Teleport For Mac
August 8, 2008 | Leave a Comment
For a log time I have been a reasonably happy Synergy user. However, I have also been working in a mixed Windows/OSX environment. Recently I replaced my Dell laptop with a new MacBook Pro. This opened up a new option for keyboard and mouse sharing in my environment.
I have recently learned that Teleport is a far superior product for a purely mac environment. Here are a few of my favorite features:
- The setup has a great GUI that makes setup trivial.
- You can establish a certificate on each host and have all the traffic nicely encrypted between them.
- There is an option that requires you to hold a key whenever switching screens, handy if rarely used.
- There are great indicators to what computer your keyboard and mouse are currently operating.
- You can drag and drop files between machines.
- Of course it also has the same kick ass shared clipboard that Synergy had.
There are probably a ton of other options that are useful, but these are my favorites. Synergy was great, but in a purely Mac based environment, I don’t see how teleport can be beat.
Tags: control panel, keyboard, kvm, mac, mouse, options, os x, osx, synergy, teleport, windows
Shared Clipboard and More With Synergy
June 28, 2006 | 9 Comments
OK, everyone is blogging about Synergy. Frankly Synergy is one of the coolest software utilities I’ve ever used.
Ever felt the desire to share a clipboard between two computers? On different operating systems? With the same keyboard and mouse? as simply as having multiple monitors on your desk? If you wanted any sub section of those things than Synergy is for you.
In about 15 minutes I managed to setup my Mac running OS X, my Windows XP laptop, and my Windows XP desktop to use Synergy. Suddenly my single keyboard and mouse could simply and seamlessly navigate between all three systems doing happy copy and paste across them. Words can’t express how freeing this setup can be.
The best part… Synergy is free, open source software and requires absolutely no additional hardware or gadgets to get running. It’s easy, you can go do it right now. If you are running multiple machines I highly recommend it.
Tags: keyboard, kvm, mac, macintosh, mouse, pc, shared clipboard, shared keyboard, shared mouse, synergy, virtual kvm, windows
Apple Ads Justifiably Harsh on PCs
May 22, 2006 | 6 Comments
Apple recently began running a fantastic ad campaign that seriously harshes on PCs. The series of ads shows two guys personifying the two platforms. The MacOS guy is clearly cooler and more interesting while the dorky guy plays up the all business angle of PCs. All 6 ads are really funny and touch on issues like networking, viruses, software availability, restarting, iLife, and good press. Basically the Mac is shown as coming out ahead on all of these things.
Sure it’s marketing, but I think they pretty much hit the nail on the head. How can PC-centric environments continue to be justified?
Tags: advertisement, advertising, apple, iLife, mac, macintosh, networking, pc, restarting, software availability, viruses, windows
Digital Comic Reader
May 15, 2006 | 12 Comments
If you are reading digital comics in Windows, CDisplay is the right application for you.
If you are reading comics on a Mac, unfortunately there is not a CDisplay version for you. However, you can get FFView.
Comical is also a pretty nice application and is available for MacOS, Windows, or Linux. In one instance I even had a file Comical could read that CDisplay was showing improperly. However, I think overall Comical is slightly inferior to the other two applications.
On a slightly different topic, if the new Sony Reader that was shown at CES and highlighted on Gizmodo turns out to be as good as it appears, that may be another solution to investigate. The biggest disadvantage here that I can see though is it appears to only display in black and white.
Tags: "digital comics", cbr, cbz, cdisplay, comic books, comical, comics, ffview, linux, macos, sony, sony reader, windows
Win2K3 R2 TechNet with Michael Murphy, Dig It?
March 1, 2006 | 3 Comments
Point of fact, no.
Yesterday I attended a Microsoft TechNet event with Michael Murphy. My interest in this specific TechNet was to learn what I could about Microsoft’s federated identity management plans.
The good news is that Active Directory Federation Services (ADFS) is now released. This package implements the WS-Federation standard for federated single sign on (SSO).
To Murphy’s credit he started the federated discussion with what I think is the perfect analogy, the drivers license. I’ll talk more about that at a later point, but I loved his quote: “Where is my drivers license for the Internet?”
