So, here I found how to do it: How to discard changes in VMWare player?

Q: Running a virtual machine, how can I ensure that the changes gets discarded after I close it?

A: Shutdown the VM cleanly. Edit the vmx and add this line if the VM uses a scsi-disk

scsi0:0.mode = "independent-nonpersistent"

or this if the VM uses an IDE-disk

ide0:0.mode = "independent-nonpersistent"

Alternatively, use this two lines:

snapshot.action = "autoRevert"
snapshot.disabled = "TRUE"

Several ways lead to Rome. Both ways should work, but don’t mix them.

Hope you'll enjoy as I did.

I think the original source of the video is here.

It is always a good thing to have a second monitor, for example to read documentation while doing some development, or for listening to music or watching videos while doing things that do not require full attention.
I have an ancient (10 years old) Dell Inspiron 8600 laptop on which the keyboard and the touchpad are starting to lose efficiency, but still it has a great display and an unrivaled audio system. The keyboard is pretty different from the macbook I am using daily, and dealing with different keyboards may not be so enjoyable. Also being an old generation laptop, the keyboard it's not very pleasant to the touch, and sometime it loses some key press.

With Synergy, it is possible to control remote computers with a single keyboard and mouse. So now, I can work on my MacBook running OSX Snow Leopard and control also the second laptop, the ancient Dell on my desk running Ubuntu 10.4, without switching keyboard or mouse. A second thing that comes for free with Synergy is the clipboard sharing; this means that you can cut-and-paste across the computers you are using: it is very helpful.
You can find more information about synergy at the official site.

First of all, you need to install synergy executable files on all the computers you need to control. Download it from here. Then, ensure that the computer can see each others on the network, using ip address or dns names. If they can ping each others, usually it should be enough.
On ubuntu you can install synergy using apt-get, while on the mac you can download the executables packed into a tarball and unpack them in a any folder you like, in my case I used ~/opt/synergy-1.3.1.

I want to use my mac's keyboard and mouse to control the dell laptop. You can have a single controller computer and many controlled computers. The controller will need the synergy server, while the controlled computers will run the client.
So on my macbook I created a configuration file which describes computers I want to control and what edge of the screen is the "border" from which the mouse will jump on the other computers. I placed it under ~/etc/synergy.conf :

section: screens
    dell:
    macbook:
end

section: links
    dell:
        left = macbook
    macbook:
        right = dell
end

The above configuration describe my screens configuration and the links between the laptops. Basicallly I am telling that I have two screens, the dell one and the macbook. And for the dell I have a macbook on the left, and for the macbook I have the dell on the right. There are many other options, but here I am just using the defaults. The full documentation on the configuration options can be found here.

Then I have to start the Synergy server on the macbook using the command:

$ synergys --config ~/etc/synergy.conf

On the dell computer then I need to run the client, who will connect to the macbook (the controller laptop) and act consequently. To do so, I can connect the client launching one of the following commands

// supposing 192.168.1.123 is the ip of my macbook
$ synergyc 192.168.1.123

// in my network I can refer the server as macbook.local or just macbook.
$ synergyc macbook.local
// or
$ synergyc macbook

After doing so, you should be able to move your mouse from one computer to the other(s) just passing through the edges of the screens, and control all the computers on your desk.

If something goes wrong, you can use the -f option to run the client and the server in foreground, and the -d to enable debug tracing.

If you still have troubles with command line tools, you may want to try QSynergy, which is a graphical user interface over synergy.

Yet it is missing some "file sharing" feature; it would be very good if synergy was able to copy files dragging and dropping files from a desk to another, but at the moment, this is missing. Installing OpenSSH can do what is missing: file transfers (scp) and remote ssh logins should be enough to complete synergy desktop integration.

Here there is a video that visually explains what you can do with Synergy:

It looks like in the video she forgot to start the client; btw it is just needed to launch the synergyc executable as I explained above.

And here, a guy shared his mouse and keyboard over 7 computers using synergy:

Have fun.

It's the best note taking application I've ever seen. Give it a try.

Update: latest version:
Mono 2.2
Tomboy 0.13.4

I’ve successfully installed Microsoft Office XP on Linux using Wine. It works quite fine and it’s really fast. I got some problems with Macros in Excel, and in particular I was getting the error “Error accessing file. Network connection may have been lost” on every startup. But I found a way to avoid that annoying message to be displayed: from the Tools Menu, select “Add-ins” and disable the “Euro Currency Tools”.
Surprisingly I didn’t found anything on internet on how to avoid the error, so I had to struggle with Excel options for some hours to get rid of that.

Quick solution for the inpatients: the “fast user switching” and the “welcome screen” feature in XP makes Remote Desktop not work properly. So, disable it and you’ll solve 90% of rdesktop problems. (Notice that those two options needs to be enabled in order to make the Seamless RDP work)

What happens is that the “fast user switching” misfeature drops connections on logout (and don’t starts connections on startup until some user logs in). If there is no user logged in or if the user logs out, the networks gets disabled, and you cannot connect using Remote Desktop.
When you try to open a remote desktop and the same user is already logged in locally, the local user gets disconnected and computer display the “fast user switching” screen, but doing that also drops all the connections, and from the remote desktop client you get a black screen (just after inserting the user name and password).

