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Well, my squiggly nature took over again and I was off to setting up FreeNX over SSH. I started off by installing the freenx server for Arch Linux by following this post and downloading the compiled arch package from here. The install went smoothly but when I tried connecting I kept getting the following error:

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NX> 203 NXSSH running with pid: 3920
NX> 285 Enabling check on switch command
NX> 285 Enabling skip of SSH config files
NX> 200 Connected to address: 192.168.6.103 on port: 22
NX> 202 Authenticating user: nx
NX> 208 Using auth method: publickey
NX> 204 Authentication failed.






After spending quite some time researching and trying several different ways I finally figured out what I was doing wrong. Basically you have to generate a new key pair using `ssh-keygen -d` and tell it to save the key at /usr/NX/home/nx/id_das with no passphrase. Afterwards you save id_dsa.pub to /usr/NX/home/nx/.ssh/authorized_keys2.

 Once you do this then you should copy the id_dsa file as server.id_dsa.key to the client’s share/keys directory; for default Windows client installation this was c:\Program Files\NX Client for Windows\share\keys\server.id_dsa.key. Now comes the most important part, make sure that you import this key into the connection that you make, see the screenshot below for more information.

So finally after lots of hard work I got freenx to run over SSH on windows. Below are some screenshots for your pleasures 🙂 Sorry for the humougous size 🙂



	

Have you heard of geometric psychology? I just listened to part of an old Career Track seminar by Susan Dellinger and thought it was a very interesting idea, you should definitely check it out. Here is a link to her website.

A few weeks ago I heard about Ruby on Rails so I went to the Rails website and saw the demo. I was impressed. The demo showed a framework that I have always had a blurry image of, plus a gazillion more things that I didn’t even know you could do. So I decided I was going to try it out. Since then I have read several online tutorials and bought a book about it (Agile Web Development with Rails, probably the only book available on the market, and a good one). You have to realize that I have never touched Ruby before so that meant some extra learning on top of the uber extensive framework. I am starting to understand the whole framework very well and getting fluent at it. That is what has been consuming most of my after-work time.

Work, as always, has been taking a lot of time. But stay tuned for some good Rails related stuff…

Firefox users have made some awesome extensions. For instance, take the Paste-and-Go extension; this might seem like a very small and useless extension but in fact it is quite useful. I heavily use this extensions for copying and pasting URLs and I was just thinking, wouldn’t it be useful if this worked for searching functionality also? Well, I did a CTRL+K and typed in "paste and search," guess what was the first link that Google came up with? Paste-and-Go! Basically for paste-and-search you have to press CTRL+SHIFT+S instead of the CTRL+SHIFT+V! Very cool!

I personally think extensions are a very big plus for Firefox and IE really needs similar extensions and for free. One thing that I miss in bare IE is mouse gestures, mouse gestures are such a time saver!

Have you looked at Windows Vista yet? Checkout the PDC 2005 presentations, some of the things that they are showing look very cool!

I just installed Ruby on Rails on a server at home, but after running the WEBrick server I got the following error:

MissingSourceFile in <controller not set>#<action not set>

After looking around for a few minutes I found out that this was caused by how I was running WEBrick. Basically you have to run it from the main application directory and not the script directory. So you should always run "script/server" instead of "./server" inside of the script directory.

Sorry, I have been very busy with work and a move which is why I haven’t been blogging much. The little time that I have had I have been spending on writing a C# based program for manging COM components. More to come soon… 🙂

Lately I have been working on a work project in VB6 and one thing that I dearly miss in the VB6 IDE is shortcuts for bookmarks. I so wish there were keyboard shortcuts for bookmarks! 🙁

Today I had to deal with an issue involving errors for COM components. So I started looking around for tools that would help me with this task. After a few minutes I found COM Explorer 2.0 by 4Developers. The tool looks very nice and does most of what you would like it to do. One thing that this program is lacking is search, and I had to look for a DLL server whose name I wasn’t exactly sure of. I ended up finding a hack to accomplish this, basically I generated an HTML report with all the DLL servers and then searched that HTML report in Internet Explorer. Other than that the pricing for one developer seems a little expensive but the site- and corporation-wide pricing sound like very good deals.

Man! there are way too many programming languages! I have heard a lot about Python lately so I decided to give it a try. While I am learning Python some how I end up on a website about Ruby on Rails and now I am getting excited about Ruby. Right now my main concentration is on normal GUI application and not web applications so Ruby on Rails isn’t really the reason for excitement (even though I did try it out :)). It’s just so hard to find one langauge and stick to it; you know what they say, there won’t ever be one language that will do everything. So my learning continues and hopefully one day it’ll all come to a good use.

Anyways, currently I am continuing with my Python adventures (right now I am working on a simple a linux fstab viewer/editor using pyGTK).

I just saw nerd score on a website and out of curiosity decided to check out where I ranked; below is what I found out. I bet if I would have taken this quiz a few months ago I must have ranked much higher! 🙂 Oh well, I guess I still am a nerd 😀

On the same note I also took the Geek quiz and below are the results 🙂