Ben Galbraith’s Blog

For various reasons, I’m constantly swapping between a PC and a Mac during the day. I use a KVM much of the time, but when I need to use both machines nearly simultaneously, I often resort to Remote Desktop Connection (RDC) to control my PC from my Mac or VNC (OSXvnc and VNC Viewer) to control my Mac from my PC.

One day, without realizing it, I used my Mac to RDC into my PC which was VNC’d into my Mac, and the results were quite recursive:

Twisted. The weirdest part was the mouse handling; moving the mouse cursor over the RDC window would continually reposition the mouse cursor above the RDC window. Try it at home!

And so, after months of dormancy, I resurrect this blog.

Why did it die?

Pragmatic Ajax. I can assure you, all of us involved in authoring that little piece of sh^H^H, err, high-quality-Ajax-reference-material-available-soon-at-a-bookstore-near-you (did I just make a ^H joke?) have made blood oaths to talk each other out of authoring another book. Ever.

Why am I reviving it?

Shamless self-promotion, my friends. What’s a blog if not self-serving? I want to tell you (that’s right, you — the one guy still hanging on to my feed) about The Ajax Experience, the upcoming conference that we Ajaxians over at Ajaxian.com are putting on in a few months.

I’m amazed at the speaker line-up that we were able to put together, from the compulsory keynote by Jesse James Garrett of Adaptive Path to the founders/maintainers of such key frameworks as Dojo, Prototype, Scriptaculous, and more. Other big names, such as Zimbra CTO Scott Dietzen and Adobe/Macromedia Software Architect Kevin Lynch, willl there. This will be a technical event full of incredible content.

I also want to mention that we’ve got some interesting ideas for making the conference experience distinct and enjoyable. My fellow Ajaxian Dion Almaer and I attend way too many shows each year, and believe me, we’re as excited as anyone at making The Ajax Experience unique and entertaining. I don’t want to spoil too many of the surprises, but I will say that we’ll be giving away a MacBook Pro (whatever is the latest and fastest model, fully loaded) at the show — and that’s not the giveaway that I think will generate the most buzz. (Hint, hint.)

The show takes place in San Francisco from the night of Wednesday May 10 to the night of Friday May 12. As you may notice, that’s right before JavaOne, which takes place the following week. Since we’re holding the show four blocks away from JavaOne’s venue at the Moscone Center, in the lovely Westin St. Francis hotel, we hope a lot of folks travelling to JavaOne from out of town can simply adjust their travel plans to fly in and check in to their hotel a few days early and attend The Ajax Experience as well. How convenient!

I hope you can make it.

It’s great to be alive and blogging again (without having to rename this blog “Separated… with children” as a certain third-party may have threatened — ah, the many rewards of moonlight book authoring). I can’t promise that future entries won’t be self-serving, but I can promise: no more ^H jokes.