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synergy

Last week at work I give synergy a go. It was really amazing. What does this do? Well very simple like most geeks I have different computers (laptops and pcs). I have several screens, what I could do is do a vnc,rdp,… to use the other desktop or I could just synergy. On my work I have to use a windows xp pro, on my laptop I’m running a ubuntu dapper. Between the 2 is a small network, I started a synergy server on my win box and started the client on my linux box. I configured it, telling my windows machine is right from my linux and my linux is on the left of my windows.

Now when I move my mouse on my windows machine the the left and off the screen it appears on my linux box. I can now share the same keyboard I’m using for my windows on my linux box, it even does clipboard sharing. So if you use a lot of computers, check this out!!

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Dojo and Quartz

I struck a delicate point using AJAX, the response to my ajax call had things written in javascript but these didn’t get triggered by the browser. Hmmm, well as I was using the dojotoolkit I asked those guys. One simple reply, use our contentpane and set executescripts to true. I did and voila everything works like a charm. I have to admit those guys really know what they are doing. It’s one of the cleanest dhtml toolkits I’ve ever seen. Just take a look at their examples, just amazing!!! So if you have to do dhtml stuff, check it for sure!!!

I’m also using quartz for scheduling stuff in my code,I must say it really looks nice. I’ll be using this much more in all of my applications in the near future, you can be sure of that 2!!

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One more converted

Yesterday I had a meeting with my boss. During our last workshop I did part of my demo on ubuntu and most of the other people were really amazed at how far the linux desktop had evolved. My boss mailed me a couple of times asking more information on my linux (ubuntu).
Yesterday he told me he had installed ubuntu and kubuntu. He was really amazed as all his hardware (including wireless) worked out of the box. With windows he had to search ages for his printer drivers, he had to seperately install his wireless,… in short he was dazzled with how far linux was.
I’m proud to say I converted one more it professional to ubuntu, let’s hope the count goes up rapidly!!

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Podcast comment

This morning I was listening to my cup of javaposse. They started a discussion about the difference between good and bad codemonkeys. The said that a good monkey would be 300% more productive than a bad one, but what’s more strange is that they would probably still be paid the same.

As I know what a lot of my collegeaus earn, I really have to agree with this. There are guys out there who really get paid way to little for what they know and do, and others who actually don’t do much get paid even more. This is really frustrating, I know that if I’m in charge of the money I’ll be giving my best programmers more than those who do little and know little.

In my former job, I now and then had to interview some sollicitants. I always asked the very simple question, tell me the difference between an abstract class and an interface. If they didn’t knew, well sorry your not a programmer in my eyes. It’s one of the basics of OO programming, what’s almost a defacto standard.

My current employer works with consultants (as I am one of them), I told him as tip. If you get a consultant, just type his name in google. If you don’t get any results, I for one wouldn’t hire them (unless he can explain). Why you might ask, well actually very simple. If you can’t find something, where do you look. Google,Support,… in most cases if you log a question or something you have to provider your credentials, so you leave your credentials behind. These things get picked up by search engines. It’s not always true off course, but in many cases it will give you an indication of the person who is sitting before you.

Now I was wondering if you could take it one step further. Afaik if you are programming you are using your keyboard, hence a person who knows who to type without looking at his keyboard should be faster than someone who needs to look at his keys. So should you say, if you can’t type, you won’t get the job, or is this taking it one step to far?

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Moving

The past years I’ve been living together with 3 friends. We rented a house in Kessel-Lo (near leuven). As of today the I’m renting a small appartment, it’s on the Diestsesteenweg (behind the train station in Leuven). It’s a new appartment, this weekend we painted the bedroom and the kitchen. Still to do is the livingroom,hall,storage and my office. At first I’ll be living in it mostly alone as my girlfriend still is studying in Hasselt, she will be joining me after her studies or if she misses me to much still this year. Who knows 🙂

One of the things I hope to accomplish with living alone is to get some spare time for doing some opensource development. At the moment all of my time goes into my own company and driving to work. When everything is finished I’m willing to ‘host’ some hacking evenings for those people who are interested, I’ll mention it over here. Who knows maybe it grows to some great Belgian event 🙂