I finally got a setup at work which I’m really satisfied with. The short version:

• 3 24-inch monitors (HP LA2405wg with two Display Ports)
• Desktop computer (HP Z600) 2.26gHz with 6 GB RAM running Windows 7 x64 - using 2 of 3 screens
• Laptop (nothing exciting - HP Compaq 6910p with Win 7 x64 – for mobility) – using the 3rd screen
• Synergy to share a single mouse and keyboard between desktop computer and laptop

(the two screens on the left is the desktop computer, the one on the right is the laptop. Couldn’t take a picture further away because I have a wall just behind me )

What’s really nice about this setup is that I don’t really notice I have two computers running, because of the way Synergy “abstract” the other computer away.

Setting up Synergy (the long version)

1. Install Synergy on both computers
2. Setup the computer that’s connected to the mouse/keyboard as “server”
   1. Select “Share this computer’s keyboard and mouse (server)”
   2. Click Configure…
   3. Under Screens click + to add a new screen (actually it’s a computer you’re adding and not a screen)
   4. Set the Screen Name to the name of your computer (yes, it has to be the hostname of your computer in order for Synergy to communicate with other clients) and click OK
   5. Do the same for the other computers (the clients)
   6. Under links you set how the screens are in relation to each other (based on my screen setup above):
      1. Highlight your “server” under Screens
      2. Under Links ([New Link]) enter:
         0 to 100 % of the left of YOUR_CLIENT goes to 0 to 100 % of YOUR_SERVER
      3. Click +
      4. 0 to 100 % of the right of YOUR_SERVER goes to 0 to 100 % of YOUR_CLIENT
      5. Note: Synergy does not implicitly understand that if server is left of client, the client is right of server, so you need to define that explicitly, hence #4
      6. Click OK
      7. Click Start (consider setting up AutoStart)
         
         On my server it looks like this: 
         
3. Setup the client
   1. On the client computer select “Use another computer’s shared keyboard and mouse (client)
   2. Enter the name of YOUR_SERVER
   3. Click Start (consider setting up AutoStart)
4. That’s it. Test by moving your mouse from the left most monitor to the right most monitor! Cool!

It so happens that I’m from Norway. Codinghorror (Jeff Atwood) just tweeted a great video quite accurately describing Norwegians (hilarious):

Though I don’t use WiX anymore, I do still follow the project. You may ask yourself why I don’t use it anymore since I created a series of WiX articles and apparently spent a lot of time with it? The answer is simple: I switched jobs about a year ago and MSI’s are overkill for deploying our current solutions (all web) to the web servers.

Back to the topic though. A few days ago Scott Hanselman published an interview with Rob Mensching (creator of WiX) that should be interesting to you if you’re using or planning to use MSI’s. One thing that was new to me though is that Rob actually created Orca as an intern at MS in 98! If you don’t know/use Orca you should really check it out (even though Rob says nobody uses it anymore ). It’s a great small tool that lets you peek inside and change the internal MSI database. Really helpful to find out what’s going on inside an MSI.

Going to QCon London? I am and a bunch of my friends are too! Just a heads up that the early bird is about to expire this Friday.

If you haven’t been to QCon before, I can really recommend it. What I find especially attractive by this conference is its various tracks that should satisfy the most demanding devs and architects, and of course not to mention the speaker list (which is still growing). Here’s a few selected speakers from my point of view:

• Dan North
• Floyd Marinescu
• Jim O. Coplien
• Joe Armstrong
• Jon Skeet
• Kevlin Henney
• Michael T. Nygard
• Ola Bini
• Ayende (Oren Eini)
• Rod Johnsen
• Ryan Slobojan
• Stefan Tilkov
• Steve Freeman
• Udi Dahan
• Ulf Wiger

And here’s the tracks:

• Architectures You've Always Wondered About
• Dev and Ops: A single team
• Functional programming
• Non-Relational DBs & Web Oriented Data
• Software Craftsmanship
• Solution Track: Wednesday
• 2015 Software Development
• Agile Evolution
• AlphaGeeks on .NET
• Cloud Solutions
• Irresponsible Architectures and Unusual Architects
• Solutions Track: Performance and ScalabilityBrowser as a Platform
• Cool Stuff with Java
• How do you test that?
• SOA 2010
• The Concurrency Challenge

Hope to see you in London March 10-12 (March 8-9 for tutorials).