More power!

One of the reasons I wanted to be running Windows XP on my laptop was the hope that I could use its ability to support two displays at once. It doesn’t matter how big a screen is, I always wind up covering it with a single application — but with two screens, I thought I might be able to have two applications visible at once and even do cut-and-paste between them.

So I got a port replicator and set things up yesterday, only to find that it was a disaster. Having two displays was nice, but when they’re wildly different in size and placed fairly far away from one another, I found it very difficult to cope. It didn’t help that Windows doesn’t notice when one undocks, and so applications still tried to use the screen that wasn’t there.

So I gave up on that idea. Today’s attempt, which seems to be a bit more successful so far, is to use two screens on my desktop machine here at work. The screens are nearly the same size and are close enough togther that the mouse does seem to move almost seamlessly between them, but I can sure tell that one of the displays is a significantly older model, with a curved screen (instead of the flat CRT of my newer display). What I’d like is two modern LCD screens, but I can’t really justify the upgrade yet.

(Update: I swapped my old curved CRT for a newer, flat-screen CRT, so now I have two CRTs with the same characteristics. That’s much better!)

Thanks, Brent!

Brent Simmons is leaving Userland today. Thanks, Brent, for all the hard work on Manila, Frontier, and especially keeping the ETP servers up and running.

Thanks, Sam!

Sam Palmisano took over as CEO of IBM today, and the stock went up $4.90. Now, if he can just keep that happening for fifty more days, I’d be a very happy camper.

Shabbat Shalom!