It was when he started to be asked questions about their solution that his shallow knowledge and inexperience in this field became readily apparent. A gentleman asked the question, “How does this relate to the Liberty Alliance?” Murphy was not at all familiar with “Liberty” and basically dismissed the question. Unfortunately this would be like someone presenting about SQL Server and not being familiar with MySQL…
Anyway, another participant tried to get at what might allow LA and ADFS to interact, he asked: “Is this product SAML compliant?” Murphy said he’d never heard of SAML, and to him it sounded “like a camel named Sam.” Obviously this response was not useful to anyone…
At this point I piped up and asked about how ADFS exchanged authorization information with the service provider, the question was something like “how does it assert authorization and attribute information?” Murphy said it doesn’t. Unfortunately I knew this had to be untrue…
ADFS could not possibly be ONLY about authentication and completely ignore the authorization issue. I re-framed my question saying that attributes and authorizations were key to identity. He said they were not, this system addressed the authentication issue and attribute information was never communicated. Fear of sounding more like a dink led me to give up at this point…
I should have asked “What good is your drivers license without attributes for your age, sight restriction, etc.?” Maybe he would have “got it” then…
Moving on, Murphy demo’d how the interaction would occur using some virtual servers he had. The interface for managing and setting up these federated connections seemed pretty easy and intuitive.
When Murphy logged into the service provider interface in the demo, I immediately noticed that the newly created account already had a bunch of attributes. Most notably, a $500 spending limit.
I had to ask: “How does the service provider know this newly created user has a $500 spending limit?” Murphy stumbled with this, but threw out a blatantly off the cuff and incorrect response.
At this point a guy behind me asked “Can you scroll down?” This was it, clearly my fears for a half implemented federated system were really just due to a poor presenter. A pile of attributes, including custom defined ones including title were being listed in a textarea as the things being passed.
So anyway, ADFS has potential, but we’ll have to try it out for ourselves.
Stuff that intrigued me from other sections of the event:
Can we run Active Directory Application Mode (ADAM) centrally to manage our authorizations for all web-based applications? ‘Cause this would rock.
Windows Server Update Services (WSUS) could be useful for PSU…
Distributed File System (DFS) and the Branch Office Management seems partially implemented, not well thought out, and overall garbage.
The Cygwin replacement, or is there more to it?
Finally, did Michael Murphy learn his presentation style from Billy Mays?
Tags: "Active Directory Application Mode", "active directory federation services", "billy mays", "distributed file system", "liberty alliance", "michael murphy", "UNIX Interoperability Components", "windows server 2003 r2", "Windows Server Update Services", active directory, ad, adam, adfs, cygwin, dfs, federated identity management, identity management, microsoft, presentation, saml, technet, unix, windows, ws-federation, wsus
ecto for Windows Still Blows
December 1, 2005 | 6 Comments
Alex, the lead developer for ecto for Windows, has commented a few times on my ecto for Windows Blows post. I figured they’ve been through a few versions and it was time for me to give them another shot. Alex seems to be putting a lot of care into the product, and as a developer myself, I know how frustrating it can be to get either useful feedback or overly generalized complaints (a la something “blows”). I hadn’t looked at it since August, so why not.
I downloaded it again. Which itself was somewhat difficult. Have you Google searched “ecto windows” lately? The first promising link is misleading as it leads to an old version (1.0.3) which in itself has a link to a broken download. Anyway, I found my way to the homepage and grabbed 1.8.7
On first glance, I’m not satisfied with the spell check, I’d prefer if it checked constantly, sorta Word style. Also, a quick trial on the new keyword feature didn’t actually work, but that is likely because of Wordpress not explicitly supporting it, not necessarily their fault. Another annoyance at this point is that the ping action threw me a non-descript error about “Internal Server Error” no clue why, or how to fix… One last comment, a lot of my posts have relative links to images in the posts. Anyway these could be rewritten to take account of my blogs hostname so they don’t all show broken? On that note, why do none of these previews use my site’s template somehow? Maybe that’s configurable and I just didn’t look deep enough.
Oh crap, I just noticed a final straw to break the camel’s back. My posts in the system that are drafts are showing up in ecto as “Published”. That won’t fly.
I guess I still can’t commit to using ecto for windows (in fact I’m not using it on the mac anymore either) The built in Wordpress interface is simple, and for now that continues to win. Truthfully many of the problems I’m experiencing may be attributed more to Wordpress or the underlying APIs, but either way I still can’t use the product. Nor will I be recommending it on campus as we roll out potentially 30,000 blogs…
Tags: api, apis, blog, blogging, blogs, desktop blogging, ecto, google, movabletype api, review, software review, windows, wordpress