I have recently been playing with the Synergy software, which allows a single mouse and keyboard to control multiple computers whatever operating system they may be using. I am currently using my PC’s mouse and keyboard to write this on my macbook pro!

It’s pretty easy to set up, the windows server is pretty simple, the only bit the documentation does not emphasise enough is that the screens must be named after the hostname of the computer, so for widows it’s the ‘Computer name’ and for OSX/linux it’s the output of the ‘hostname’ command.  The linux and OSX client is command line only which is quite annoying but otherwise a very nice piece of software.

PatchELF is a program that allows the patching of the rpath of a linux binary to be whatever you want, even the printing of it.

I’ve just found out what some strange linking options mean with gcc!

Quite often i’ve seen at the linking stage

gcc object.o -o executable.out -lsomelibrary -Wl,-rpath,somepath

I’ve discovered that the -Wl,-rpath,somepath expands basically to

-Wl -rpath=somepath

and this means the location of the shared library in somepath is hard coded into the executable to be used at runtime. rpath means runtime path, all of which means the dangerous LD_LIBRARY_PATH environment variable is not needed.

Clang is an attempt at creating a gcc replacement front end for *nix based systems with static code analysis and more helpful error messages etc.

To allow the use of the clang compiler, the easiest way is to create a  new mkspec, and create a Makefile with

qmake -spec linux-clang

See the link at the end of this post for the original credit, and a sample mkspec file.

Credit here

Nuff said…

In linux, the middle mouse button by default pastes the contents of the clipboard into something. If I had a penny for every time I’ve miss middle-clicked a link and tried to open a url like “for $file in `ls`”…

To disable this “feature”, go to about:config in firefox then change

middlemouse.contentLoadURL -> false

This will disable middle-click url loading.

This is a pretty awesome tongue twister! Also should be known the voice of Brain is none other than the actor Maurice Lamarche, a voice actor for Futurama and other programs. He did the voice of the “big brain”! Oh the irony…

So true!

Just been to a bbq at a friends house during which we watched the first world cup 2010 game that we were involved in (England vs. USA). Twas pretty rubbish really, 1-1 end score plus a complete fumble by the England goalkeeper. Not exactly decisive!

Anway the bbq was good, ate too much as per usual but got to play some footy in the park. In all a good night.