I’ve written about synergy2 a couple of times here, most recently back in may of this year. It’s a fantastic little utility that allows you to use the same keyboard and mouse across multiple computers. I use it on almost every machine I own, windows mac and linux. It can be a bit of a bear to setup though, especially for long time mac users who faint at the thought of having to edit a text file to configure an application. Today I happened across SynergyOSX, a handy little GUI to help you configure Synergy2 on macs. If you’ve previously taken a look at it but were put off by the command line interface, check this out. Synergy2 is awesome if you’ve got more than one computer sitting on your desk.

Today I learned a lesson that made me feel pretty foolish. I’ve been working towards practicing what I preach, abandoning long-used commercial software packages like photoshop and word for open source alternatives. I’ll get around to writing about that eventually. I figured the same should apply to file formats, so when I redesigned my site I started using .png instead of jpeg files. This is why the header graphics were taking so long to load – some of them were as large as 320k. This was driving me nuts and several of you have commented on it. I spent a lot of time trying to figure out how best to optimize PNG files, never bothering to read any actual documentation of course, and never making any significant headway. I tried a variety of tools on mac, win32 and linux (pngout.exe, AdvanceComp, optiPNG, PNGCRUSH, plus several others), all without much luck – at best I was shaving a few k of the files, not the 30-50% reduction I was hoping to see. Finally I headed over to wikipedia and read up on the png file format and discovered I was operating under a misapprehension the entire time. PNG is for replacing GIFs, not jpegs. 10 minutes later I had a collection of header graphics that were literally 1/10th their previous size. So. Apologies for the crappy website performance, it’s fixed now. At least some of you may find the links to the png optimization tools useful, if you’re not already on a CS version of photoshop any of the above will do a superior job optimizing your pngs, and most of them have compiled binaries for multiple operating systems, as well as GUI’s.

I’ve mentioned before how much I dislike MacOSX’s metadata files and how it writes them everywhere by default, including to almost every single directory users touch on servers I manage. It’s my sincere wish Apple would address this themselves, but given that the problem has existed for years it seems unlikely. Meanwhile, enter another solution – BlueHarvest. It’s a control panel for OSX which allows you to disable the creation of DS_Store files on a per location basis, remove existing files, and change the default permission profiles assigned to them. Do the world’s networks a favor, mac users, and install this and turn of creation of metadata files for anything but the volumes you own, it won’t cost you anything and the world’s network admins will thank you.

Today’s example – bookmark tags, a firefox extension that lets you tag all your bookmarks. Who needs rigid hierarchical categories? Not you, after you’ve installed this. If you’re not already a del.icio.us user and care to experiment with tagging, this is a simple way to play around with it.

[via downloadsquad]

I’ve been writing about how appealing I find Ruby and especially Ruby on Rails these days. We’ve struggled at both my current job and my last position in terms of what platform/s we develop on. Bowdoin was largely a perl shop with some flash in the mix; Skidmore is, unbelievably, still trying to tell everyone it’s Cold Fusion or nothing. (fortunately I’m able to bypass all that). Meanwhile though as I imagine other positions I might move to in the future and what toolsets I’d focus on, Ruby is tops on my list. At Bowdoin there were several architecture astronauts who were trying to force us into an all-Java development model. This was largely an effort to take control of the college’s web communications by the technical staff and I argued against this while I was there. I’m not sure where they’re at with it now. Anyway I got to musing on this today after running across an onjava.com interview with James Tate, the author of Beyond Java. There’s a great quote:

There are developers that can’t stomach learning servlets, Spring, XML, Hibernate, Struts and then some UI glue frameworks. They’re going to be unleashed in Rails.

He’s describing me. My first exposure to a java development framework was the cocoon project. I mean no offense to the developers, but man, I developed a life long aversion to the complexity of these frameworks from that project. We had two really smart sys admins working for us during my time with Cocoon and we still struggled with it. It’s not that there’s something wrong with Cocoon specifically, it’s that the amount of grunt work required to implement projects using frameworks of this nature is so onerous as to drive me to anything that enables me to avoid 700 line xml configuration files. I’m hardly an architecture astronaut – my basic philosophy is to focus on results, and my dabblings with rails thus far are showing me that rails is going to get me to the results even faster.

As if anyone needed it – the guardian has posted a poll designed to uncover the top 20 geek novels, and as of now I’ve read 18 of the top 20, I’m missing only Consider Phlebas by Iain M. Banks and Trouble With Lichen by John Wyndham. I just read my first Banks novel earlier this year, The Player of Games, and really enjoyed it, so I’m adding Phlebas to my wishlist. I’d never heard of Trouble with Lichen before and Amazon doesn’t seem to have much info on it.

