MyEntunnel is a cool app for tunneling SSH ![[WikiPedia]](http://www.mikeyp.com/css/external.gif)
via Windows. I use it primarily to proxy IM connections from work to my Linux server at home. Today, with some help from StickyC, I set it up to tunnel VNC . Here are the settings.
My VNC server is running on the same Linux box as the SSH server. So in the "Local:" pane of the Tunnels tab of MyEntunnel, I added: 5901:127.0.0.1:5901. By default, VNC runs on ports 5901 and up, so this line means forward port 5901 from the machine running the SSH server to port 5901 on the machine running MyEntunnel. After adding this line, I restarted the tunnel by clicking the "Disconnect", then "Reconnect" button. Finally, when I launched the VNC client on my Windows machine, I told it to connect to 127.0.0.1:1. This means connect to the first VNC server on the local machine. The first VNC server maps to port 5901, which is what MyEntunnel forwards to the SSH server, where the real VNC server resides.
When I was comparing Microsoft's Virtual PC 2007 [virtualpcadditions, virtualpc2007] with the free VMWare Player virtual machine, I lamented having to decide between a polished, easy-to-use solution versus a powerful, yet clunky solution. But then I remembered that InnoTek recently made their VirtualBox virtual machine freely available for Linux and Windows hosts. I compared VirtualBox to Virtual PC 2007 and VMWare Player on my P4 Prescott machine, and with my totally unscientific asseement, I am quite impressed.
I installed the SimplyMEPIS and ZenWalk Linux distros under each virtual machine. Here are some usage notes for each:
DefaultDepth to be 16 instead of 24. Both MEPIS and ZenWalk detected VMWare and installed the VMWare video driver. Microsoft's Linux Additions video drivers didn't work properly in either distro.Inside of each distro's VM, I downloaded and compiled ppower, a compact and solid app used to control X10 serial devices. I timed the compilation on all three VMs. VirtualBox and VMWare came in at a dead heat, but both were nearly twice as fast as Virtual PC.
All in all, VirtualBox is almost as easy to use as Virtual PC 2007, but with better performance. It is my go-to virtual machine now.
Side Note: I repeatedly tried to download Parallels Workstation as another VM to use for comparison, but their web site is a disaster. It took several days before their user registration page would give me a trial code, but the link to download the product itself hasn't worked in weeks. I actually had to Google to find their user forum, as a link on their own site was nowhere to be found.
As you probably know, thanks to the morons in Washington, Daylight Savings Time has been meaninglessly changed this year.
If you have some Linux boxes running a distro older than a couple of years, you'll likely need to manually update the time zone data. Luckily, Linux-Watch.com has a nice and consise HOWTO that I found easy to follow.
The only gotcha is something that StickyC discovered: many Linux distros (mine included), use a copy of the zoneinfo file for /etc/localtime instead of a symbolic link. This is, of course, easy to change, but it's something to be aware of.
FolderShare is a neat peer-to-peer file sharing application that was recently acquired by Microsoft. It sits in your system tray and silently synchronizes a specific folder on one computer to a folder on some other computers. Some co-workers and I are giving a talk tomorrow, and we decided to use FolderShare to sync the talk assets. Overall, it worked, but not without a couple of issues.
The first thing we noticed was that by default, FolderShare allows you to access your entire computer via a password-protected web page. I was pretty horrified to discover that only a simple password was between my files and the rest of the world (remember, this skips through your firewall). To disable this, you need to open the FolderShare Settings dialog and uncheck the "Allow web downloads from this computer" checkbox on the Transfers tab. It also seems wise to uncheck the "Run FolderShare when your computer starts" checkbox.
Second, FolderShare is not a revision control system. If two people open the same file on two computers, FolderShare will resolve the difference by automatically renaming the files using the computer name and user name. This is not what you might expect, and will screw up any file dependencies you might have in a project. As a matter of fact, when working with PowerPoint files, FolderShare seems intent on re-syncing the file each time it is opened, whether you changed the file or not.
Finally, bandwidth is an issue. If three people (and three computers) are sharing a folder, and one of them has slower bandwidth, the slow computer will take longer to catch up to file changes. Eventually, it will get enough out of sync that FolderShare will start renaming files as if they were edited by two different people (see above).
All in all, peer-to-peer document sharing via FolderShare worked pretty well, though we did have a panic moment when we noticed 7 copies of our talk in the folder tonight. I ended up turning off FolderShare, fixing the PPT file, copying the "master" to a new directory in the folder, and restarting FolderShare. After tomorrow, I'll be uninstalling it.
