by R.I. Pienaar | Nov 23, 2005 | Usefull Things
Most readers here will probably know Synergy already, it’s a tool that lets you share one keyboard and mouse between two machines. The machines can run Windows, Linux, FreeBSD, OS X etc. in any combination. I don’t always realize it but this little tool is as integrated into my work environment as the computers themselves, I simply could not live with out it.
Till now getting it going on the Mac was a major pain, it involved all sorts of silly files being copied by hand etc, was hard to make auto start etc. Enter SynergyKM, it’s a GUI to Synergy, has a System Preferences plugin and sits nicely in the menu bar (optionally) showing your current status. It supports auto discovery of your current location via Bonjour otherwise you can just select your location like the normal network location tool on the Mac. It supports configuring both client and server mode.
by R.I. Pienaar | Nov 21, 2005 | Usefull Things
I have been contemplating coding up a little script that scrapes Google to write a command line to the Google calculator, seems I was beaten to it by John Bokma who wrote a nice Perl based Google calculator interface
% gc 50 usd in gbp
50 U.S. dollars = 29.105303 British pounds
by R.I. Pienaar | Nov 17, 2005 | Code
I’ve realized for a while now that simply announcing new versions of code that I put out listing what’s changed does not really work, as a new user it would be nearly impossible to find all the posts I’ve made related to a specific bit of code.
I’ve therefore installed a copy of MoinMoin Wiki that I will use to write documentation for projects with.
The first project to get the Wiki treatment is my PHP Library for Google Maps EZ, you can find the full documentation here.
by R.I. Pienaar | Nov 6, 2005 | Code
The author of GMapEZ broke backwards compatibility with a recent change, this release will work around that. If you’re maps just wouldn’t display give this one a try.
There is also a new feature that lets you provide multiple extends, if you are upgrading from a previous version your config file needs to change, a new section [extends] has been added, you should also look at the sample index.php to see how to pass multiple extends to the backend.
Using this new ceature you can create one set of map data and one config file but provide different views, see my visited map showing default view and the same map with a view of just South England.
Some changes made to GMapEZ has some positive effects on my library, for one load time on maps with many points are much much faster now and there are also lots more colours to pick from.
I will be helping the GMapEZ author to produce a downloadable package containing all that is needed to self host the GMapEZ library rather than rely on his hosted version, that way I can also certify my code to work with a given version of GMapEZ.
The new version can be found here: http://www.devco.net/code/gmapsphp-current.tgz full documentation for this application can be found here
by R.I. Pienaar | Nov 5, 2005 | Usefull Things
With FreeBSD 6.0 now officially released I thought I’ll go through the Release Notes and post a few of the things I found useful from it.
The release notes list a LOT of changes and I’ve already noted a few that isn’t mentioned. This might be a easy upgrade but it’s a significant mile stone.
- 80386 processors are not supported anymore.
- A new sysctl called security.jail.enforce_statfs that controls what mounts are visible in a jail, I recommend setting this to 1 if you are using nullfs to share directories that way jail users can see for themselves that certain directories are mounted read only for example.
- The IPDIVERT kernel option now causes a module to be built that is loadable at run time! Also libalias now supports being built as a kernel module.
- ipfw have a option to only match packets for a given jailid, this is now support with mpsafenet=1
- ipfw can now tag altq packets
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bsdiff(1) and bsdpatch(1) has been added for binary diffs and patching
- libarchive and therefore bsd tar now supports ISO files and ZIP files, try tar -tvzf blah.zip and tar -tvf blah.iso to see this in action, fantastic!
- Two utilities – pgrep(1) and pkill(1) has some new options, these utilities makes it easy to find and kill processes by name
- The fantastic portsnap(8) utility is now installed by default. This replaces the old cvsup method of keeping your ports tree in sync and is well worth investigating. It’s been the first thing I installed on any new box for a long time, great to see it included by default.
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tcpdrop(8) has been added that enables you to reset any TCP session, very handy indeed.
- rc.d scripts can now rename network interfaces at boot time using ifconfig_fxp0_name=”net0″ syntax.
So that’s just some of the highlights, there are loads more, and lots of work has gone in under the hood to improve threading and SMP from the 5.x branch, this should help with some concerns that were raised on the performance of 5.x series of FreeBSD.
