iTunes recently launched its new social networking platform, Ping, and with the launch came a few interface changes. The changes include replacing the standard horizontally configured window controls with vertical ones (LifeHacker tells you how to change this back if you like - http://lifehacker.com/5629084/move-itunes-closeminimizezoom-buttons-back...), lighter colors all the way around (a dull gray that I am not really into), the removal of some dividers, and swapping out the icon.

It was a normal Friday night. I was laying in bed, trying to watch the latest episode of Happy Town on Hulu, when suddenly the video paused, the sound kept going and nothing I pressed would make the full screen go away. I tried every key combo I knew. Finally I settled for restarting. I pressed and held the power button till the screen turned off, then pressed it again expecting my trusty MacBook Pro to restart flawlessly.

Boy was I wrong. The first thing I noticed on restart was a strange loading screen that took a little longer than normal on boot. I waited, eventually got the login screen. After logging in and booting, everything was great. I started Firefox again, went to Hulu, continued where I left off. After a few minutes, the video froze. The sounds kept playing. I was right back where I started. After a bit of googling from my trusty Windows XP machine, I found that some other people had similar issues and fixed it by clearing caches and removing startup items. I thought this may just be a flash issue, or a Firefox problem. I tried all of the fixes above.

I restarted, removed startup items, ran the periodic updates, ran cleared my caches, did all of the fixes suggested. I restarted again. Now... I wanted to prove to myself that this wasn't an issue with Firefox, so I started up Safari, which I recently stopped using (see http://echodittolabs.org/blog/2010/06/safari-firefox-why-i-made-change ). I went to ESPN.com to checkout the World Cup scores. After a few minutes, Safari froze. I tried to force quit, but it was useless. I had to restart.

At this point I was ready to give up. I sent an email to some coworkers, and asked what they thought I could try. The only response I got was to start up in single user mode and see if fsck could fix it. I restarted my computer in single user mode by pressing CMD and S at the same time on startup.

I have recently started using synergy to control my Mac and PC using a single keyboard and mouse. Synergy is a pretty impressive piece of Open Source software: it’s impressive enough that it can use a standard LAN network to share input devices between computers. What I didn’t realize until setting it up was how much more it can do.

While Synergy is fairly easy to set up, being a geek-centric piece of open-source software it requires some editing of configuration files and the like (though on Windows machines a straightforward GUI is provided to facilitate this). Configuration files specify not just what machines are going to be controlled and how their monitors are laid out in physical space, but also allow for a plethora of configuration options. While many of these options are basically just advanced setup parameters, there’s one class of options that makes Synergy incredibly powerful:

Through Synergy’s configuration file one can map keystrokes entered while controlling any machine to (not necessarily identical) keystrokes on a specific machine!