John Sandford week continues with Mind Prey.
Yet another Prey book.
One of my favorite books, Point of Impact chronicles an ingenious plot to assassinate a public figure and frame a former Marine sniper. Only he’s smarter than anyone expects. I know there was a movie made a few years ago that loosely follows the same plot, but I’ve not seen that so I don’t know if it’s any good or not. I’ve read the book several times and enjoyed it each time.
John Sandford week continues. Somehow I missed several of the Prey books so I am now catching up. The only problem with this is I’ve read all the ones I have in the house so I’m fresh out of new books to read.
Hidden Prey is another John Sandford novel, this time with Lucas Davenport as the central character. As usual, Sandford spins a good story, with great characters and a couple of good plot twists.
Every year in December I start to think about tracking the books I read for a year. I frequently am reading more than one book at a time, and sometimes I read two or three books in a week. Being the child of organized list makers, tracking what I read isn’t necessarily a simple thing. Do you track only those books which are new, or can you count ones that you’ve read before?
This year I’ve decided to add a new posting for each book I finish reading. The posting will indicate whether or not this is a first-read or a re-read, and it will included, thanks to my Amazon Associates account, a link to the book on Amazon. If you should follow that link and make a purchase, I’ll get a pittance in return.
Once before I used a spreadsheet to track my reading habits for a calendar year and if my memory is right I read about 75 books that year, with perhaps 45 of those being new, first-reads, and the rest being re-reads. My guess is that I’ll read about 50 books in 2010.
John Sandford’s Heat Lightning is the second book with the central character Virgil Flowers. Virgil works for the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension for Lucas Davenport, the central character of all the Prey books. The first Virgil Flowers book, Dark of the Moon, was a little slow getting started but a good read. This second story was very good.
I have a love-hate relationship with Facebook. I appreciate seeing what the people I know are up to, but I dislike all the quizzes and games and their associated chatter. Turns out it is possible to get status updates, notifications, notes and links via RSS feed. Naturally, since Facebook wants to your share your stuff with the world and not just lurk in the corner like a good introvert, they don’t make it obvious how to set up the feeds.
Jamie Zawinski has a short posting on his Live Journal site explaining how to use Facebook using RSS feeds. I’ve copied the directions below.
At work I now have four computers and five screens, all controlled from one keyboard and mouse. Here’s how I did it.
The primary machine at work is a Mac Pro running Mac OS X 10.6.2 with 2 x 2.66 GHz Dual-Core Intel Xeon processors, and 4 GB of 667 MHz DDR2 RAM. This machine has two 20" Apple Cinema displays attached to it, and an Apple Keyboard and an Apple Mighty Mouse. This machine is called Palantir.
The work supplied laptop is a 15" MacBook Pro also running Mac OS X 10.6.2 with a 2.4 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor and 2 GB of 67 MHz DDR2 RAM. This machine is called Orthanc.
The final machine in the mix is my personal MacBook Pro running Mac OS 10.6.2 on an 2.66 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo with 4 GB of 1067 MHz DDR3 RAM. This machine is called BlackPerl.
I also have a Dell Precision 390 running Windows 7 Professional, it has an Intel Core2 Quad CPU running at 2.4 GHz, and 2 GB of RAM. It’s called Khazad-dum. This machine doesn’t actively participate in the Synergy setup, it’s accessed via Remote Desktop from my Mac Pro.
According to their web site, Synergy
While you could manually start the server each time you wanted to use Synergy, a better solution is to have it started automatically each time the computer is restarted or booted. Using Lingon I was able to create a launchd plist for Synergy that starts the server component automatically. My net.sourceforge.synergy2.plist looks like this:
{{ $image := .ResourceGetMatch “synergy2.png” }} Once this file is created, Synergy will start automatically every time the machine is booted. This creates the server necessary for Synergy to work.
On each client machine I added a function to my .bashrc file to create a secure shell connection to the machine with the Synergy server, in my case called Palantir. The function looks like this:
function pssh() { ssh -L 24800:localhost:24800 userid@palantir.example.com }In addition to that function, each client machine also has a second .bashrc funtion called syn, that starts the Synergy client over the port forwarding created by the first function. It looks like this:
function syn() { /Users/username/bin/synergy-1.3.1/synergyc -f --name clientName localhost }With the Synergy server always running on my Mac Pro it is easy to start Synergy on both client machines. I open up a new Terminal tab and run the port forwarding function first (pssh). This function results in your being signed into the server, and this connection must exist in order for Synergy to work.
Next, open a new tab, which will give you a prompt on the client machine, and run the syn function to start the Synergy client. This tab will record the output generated by Synergy as you move into and out of the client via the host’s mouse.
I have discovered that Synergy is persistent; as long as the client is running and the port forwarding exists your client machine will respond to actions happening on the server. For example: if I take one of the laptops to a meeting without breaking the Synergy connection, and the screen saver starts on the server, the screen saver will be activated on the client too. This is a very minor downside as it is easy to Cmd-Tab to the Terminal instance with the Synergy tabs, and Ctrl-C out of the Synergy client and exit from the remote connection.
Synergy seems to be a dead project. No updates have happened to its source in a long time. Also, this setup which worked flawlessly under Mac OS 10.4, and 10.5, seems to be a bit flakier under 10.6. If you aren’t interested in this much effort to build a secure connection for Synergy you might want to look at Teleport, an alternative for accessing multiple computers from one keyboard and mouse.
Also, the launchd plist creation software, Lingon, is no longer being supported either.
Four years ago, on December 5th, 2005, I installed Mint on my domain host and started accurately tracking visits to my site. This morning at about 7:30 am the 50,000th page was served to the 26,620th unique visitor.
{{ $image := .ResourceGetMatch “50000.png” }}
Obviously my little personal site is way out on the power curve of the World Wide Web, but nonetheless it pleases me to see my numbers increasing. A rough count of the visits in the last 12 months adds up to nearly 22,500, meaning the rate of visits in accelerating here at Zanshin. If the same rate of acceleration continues throughout the next twelve months I should see 100,000 or more a year from now.
50,000 in this case means pages served by my host to some browser. Kind of like McDonald’s billions and trillions served signs, only fewer. The 26,620 unique visitors really means 26,620 unique sessions on my site. If you visit my site, look at a page or three and then leave that is a unique session. If you go to another page, say google.com and then come back, that would be a new unique visit. Sticking with the McDonald’s analogy, one trip through the drive-thru lane followed by a lap around the building and another drive-thru lane excursion would be two unique visits. All this really means is that most people look at 1.87 pages per visit to my site.
The most popular postings here fall into the “how to” genre. The most popular posting is Installing PostgreSQL on Mac 10.6, closely followed by Using jQuery to Create an iGoogle Style Drag-and-Drop. These type of postings are fun to create, and since they attract visitors I’m planning on more of them in the future.
What’s fascinating about these how-to style postings is the geographic diversity of the visitors. I regularly have visitors from India, Germany, Russia, the Netherlands, Poland, Spain, Italy, Brazil, Australia, and even more obscure places like Iraq and Vietnam.
The newest edition to the suite of sites under the zanshin.net umbrella is Solfège, my site about learning to play the violoncello. While it’s only been around for a couple of weeks it already has nearly a dozen postings and several pages dedicated to my experiences learning to play music.