August, 13 2004

The story of Giuseppe Dom Barbaro would make a great movie. Since last Saturday:

• His baby daughter was kidnapped.

• He punched a TV camera.

• He was called a ‘Melbourne underground figure’ on national television.

• His daughter was returned unharmed.

• It is announced that he is facing drug charges in Victoria.

• In all the publicity his fiance figures out that he was already married.

And, to cap it all off:

• The New South Wales police – who have had a warrant for his arrest since November 2002 – saw Giuseppe’s picture in the paper, and have applied for extradition.

This is, of course, not mentioning that his 19 year old son goes to trial on Monday, “facing 18 charges of supplying a prohibited drug”.

I flew down to Melbourne this week to install the first iteration of a project for a customer. The little test lab had three PCs, three nice LCD screens, two keyboards and one mouse. Rather than looking for more hardware, I did the geeky thing and installed Synergy.

Synergy allows multiple computers to share the one keyboard and mouse, which is more convenient than having three sets to juggle. As you move the mouse off one screen and onto the next, keyboard input focus follows. Only took half an hour to download and set up.

It also earnt me a serious techo-cred with the customer.

No blog post on Synergy would be complete without a pointer to this post.

I also tried coLinux this week. CoLinux is User Mode Linux for Windows. I can now run Linux apps like CUPS on my laptop, while still listening to mp3s through WinAmp. Takes a few hours to get one’s head around the config, but once set up it Just Works. Very nice.