August 2006 – snydersoft.com

Synergy (share a keyboard and mouse)

From the Synergy website: “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).”

I use my laptop as the “server” and then have a linux machine in my office that I can control with the laptop keyboard and mouse…. just by moving my mouse over to the right edge of my laptop screen until it jumps to the linux machine.
At home I use the same software to control a MacOSX machine from my Windows Server 2003 primary machine.

This product is simlar to a KVM, but allows both machines to have their own monitors and for you to see/control those machines at the same time (without switching between). One side benefit is that you can copy-n-paste between machines (simply copy some text in machine one, mouse over to the other machine and paste), show me a KVM that can do that!

You can download MacOSX, Linux and Windows binaries at:
http://synergy2.sourceforge.net/

Dell Recalling Laptop Batteries (again)

Dell is recalling a large number of laptop batteries (primarily for the D-series laptops), but to the potential for overheating and fire.

Article at CNN:
http://money.cnn.com/2006/08/14/technology/dell.reut/index.htm?cnn=yes

Website at Dell for getting checking/ordering replacement batteries:
http://www.dellbatteryprogram.com/

Problems installing Perl modules under Redhat8/Redhat9

I had another friend get bitten by this *feature*, and felt it was worthy of a note on this site.

: “Note for Perl 5.8 Users (incl Red Hat 8)

Redhat 8 and 9 changed the default LANG to something with utf8 and this causes all kinds of problems with installing various modules and software. So the fix is to set the environment LANG=en_US before going to into CPAN.

Just do “export LANG=en_US” on the command line, and then install the module you need. You probably want to consider installing this into something like /etc/profile, or other global environment area so that it is selected the default for all users.

CSS Positioning (and when elements space is closed up)

When using relative positioning the space that the element normally needs is NOT closed up as the element is positioned.

However, when using absolute positioning the space that element normally needs IS closed up.

And don’t forget that positioning of an element is based on the “parent” element that was also positioned, otherwise it is the BODY/HTML element.

Passphrase-less SSH key for scripted uses

I have used this a number of times, but since I needed to look up all the flags again, I thought I would post this for those interest. I occasionally use this to allow a script to push a file from one machine thru the firewall to an external machine (via SSH).

Here is how you make the key:
ssh-keygen -N “” -q -b 1024 -C “key comment” -t rsa -f ~/.ssh/id_rsa

This then allows you to use commands like:
scp file.txt user@externalhost:/put/the/file/here/

Hello world!

Welcome to SnyderSoft.com, I am going to start using WordPress for the main site. This will allow me to post blog like content quickly and easily with screenshots. My goal is to provide everyone lessons that I have learned while testing/trying new technology offerings. Primarily the interest will be in System Administration and Web Development tools, with a possibiliity of reviewing new gadgets that I have the opportunity to work with.