Synergy/DE PSG Blog

Mr Numpty’s hair stood on end. It must be the static!

One fine day (well, it was raining – it is the UK after all), not too long ago (yesterday), there was a man called Mr Numpty (names changed to protect the innocent). Mr Numpty was a seasoned Synergy developer and wrote Toolkit applications in his sleep (amazing what Workbench can do for you these days). [...]

Airline Baggage Roulette

Well it's another day in United Airlines "friendly skies" for me. I'm setting out on a week-long treck around the East Coast and Mid-West to visit several Synergy/DE customers with one of our sales account managers, Nigel David. It takes a LOT to make me smile when leaving home at 4.am on a Sunday morning, but today [...]

Giving people what they want

I just spent the past few days in Seattle attending Visual Studio Live! 2010. If you’re a regular follower of the Synergex PSG blog, you may have the impression that we swan around the world doing nothing but attending conferences. While I'd like that to be true, it's really in an effort to provide our [...]

Blunt Pencil?

I guess all jobs have their perks. This week visiting the office in California, in July, is certainly one of mine. OK, so being stuck in an air conditioned office all week is not exactly lapping up the sunshine, but today is Saturday and I’ve been loaned a bike! Now, when I say bike, let me explain. It’s [...]

XP: The O’Hare of Computer Network Traffic

Not long ago, I found myself with a lot of time to kill while sitting in an airport and waiting out a flight delay. The culprit, I was told, was a weather system circling over Chicago. At first this seemed odd, since the plane I was awaiting had neither originated in nor connected through O’Hare. [...]

Starting Services on Linux

For a while now I’ve been wondering about what the correct way is to start boot time services such as the Synergy License Manager, xfServer and xfServerPlus on Linux systems. A few years ago I managed to “cobble something together” that seemed to work OK, but I had a suspicion that I only had part [...]

Visual Studio 2008 SP1 Hangs After Office Upgrade

Just incase you run into the same issue… This week I had to revert back to using Visual Studio 2008 while working on a customer project, and I pretty quickly found that I had a problem. I was working on an ASP.NET web project, and found that each time I opened a web page for [...]

Linux ls Color Coding

It’s always driven me CRAZY the way that RedHat, Fedora, and presumably other Linux systems apply color coding to various types of files and directories in the output of the ls command. It wouldn’t be so bad, but it seems like the default colors for various file types and protection modes are just totally unreadable [...]

Winner Winner Chicken Dinner!

Spain isn’t the only winner… Congratulations to Graeme Harris of G. Harris Software—the lucky winner of the Official World Cup Jabulani ball! Graeme, your name was picked in the random drawing of all PSG blog subscribers who entered to win. Your official World Cup soccer ball is already en route to your doorstep. (Let's hope [...]

Learning from Stupidity

I'll be the first to admit that I've done some really stupid things in my life. Like the time I decided to paddle a canoe across a mile-wide river even as threatening clouds loomed on the horizon. Or the time I got stuck on a hike by taking a "short-cut" which involved shimmying around an overhang, leaving me suspended [...]