How to solve:

1. Disable the “fast user switching” and the “welcome screen”
Open User Accounts in Control Panel.
Click Change the way users log on or off.
Clear the “Use Fast User Switching” check box.
Clear the “Welcome Screen” checkbox.
Apply the changes.

2. If you still get disconnections on user logout, try setting up the KeepRasConnections key on the registry:
Open regedit and go to the path:
HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon
Create a new String value, or modify the existing value, called “KeepRasConnections” and set it to “1″.
Exit your registry and restart Windows, as usual

This should work. It did, for me.

I have an HTC3300 with Windows Mobile 5.0, and as a phone, my Nokia 3210 was much better. Also my Palm Tungsten T2 was much better to handle contacts, TODO lists, calendar, notes, etc. Actually I continue using the Tungsten T2 as PIM, because of how stupid Windows Mobile is. At the beginning I thought that it was me that was not still accustomed with the new software. But now it’s one year that I try to use it and I still get puzzled by the stupid Windows Mobile.

Some things that almost all the phones can do and Windows Mobile can’t:

• Assign more than one mobile phone number to a contact
• Send an SMS to a phone number that is not classified as “mobile phone number” in the address book
• Assign a ring tone to a Contact Group
• Assign a tone to SMS notification

Moreover, the feature to add and edit contacts has been probably designed by someone escaped from a mental hygienic institute: you have to scroll up and down to search the few fields you need to fill, and the controls to cancel or confirm your changes are almost hidden.
Other applications are bad as well. For example the graffiti help doesn’t give you the correct information on how to write most of special characters (like $, €, etc)

Most of latest Palm smart phones are using Windows Mobile. That’s a real pity. Palm already did a bad choice when they moved from Graffiti 1 to Graffiti 2. Fortunately I found the way to use Graffiti 1 on the Tungsten T2.

I’ll never buy another Windows Mobile handy or PIM, I hope that device producers will find a better OS to install on their products. Windows Mobile must die.

For example, at home I have a WIFI access point and I don’t use DHCP. But I don’t want to expose the administration console of the access point to Internet, so I put the administration console on a different subnet that is only accessible by air if you are around it. On my laptop then I need to access the Internet subnet (192.168.125.*) routed by the access point and the Intranet subnet (10.21.35.*) to access the access-point administration console, using only my WIFI network card.
This is the script “WIFI Home Static IP.nsh” to do that:

interface ip
set address name="Wireless Network Connection" source=static addr=192.168.125.77 mask=255.255.255.0 gateway=192.168.125.1 gwmetric=0
add address name="Wireless Network Connection" addr=10.21.35.2  mask=255.255.255.0
set dns name="Wireless Network Connection" source=static addr=192.168.178.1

The above script sets two IP addresses and related subnets details for the interface called “Wireless Network Connection”. The interface name comes from the Network Connections dialog of Windows.

To execute the script you use the command:
netsh -f "WIFI Home Static IP.nsh"

Executing that, this is my ipconfig output

Scheda Ethernet Wireless Network Connection:

        Suffisso DNS specifico per connessione:
        Indirizzo IP. . . . . . . . . . . . . : 10.21.35.2
        Subnet mask . . . . . . . . . . . . . : 255.255.255.0
        Indirizzo IP. . . . . . . . . . . . . : 192.168.125.77
        Subnet mask . . . . . . . . . . . . . : 255.255.255.0
        Gateway predefinito . . . . . . . . . : 192.168.125.1

And to restore the default IP settings for other networks (using DHCP for obtaining single IP and DNS) I use this other script called “WI-FI DHCP.nsh”:

interface ip
set address name="Wireless Network Connection" source=dhcp
set dns name="Wireless Network Connection" source=dhcp

The above lines sets IP and DNS address to be obtained automatically from the DHCP (that is the default behavior), for my Wireless Network Connection.

To do things quickly I associated the .nsh file extension to the command netsh -f "%1" and now I can switch network settings just clicking on an icon.

Learning to create netsh scripts can help much if you bring your laptop in different networks.

But, Microsoft Word file format is not public, and generating such kind of file from Java is not that easy. There are libraries, like jakarta POI, but they are quite complex, and limited; and generating a print layout using those Java API could become a nightmare.
The solution, as for the excel example, is to create a textual format from a word document, that can be easily manipulated: RTF.
RTF, as msword, supports textfields that can be referenced by bookmarks and can be filled modifying the content of the file.

