opensource

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!

Tim Lee takes issue with an article by Nicholas Carr in which Carr explores the limits of the open source development methodology. Carr says the OSS isn't very good at innovating. Tim disagrees:

I was hoping to follow up the EchoDump release with redirect.module, a simple Drupal module for providing HTTP 301 redirects in a manner similar to how Drupal's path aliasing system works. All I had to do was fix some minor issues to make our 4.7 version compatible with Drupal 5.

But wouldn't you know it, former Ditto and all-around great guy Justin Miller beat me to the punch. He's just released a Drupal-5 compatible version of http_redirect.module (originally created by professionalnerd.com). You can get it here. And if that doesn't exactly meet your needs, this module might.

So! No reason to reinvent the wheel, regardless of how fun the reinvention may be. Thanks for putting this together, Justin!

Some of you may remember opensource.echoditto.com, EchoDitto's lately-neglected repository of free software. We've had turnover both in staff and Drupal versions since the last time we paid serious attention to it. One of the goals of this labs project is to migrate that software over.

Much of it hasn't been ported to Drupal 5 — and most of it shouldn't be. Webform makes echoinvite unncessary; askismet and the spam module encompass the capabilities of blacklist.

But we've still got a few useful tricks up our sleeves — and now have some new and improved, Drupal 4.7 and 5 versions of "classic" EchoDitto modules.

So, first up: EchoDump. This is an awfully simple module, but also an awfully useful one — at least in my experience. If you're maintaining a Drupal site for a client that expects regular reports but isn't capable of wrangling with SQL, this can greatly simplify your life. It allows you to create SQL reports that can be exposed on a granular basis to users. And it features easy exporting to Excel, making the creation of "user signups over time" graphs and the like a relatively painless process.

As you might expect, you'll want to be very careful about which users you grant the right to enter SQL.

Also, please note that although the 4.7 version has been used on production websites, I just adapted it to 5.0 for this post. Please consider it beta software, and use it with care.