Ah, the first post.

Hello everyone out there cruising the intertubes. I'm the latest addition to Scimatic software, Tom Leeson. Glad to be posting here on the Scimatic blog for the first time. As Jim mentioned several months ago, I'm looking forward to discussing, among other things, the zombie apocalypse (remember, preparation is everything!), Judas Priest vs Iron Maiden (there's more argument there than meets the eye, despite the obvious difference in record sales), and various programming topics.

For my first post, I'd like to share a project that makes my day to day work much easier.

Synergy – Synergy is a very cool open source project that allows for cross platform mouse and keyboard use across a local network. It gets a little dicey across wireless connections if there's a lot of traffic, and it doesn't always play nice when you've stopped at a breakpoint in Visual Studio, but it allows me to control my main windows machine, and my laptop (running Ubuntu) at the same time, with one mouse and keyboard.

It works in the same vein as having multiple monitors, such that if I want to google something or open a link on my laptop, all I have to do is move my mouse to the edge of the screen, and it will simply hop over (almost like having a second monitor). Not only do you share a mouse and keyboard, but a clipboard as well. Sadly, it doesn't allow anything more than text to be copied between systems.

Running it involves running a server on one machine, and the client on the other machines. I prefer to have the server on my windows machine, as it is my main focus for most of the day, and it has a handy GUI for setting up the server. I even managed to get a script running on my laptop, so before synergy is started when I arrive in the morning, all I have to do is log in and click my shortcut for synergy on my laptop (it's configured to start automatically on my main machine), and I'm off to the races. All the shortcut consists of is the following: synergyc <IP ADDRESS>. Seeing as my windows machine's IP address doesn't change from day to day, it provides me a way to get synergy started without going into the command line. (Not that that's ever really a bad thing.)

I've tested it on Windows 7, Linux (Ubuntu 9.04/9.10), and OSX, and it works across all 3 platforms simultaneously. So if you have a project that spans across multiple OS's, and you have the extra systems laying around, I'd definitely recommend giving it a shot.

I'm looking forward to writing more about topics that are centered around programming. I'm cooking a few things up, so it's just a matter of putting pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard in a text editor... but the previous one just sounds more elegant).