Over the past year or two, I've rediscovered a love for comics and graphic novels. But I can't stand most super hero comics, so I usually gravitate toward the independent and underground stuff (the "weirdo section" as it is labeled at my favorite shop, Dr. Comics and Mr. Games). It must be due to all of the R. Crumb and Mad Magazine stuff I read as a kid. My favorite publisher at the moment is Drawn and Quarterly, who publishes the timely novel Pyongyang: A Journey in North Korea, by Guy Delisle .
Pyongyang is a graphic novel of the author's time in North Korea. He was sent by a French animation company to supervise the outsourcing of animation in North Korea. His stories about being constantly monitored and having a 24-hour "handler" while there are really amazing. His drawings really capture a view of the DPRK that most westerners have never seen. And while many of the events in the novel are hilarious, you can't help but feel terribly sad for everyone who lives north of the 38th parallel.
Pyongyang: A Journey in North Korea is an excellent read, especially if you are interested in current events, and Guy's art style is perfect for the storytelling.
iTunes is a fine media player and media manager, though for me, the Windows version feels sluggish and bloated. I wish I didn't have to use it to manage the mp3 collection on my iPod nano [ipodnanoreviews, nano2bass, ipodnanomachrone, nano2greviews]. I've tried XPlay and Anapod Explorer, but found both to be a bit clumsy, and in some cases glitchy. And they both required a full installation on my Windows machine.
Luckily, there is SharePod. SharePod is a tiny and efficient app that handles all of the basic tasks you'd want to handle with your iPod… without needing iTunes.
And best of all, the app is so tiny, you can actually run it from the iPod itself! It's a brilliant solution. You simply enable your iPod for "disk use", which lets Windows see it as a regular portable disk. Then copy the SharePod software to the iPod. From that point on, whenever you plug your iPod in to any computer, you can just open the iPod "disk" and run SharePod.
SharePod is a really elegant solution to media management for iPods. I'll be donating a few bucks to the author so I can get the source code and tweak it a bit. Highly recommended!
I've been using online backup services since 1999. I realized that I had enough data in Quicken that losing it would be a painful experience. I also realized that I wasn't sure if I could trust local backup media, like ZIP disks (back then) and CD-Rs, especially if there was a fire or flood at the house.
I started with backup.com (aka "@Backup"), as it was recommended by Intuit at the time. The fee was $29 per year for 30MB of data backup. In 1999, that was plenty of space for my Quicken files and other documents. I even used the recovery service once to pull down an older version of a file. However, by 2002, I noticed that the client app for backup.com was reporting connection failures to their backup server. Shortly thereafter, I canceled the service, and chose another provider.
I learned a couple of things from the experience. First, online backups can be convenient and unobtrusive. Second, having multiple backup revisions is great, as you can go back in time in case you screw up an important file. Finally, an online backup service needs to be trustworthy and reliable. If they ever show signs of unreliability, grab your data and move on.
After dumping backup.com, I signed up with Connected Backup. I've been using Connected ever since. Connected was recently acquired by Iron Mountain, the big off-site records company. Connected stores numerous revisions of each file for several months, and using their slow but effective client app, you can be very specific about which files to back up and when to do it. I pay $99/year for 500MB of backup space, which is enough to cover my ever expanding Quicken data and documents folder, and I have backups scheduled to run once a day.
However, many new online backup services have appeared recently, promising low prices, tons of backup storage, and real-time backups. Carbonite is the best of the of the bunch. For $49 a year, Carbonite will backup an unlimited amount of data, including your entire computer if you want. Whenever a file changes, it is immediately backed up automatically. A downside is that only the most recent revision of a file is backed up - you can't go back in time like you can with Connected. And a minor irritant is that backup inclusions and exclusions are done via Windows Explorer instead of a central backup application. So if you want to know if a file is going to be backed up, you need to navigate to the file itself in Windows and look for a colored "dot" on the file icon. That all said, I use the Carbonite service in addition to Connected, and love it. The convenience is outstanding. If you don't need to have multiple revisions of files backed up, Carbonite is the online back service to use.
Over the coming year, I anticipate services like Connected and Carbonite to be more competitive with each other. Hopefully, they'll each offer unlimited storage, but with multiple file revisions. If that happens, I'll be able to rely on just one service instead of two. But until then, consider me nicely backed up off-site.
