NoMachine NX
Now, this is how a virtual desktop should be. Fast, responsive, fully-featured remote access with standard ssh as the transport. I am duly impressed.
I installed the NoMachine server packages on my desktop at home (Debian unstable) and grabbed the client packages for my desktop at work and my laptop. Even at the slower non-EVDO speeds on my wireless internet plan I can get a usable desktop -- full-screen, full-functionality. Over a fast link, it's almost indistinguishable from being on the box itself.
So, yeah. I give two thumbs up. Only one quibble: The Windows client doesn't seem to understand my dual-head setup and will only refresh the window on the primary screen. Odd.
Anyhow, hit up NoMachine and give it a try.
Mastering Perl
Perl Guru Coworker: Got $20? The author of Mastering Perl is selling and signing books today.
Me: Nah, I already mastered Perl.
Perl Guru Coworker:
Me: Yeah, I switched to Python!
It’s (mostly) the network
An anecdotal bit of evidence, which is interesting to me: when I commute to Chicago, riding Metra UP-West Line, with my EV-DO capable blackberry on Verizon, if I sit on the north side of the train, I get EV-DO speeds nearly the entire way to the city. If I sit on the south side, I get the slower "1x" rates.
Apparently even Verizon keeps the rivalry alive....
Tethered BlackBerry With Ubuntu
I recently acquired a Blackberry 8703e with tethered internet access, and thought to myself how great it would be if I could use said tethered access from Linux.
Of course, when you're setting up something that isn't officially supported, you're likely to run into a few snags.
The first snag is: The 8703e doesn't expose its serial modem over USB without a handshake of some sort. Luckily for me, there's a brilliant guy who wrote a program to do it, called XmBlackBerry. You can grab it from Sourceforge.
The next snag is: XmBlackBerry uses OpenMotif 2.3. Ubuntu Feisty Fawn comes with 2.2. So, I grabbed the tarball from MotifZone, built it a nd installed it. I put it out in /usr/local so that I wouldn't have to worry about the ubuntu packages freaking out over the different motif versions.
OK. So I can start up the program, it notices the blackberry, and I symlink the new pts ( /dev/pts/X ) to /dev/modem so that I don't have to change the config each connect.
Now I fire up kppp (yeah, I could be a real geek and set up pppd directly, but kppp gives me a lovely little gui I can minimize to my panel and all that happy user-friendly goodness.) and punch in the settings. Unfortunately, though, the kppp default settings for pppd require LCP echoes to be responded to in a reasonable manner. Turn that off (lcp-echo-interval 0 ), and voila! We are connected!
