Here comes another slow update.
I have potentially a lot to write about but I generally let it go.. I could write so much more.. but it’s better this way, people should get busy doing their stuff rather than read other people’s stuff 8)
First of all, a suggestion (I got from Rasty !) to keep in touch with this blog or with any other blogs: Google Reader. It’s basically a page that groups RSS and Atom feeds. A feed is a streamlined version of a web page comprised of a series of articles. An RSS reader is a page/software that shows all those articles coming from different sites in a single view.
The useful thing in all this is that one doesn’t need to actually bother going to a site to see if something new is up.
This is potentially deleterious though, because one may want people to go to the actual site to see additional content.. but then again, people easily get bored of sites that are updated rarely and would probably end up forgetting a site after a few failed attempts to find fresh news.

Now, about work, I think I pretty much decided. I will go for the company that lets me do research. Research sounds good, but I doubt I will have total freedom.. still ! I like the idea. I honestly don’t feel too much the need to work on a shipping game…. I still get recognition for working with a famous company and so family and friends are set ! That saves also a lot of time for people I meet for the first time and to whom I need to explain where I work at.
Great.. but with all the papers I have to sign and things I have to do (including a medical check !), I don’t want to celebrate until I’m actually hired !

In the meantime I kept working on DSharingu. I finally managed to remotely control my mother’s PC.. and that was really all I was asking for !!
The application has matured quite a bit. It has a few key features that one would expect from a modern application: on-line update, tabbed views, good installer. But also has unique features that make this application so important to me. The most important feature for me is the ability to set the application to keep trying to connect to another PC.
I have a fixed address on the Internet and my mother’s PC can safely keep trying to call me at that address. The minute I need to access her PC, I run DSharingu on my side and accept the next incoming connection (currently tries to connect every 20 seconds). As I mentioned before, this is because she has her connection firewalled by the provider.
The remote desktop’s view is shown using only 4 gray levels. But, frankly, that’s all it’s needed to administer a computer. Still, color will come back at a later time.

DSharingu doesn’t do much more than VNC, in fact it’s probably quite slower and I still have to implement the keyboard interaction.. but it fits my needs as they grow and it’s also a launch pod.
With DSharingu I have an application in place that starts when the PC starts and that can easily be updated. I can now start adding features and  easily bring them to my mother’s PC.
Videochat would be nice, but honestly I think that a web-cam feature is more useful. By web-cam I mean a program that grabs images from a video source (usually a cheap camera attached by the USB port) and that sends it over FTP to a web server. The image is then associated to a page that can be watched with ease.
Because of the inherently inefficient method of transfer (sending whole JPEGs over FTP and forcing browsers to reload the image), updates come rarely.
Slow updates are not necessarily bad though. With no animation to speak of, people think of a web-cam as a detached view, something to leave on and mostly forget about…  I better be careful with that !!

I started with a hint on how to keep in touch with the blog and I end with a hint on how to update one: use Docs & Spreadsheet from Google !
To post updates I need some minimal HTML code.
I used to use Crimson Editor which is a text/code editor non-WYSIWYG. I tried Wordpress’s WYSIWYG editor but that seems to have a mind of its own and sometimes generates an HTML mess. GMail’s editor works nice but doesn’t show the underlying HTML code, so when I paste into Wordpress’s editor I get plain text.

This Docs seems to work nicely (though not quite perfectly.. I have to go remove a link manually after I’m done writing !), it has a real-time spell  checker.

cul cul.. zzzzzzzz !!!

Posted by Davide Pasca in Programming, Diary, work