Firehed’s Blog

Oh how evil they are. Started at around 5pm, still going on at ten to midnight. It’s been like this every day for the last week and a half. For what? To get a good grade in a single assignment for a single class that’s unique to the school of which I’m dropping out. At least the liberal arts assignment I can’t do because of this might actually have some sort of transferrable value if or when I choose another school.

Ugh. Never again. Both in dedicating so much time to such a pointless project, and believing the school’s self-promotion department. Shame their teaching and having to live here departments aren’t as good.

Of course, you may have no idea what Synergy is… so maybe I should explain that first:

Synergy lets you easily share a single mouse and keyboard between multiple computers with different operating systems, each with its own display, without special hardware. It’s intended for users with multiple computers on their desk since each system uses its own monitor(s).

The setup could be a bit more intuitive. You’d think that setting one screen to the left of another would automatically mean that the second screen is to the right of the first, but apparently not (that one had me cursing at why my mouse wouldn’t move back to the first screen for a while). Not to mention the display naming - it has to match up with the computer’s name. Well, my confusion is your answer… or something like that.

But once you’ve got that figured out, being able to use all of your computers and displays with a single mouse and keyboard is awesome (what a first world problem). AFAIK, no doing some sort of massive virtual desktops thing or even a pseudo Parallels Coherence kind of thing, but it’s still incredibly useful.

And finally, I have it so my screens of different resolutions line up properly. Anyone who’s used a multi-monitor setup with screens of different size knows that the OS never respects the PPI of the display with regards to placement, so the edges never line up properly. Synergy does :) Again, setup in that department could be better (as it could in operating systems as well - like being able to just drag some lines to show where displays end, and it calculates all the rest), but I can’t really complain.

Anyways, try it. http://synergy2.sf.net And for OS X users, grab this GUI version as well, unless you enjoy the terminal.

Though I’m not sure if the outcome was any better than if it would have done so straight up. Ugh… never again, I tell you. Thanks so much, amk.ca, for having a logical tutorial to get things figured out.

Backstory: I wanted to create a Wordpress-style “pretty” URL using Apache’s mod_rewrite, but not doing the traditional method of just forcing it into a hidden GET approach (page.php?var=$1&other=$2). Nope, what I wanted was to have it simply ignore everything after the folder, and just deal with it in PHP with Apache’s $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'] global variable, breaking things up with an explode(). For some reason, it just feels cleaner and safer to me. I don’t know why or if I’m right, but once I get into doing something in the most complicated way possible I just won’t give up. It must be slightly safer - AFAIK, you can’t fake $_SERVER stuff, just $_GET and $_POST. Mind you, it still needs to be sanitized, but trying to put a ../ in the URL just makes it disappear. Yay! That’s one (of about eighty million) possible script kiddie hacks I don’t need to worry about. I think.
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Got five more Joost invites - same deal as last time. First-come, first serve. I also read a snippet about them getting more advertisers (as it is, they’re short and not too frequent) which will hopefully lead to some more content.

Then some Photoshop. If, like me, you consider yourself somewhat of a novice but would like to be able to use it as more than MSPaint on steroids, I’d HIGHLY recommend subscribing to Revision3’s PixelPerfect. Available as a video podcast, you can watch Bert work his magic and give you some fantastic tips. I’d suggest subscribing to the Quicktime HD feed. If you know of other free things of the same nature, let me know!

I’d suggest not staying up for that long - it does some really strange things to you. I wasn’t quite to the point of hallucinating, but my dream lineup doesn’t typically include dreaming about being tired too. I don’t think it cause the barbecue-destroying weather though. All weekend now? Lame.

A quick note from Eric: I’m no longer the only writer here, so do take note of the author from here on out. I’ll continue to be the primary author putting up various bits along with my usual ramblings. Our writing styles are fairly different, so it may be easy to tell them apart without checking the author.

To be 100% honest I hated high school. It was mostly a waste of my time. In fact, I really did not enjoy it until senior year. Reason being? I left school before lunch to go to my internship at a local investment banking firm. (talk about spin, don’t even ask how I managed to convince my principal that under loading my senior year would benefit my future) The last thing I wanted my college to be was another 4 years of high school.
Of course, I really did believe Babson when they said they were different. I remember sitting in on a presentation at the admissions office. The presenters just talked about FME for an hour and how exciting it was. When I asked about rhetoric class they said “The professors really make rhetoric business like. There is a lot of public speaking and the course tries to improve your writing for the business world.”

I think not! In fact, I have an outline I wrote in rhetoric hanging on my dorm wall. The professor made an interesting comment:

“This outline is too business like. Please rework and schedule an appointment with me during office hours.”

Too business like? You have to be kidding me! THIS IS A BUSINESS SCHOOL SCHMUCK!

Overall, freshmen year has been very disappointing. Law has been the only worth while class. Although Buzz2O was exciting, the actual content in FME has been a joke! The professors think they have found these great revolutionary ideas by categorizing everything possible. The tests are on how well you can memorize the categories. Aside from that the readings are really boring and, IMHO, mostly trivial. FME has been, hands down, the most disappointing class I have ever taken.

