I’m so happy - I found Synergy. No, this isn’t some aspect of monkhood that I have achieved after many years of study, it’s merely a wonderful little application that lets me use my keyboard and mouse between two different computers merely by moving my mouse to a side of the screen. I’ve used Win2VNC before to do the same and while it worked well, I had to a) install VNC and b) it ceased to function very well once I went to a dual-monitor setup. Thus, I’ve been on the prowl ever since for a good app that does the same. And thanks to my recent discovery of MSDN blogs, I found a good article about using your laptop as a second monitor. I can now happily recline in my chair and use my laptop without having to lean forward to use it’s puny little keyboard - ah, the luxury of laziness.

Now, if only I could find a good virtual window manager for windows, I’d be very happy. The one that comes with GeoShell isn’t bad, but doesn’t fit my usage patterns - i.e. I like to minimize things and have them stay on the same desktop when I restore them. I’ve also tried Virtual Dimension a couple times, but I couldn’t get settled with it either. This past time, it was a little slow and kludgy (probably just the number of apps I was running on my laptop at times), but it also didn’t handle command prompts well. I always keep a cmd.exe open and Virtual Dimension kept it on every desktop - fairly annoying for me. Otherwise, it wasn’t bad, but I know Keith didn’t have too much luck with it either.

For now, though, back to writing an interace to my syslog database server. Oh, and taxes, and doing laundary, and cleaning up a little bit after being away for work and fun for the past 8 days.

p.s. I did want to mention there is a bit of (barely noticeable) lag with Synergy, but I have no doubt that’s due to the fact that I’m connecting from my wireless to my internal network. If I were on the same network, I bet it would be flawless.