Rui CarmoHad lunch with Melo and Nuno, where several major world issues were discussed, such as the current trend of life imitating Dilbert (and whether Scott Adams will sue most of the telecommunications industry for plagiarizing his fiction and turning it into real life), the lack of Bayesian context-sensitive bash command-line completion (and history), the Google Earth craze, and, of all things, perlVNC (that one was my fault).
Fortunately, triple-space indenting did not rear its ugly head this time, although we had nearly as much fun speculating on whether or not pfig would actually use catalyst for his current magnum opus.
The rest of the day was rather not blissfully uneventful, as I tried to tie together quite a few loose ends that needed settling before Friday.
Local VoIP
Lots of harmless fun was had at another brand new VoIP service dubbed "Talki", which, being ADSL-centric, will never "Walki" around (it's a mobile joke, bear with me).
I was amazed at the fact that it involved a six-million Euro investment (English) up front - which, as VoIP expenses go, is around what? One-hundredth of the actual infrastructure costs? No wonder their stock went down.
Finally, a Remote Desktop Server/Proxy for UNIX
Lots of other stuff in the news I won't even try to keep track of today, but the Perl VNC thing got me wondering, and I managed to dig up Xrdp, which actually works at this point. The CVS snapshot is usable enough for me to hook up to my VNC sessions using a standard Windows Remote Desktop client.
The keyboard mappings are, of course, completely shot (only the US layout seems to work), but using RDP is vastly more efficient than even the most bleeding-edge VNC encodings (you've got to hand it to Microsoft on this one), and it might one day do away with the need to use crummy VNC clients on the Mac.
It doesn't compile on Mac OS X yet, not out of the box. It's apparently a matter of compiler switches that I'll look into if I have time, but anyway it's pretty pointless to run it on a Mac until there's a better native VNC server. I've had no problems with Fedora Core 3 and 4.