(That being said I actually found the IT side of FME to be somewhat useful, although Eric would disagree with me)

In the end, entrepreneurs are born not taught, regardless of Babson’s attempt at the contrary.

Hence missing a couple bits of linkage. First off, we’ve been getting ready for the big presentation at the end of the year (which is only 17 days away; the presentation is this coming Monday). Then, some bad news last night in the form of a Porsche meeting a tree at very high speeds just down the road, taking out itself and two fellow Babson students. As CrapCampus bluntly notes, it “is a perfect example of why you should not buy expensive, powerful sports cars for your children.”

Then I got to meet with the class dean today. How fun! I’m not expelled for writing blunt truths about the school :)

Mac Laptop users, check out MarcoPolo - automatic location switching. It could use a couple more features, but you can use what it has to accomplish what you need. It can use fuzzy logic to predict your location based off of numerous things - local bluetooth signals, connected USB devices, your IP address (or part of it), and WiFi signals around. Location on its own isn’t especially useful if you ask me (unless you want to use it to enable/disable network interfaces), but being able to run apps (somewhat primatively, but it still works) and set default printers by logical detection is awesome. I’ve only got it set to run a network share mounting script on connecting to one network, unmounting the drives on another. Anyways, laptop users at the very least should check it out.

Not too much else to say - I’ll try to do some better updating on the weekend when I have time to actually do things again. Like eat. Eating would be really nice. Hopefully I’ll get a chance tomorrow - we’re supposed to have a BBQ.

Oh, yeah, Moleskine lovers, check this out.

Nah, not the crazy pundit, the keyboard. Anyone else considering converting? I can touch-type well enough on QWERTY, so I thought I’d change over the keys and set myself up with a “Dvorak - Querty Command” setup (to ease the transition, my keyboard shortcuts won’t all change location too).

Anyone know of a good approach to learning DVORAK? Only the “A” and “M” keys are in the same location which isn’t much of a start, although I know it’s supposed to be much better in the long run. I’d really like to know if there’s any truth to this page’s stat on a QWERTY typist’s fingers travelling sixteen miles a day, vs one for DVORAK. I’d really like to avoid having to go back to the typing proficiency of my first-grade self, although I was a fairly quick learner. The only real problem I have so far with up physical re-arranging (and not having done the software changes yet) is that the little “put fingers here” bumps are in the wrong place, which makes a surprising difference.

Also, anyone know if it’s safe to try to do the same mod to the keyboard of a MacBook Pro? I tried it on my thinkpad, but the stupid little nipple mouse thing screwed everything up, since the keys surrounding it have the cut-outs. Of course, the MBP has backlit keys, and I’d rather not deal with an unnecessary repair bill if it can’t be done safely. One of those Art Lebedev Optimus Maximus keyboards could really come in handy for this. If only I had a spare $1500 and they had a working one.

The advances we’ve made recently are just mind-blowing. Download a disc image? Big deal. Store it on a home fileserver? Getting there. Realizing you can’t burn that kind of image file in OS X? Dammit. Firing up Parallels and burning it to an external DVD burner (that cost maybe $60) from that remote networked file? Heh, now we’re getting somewhere.

Seriously. Burning discs from a fake computer with source files located somewhere else entirely. Barely five years ago, it took half an hour to burn a single disc with 25% reliability on a good day. Now I can do the whole set of four in half that time without even considering a coaster, for MUCH cheaper. We must be approaching the so-called singularity when I can use Windows-only software to do the job on a Mac, using files on a server that should be running Linux. I’m sure it’s saying something when the most confusing part of the process is finding my cursor because it got lost on a 24″ flat panel. Or, rather, got lost between that and the laptop screen because they’re two different sizes and thus don’t line up quite right in extended display modes.

I feel like I’m a little too lucky for things to have worked this smoothly. Actually, I was kind of pissed when it wasn’t working at first, as if it what I was doing could be less technically complicated. Turns out that it couldn’t lock the drive for complete access because I’d fired up two copies of the software, not because it’s running through three USB hubs and a virtual machine. Hell, even the software drive controls to eject the tray work as if I was running the software natively.

Now if only I didn’t have to “steal” software I already own over bit-torrent because digital distribution never took off as much as it should have. Props to Steam for doing that one right.

Not quite sure what happened to cause me to miss posting yesterday. Actually, I think it had something to do with finally putting together my resume’, and a stupidly long-running game of poker, in which I lost spectacularly and then hung around as dealer. Anyways, have some interesting news snippets:

Toshiba creates 16GB flash chips (Press release)

“Nerdy” tattoos @ CelebrityTattoos.org (I don’t think nerdy applies to the numerous gaming tats though, just hardcore fan. I’d get the Cloud one)

Remember that guy who was going to live in a box underwater for two weeks? He made it @ TreeHugger.com

Finally, a good CSS “sticky” footer @ RyanFait.com He’s got some other useful snippets on web design that I’d suggest also checking out.

Funny graffiti

Discussion on what a two-party system is doing to America @ Digg

Effectiveness of gun laws in Switzerland @ Drudge Report (Presidential hopeful Ron Paul seems to understand)

What 9/11 did to free speech @ LA Times

Now go enjoy your weekend, unless you’re not the type to get Fridays off. In which case, you can make it!