I got the templates, then I added textfield associating them to a bookmark:


Example of a template with textfields. Click to maximize

For example, the rtf source code for the “name” bookmark in above image, will look like:

{\\field{\\*\\fldinst {\\lang2057\\langfe1040\\langnp2057 {\\*\\bkmkstart name} FORMTEXT }{\\lang2057\\langfe1040\\langnp2057 {\\*\\datafield 0000000000000000046e616d6500000000000000000000000000
}{\\*\\formfield{\\fftype0\\fftypetxt0{\\*\\ffname name}}}}}{\\fldrslt {\\lang1024\\langfe1024\\noproof\\langnp2057 \\u8194\\'20\\u8194\\'20\\u8194\\'20\\u8194\\'20\\u8194\\'20}}}{\\lang2057\\langfe1040\\langnp2057 {\\*\\bkmkend name}

I agree, not that easy to understand. The thing is that, if you modify the highlited text you get the field filled with your value. In bold the keywords I used in my code to locate the position of the text to replace.
So, it becomes just a matter of searching the template file for field values identified by the bookmark, and replacing it with the desired value.

Here’s a simplified version of the class that does this job:

 1package it.newinstance.util.rtf;
 2
 3import java.io.FileOutputStream;
 4import java.io.IOException;
 5import java.io.InputStream;
 6
 7public class RTF {
 8    private StringBuilder builder;
 9
10    public RTF(InputStream in) throws IOException {
11        builder = new StringBuilder(16384);
12        int ch;
13        while ((ch = in.read()) != -1)
14            builder.append((char) ch);
15    }
16
17    public boolean set(String fieldName, String fieldValue) {
18        int bkmkStart = builder.indexOf("\\bkmkstart " + fieldName);
19        if (bkmkStart == -1) return false;
20
21        int fldrsltStart = builder.indexOf("\\fldrslt", bkmkStart);
22        if (fldrsltStart == -1) return false;
23
24        int start = builder.indexOf("{", fldrsltStart);
25        if (start == -1) return false;
26
27        int end = builder.indexOf("}", fldrsltStart);
28        if (end == -1) return false;
29
30        builder.replace(builder.indexOf(" ", start) + 1, end, fieldValue);
31        return true;
32    }
33
34    public byte[] getBytes() {
35        return builder.toString().getBytes();
36    }
37
38    public void launchMSWord() throws IOException {
39        runMSWord(saveTempFile());
40    }
41
42    private String saveTempFile() throws IOException {
43        String tmpDir = System.getProperties().getProperty("java.io.tmpdir");
44        long time = System.currentTimeMillis();
45        String filename = tmpDir + "print_" + time + ".rtf";
46
47        FileOutputStream out = new FileOutputStream(filename);
48        try {
49            out.write(getBytes());
50        } finally {
51            out.close();
52        }
53        return filename;
54    }
55
56    private void runMSWord(String filename) throws IOException {
57        String osName = System.getProperties().getProperty("os.name");
58        if (osName.indexOf("Windows") != -1) {
59            String command =
60                "rundll32 SHELL32.DLL,ShellExec_RunDLL winword " + filename;
61            Runtime.getRuntime().exec(command, null, null);
62        } else {
63            System.out.println("Not in Windows; open yourself " + filename);
64        }
65    }
66}

You construct the RTF object giving an InputStream to the template file; all the job of replacement is made in set method, then you can get resulting bytes with getBytes(), or just call launchMSWord() if you want to pupup Microsoft Word to the user (this works only on standalone applications).
The above code is a slow prototype, as string search and replacement is made in the easiest way for this post to be simple to understand and to read, so I made a much faster version (that also check to not making mess with the rtf code) that you can find at this link. I used this class with very big and complex msword templates containing images, tables, etc. without problems.
A thing that should be added to this class, is character escaping: I didn’t implemented it yet.

Here’s an example of usage:

 1String resourceName = "/sample-module.rtf";
 2RTF rtf = new RTF(Sample.class.getResourceAsStream(resourceName));
 3
 4rtf.set("name", "Foo");
 5rtf.set("surname", "Bar");
 6rtf.set("birthday", "10/10/2010");
 7rtf.set("address", "Sample Test Address");
 8rtf.set("phone", "+010 010101010");
 9rtf.set("test", "testtesttest");
10
11rtf.launchMSWord();

As for the excel example, this class can be used in web applications using application/msword content type, so that the browser will associate the file to word.

For a runnable example, I put an eclipse project on subversion with some of my stuff, at this URL:
http://newinstance-util.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/util/
After opening the project in eclipse, the class to launch is
src/it/newinstance/util/rtf/Sample.java
No junit testcases, sorry :-)
The template is located under the resources folder.

The advantage of using this template-based approach over java-api based generation, is that you can take a template from the user and achieve a document that fully respects the given layout. Also you can easily handle layout change.
Doing document generation using a programming language is much more a matter of art than document layout design.

Associating .class extension to jad.cmd let you decompile it on screen (in command prompt) just double clicking on class files.

@echo off
title JAD: decompiling...
%~dp0jad.exe -ff -nl -nonlb -o -p -pi99 -space -stat %1
title JAD: %~nx1
pause> nul