Software Physics

I work remotely a lot and frequently need to show remote users something I’m doing on my machine. To do this I wrote a simple program to capture my desktop then upload it to my website where viewers could take a look. I automated the viewer end with a little Javascript so, as I put images up, the viewers’ screens update. I called the application Simple Web Sharing or SWS. The tool was really only useful to me or technical folks who owned a website where they could post screenshots. I recently modified the application to use Amazon’s S3 so now you don’t need to figure out the website end of things. I think the tools are pretty useful and now interesting to a wider audience so I’m making them available.

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I love my Shure E3 in-ear headphones. Here’s why they’re great (in order):

1) Complete isolation from your surroundings

2) Normal sound pressure level listening in loud environments

3) No batteries

4) Superb sound quality

5) Compact

All this and they’re a real high-quality product.

With these I can sit in the middle of bedlam, blissfully deaf to all of it. I’m compelled to mention this now because on Friday I flew cross-country across the aisle from a screaming infant reenacting scenes from the Exorcist. Aside from the occasional disturbing visual, I was completely unaffected. If you travel or work in a not-so-quiet home office, get thee a pair of these.

Downsides: I should mention these as the noise cancellation style headphones provide excellent isolation as well.

1) Comfort - some people have trouble getting used to the in-ear fit

2) Fit - these work great when the ear piece seals well. Moving around a lot breaks the seal and the sound goes to crap. Don’t plan on using these on the treadmill.

3) Compete isolation from your surroundings - With music playing you will not hear anything. That goes for smoke detectors, screaming children and fire department axes at the front door…

I’ve been looking at a number of the small linux distros lately. What cool tools those are! I have a Damn Small Linux LiveCD that I run inside of a VPC; it’s a great tool. The whole dsl iso is 50meg and the memory footprint, even when running virtualized, is trivial. Also, using VPC as the host allows me to run the livecd “stateless” as it’s meant to be and to separate the state management into the VPC which takes care of keeping my settings between invocations. The thing boots from a saved configuration faster than starting Quicken and requires less system resources, very cool.

I’ve also tried this using QEMU as the virtualization layer (using kqemu to accellerate things). This works and is totally free but the MS VM technology blows the doors off of the accelerated emulation stuff.