IP address 192.168.1.2 maps to "desktop" and that 192.168.1.3 maps to "laptop". I added a pair of lines to the hosts file on both my desktop and my laptop to make sure both programs could talk to each other (note: all names confabulated to protect my innocent little computers):


192.168.1.3 desktop
192.168.1.4 laptop


This gives Windows enough information to map these names to their IPs. (Note that this assumes your router or cable modem IP assignments are stable; consult your documentation on how to set this up more reliably if you have problems.) With that information, Synergy can decode these names and the client can find the server and vice versa.

And with that, it works. I move my mouse over, stuff changes on my laptop, I move my mouse back, I finish typing this essay. Not even sexay-looking enough to take a screenshot, but radically useful and easy as pie. I wish I'd done it earlier.

-the Centaur