In terms of which of those top 20 books I’d name as my personal favorite, I’d have to go with:

Dune

Though it’s a pretty tough call – Neuromancer, Snow Crash, Watchmen and Cryptonomicon are all killer books that I really enjoyed.

I honestly have no idea if this is all going to work out as this current.boom seems to think it is, but man, it really is the second coming of client-server. Today’s example? A flowchart engine built in flash from gliffy.com. They’re in beta and unfortunately not taking new accounts right now, but that link will give you a pretty good sense of what their service is about.

There’s a pretty good comment in the latest cringely column that touches on the core of this I think – he’s talking specifically about Microsoft when he says this:

1) Gates and Ozzie HUGELY over-estimate the role of advertising. This is intentional because it distracts with enthusiasm and plays into current Internet hype. Advertising alone will not be able to support these services, especially if Microsoft benefits from them only tangentially as Ozzie suggests. Remember that for Gates and Ballmer to be happy, Microsoft will have to maintain $2.5 billion per month in revenue and $1.5 billion per month in profit. That’s FIVE TIMES the size of Google without Google’s ad expertise or ad infrastructure. It simply won’t happen.

But the takeaway is – there’s not as much money in net advertising as there is in selling licensed software, not by a ginormous order of magnitude. I agree with Cringley, it’s hard to imagine Microsoft sustaining itself on this business. The question is, can all these smaller players like today’s example? Some of them, including Gliffy, seem to intend to upsell into paid services for some of this stuff, but at least as far as I can recall there’s not a ton of success with this model. Anyone know how many folks actually pay Yahoo for an enhanced email account, for example? Or Flickr? My sense is not a lot, and you’re basically dis-incented to do so because there’s always someone else with a better deal anyway. I’m seeing tons of cool applications coming out these days (Writely, Gliffy, Num Sum, and so on) but what I don’t see is the business model. It reminds me of the first dot.bomb, bigtime. Anyone seeing something I’m not here?

Digicamreview has reviewed the Panasonic Lumix DMC LX1, the first consumer level 16×9 digital camera. I’m in the market for a new camera. My trusty canon a40 has been great but 2 megapixels doesn’t cut it anymore. This one is tempting – I shoot a lot of panoramas of the hikes I go on, and this thing would be fantastic for that, both in wide and tall mode – wide so I can take fewer shots per panorama, tall so I can capture more of the sky when I’m shooting the mountains I hike in. To be honest I would never have considered a panasonic until I saw this review. I’d been focusing on Canon and Pentax so far, Canon because they rule and Pentax because they have a decent submersible camera that’s fairly inexpensive. I can get a wide angle lens for several of the Canons I’ve been considering but it adds bulk to the camera and this time around I’m trying to get as light and small of a camera as I can. The review is generally positive, it’s main complaints are with the noise levels the camera produces and the fact that it’s relatively expensive for an 8MP camera. I’m adding it to the list of models to consider when I get around to buying a new camera this spring.

Of course wags will observe I basically still am, but check out this awesome inexpensive gocart project. Take two cheap cordless drills, add sanding discs to them, bolt them down onto a platform, add wheels, and you’ve got a gocart that controls like a tank. Add a tennis ball launcher to this and some protection for the occupant and you’ve got the best kid toy ever.

[via Make]

I have a weakness for epic fantasy, borne of my mother’s decision to read the hobbit and then the entire lord of the rings trilogy to my sister and I over the course of our childhood. George RR Martin’s ‘A Song of Fire and Ice’ series is along with Steven Erikson’s Malazan series about as good as it gets these days in terms of this genre, and after a 5 year wait the latest volume in Martin’s series , A Feast for Crows, is out. Early reviews are sadly mixed, observing that the book is overlong and demonstrating a lack of good editorial advice, but I’m buying it nonetheless. Fortunately for fans, the next volume shouldn’t take nearly as long to arrive – Martin basically wrote himself into a 1000+ page corner and decided to re-edit and cut the massive tome into two volumes, so the 6th book in the series will supposedly come out this spring. We’ll see about that, but in the meantime there’s the current volume to enjoy. I’ll post a review once I’ve read it, though it will be a while. I’m currently wading through the latest Malazan book from Erikson (House of Chains) and my bet is I won’t touch another epic fantasy for a while. Don’t get me wrong, Erikson is great, but a single 1k page epic is enough for me for a while.

Full disclosure here – I’m testing integration of wordpress (my weblog software) and Amazon. Clicking on the link means I’ll get a small commission if you buy the book. I’m actually not trying to make any money here, I just find it convenient to have an easy and legal way to get product imagery into my weblog. For example: