So the Queue is back up and running.  The server previously known as the Queue has some hardware problems, mainly none of the fans want to spin any longer, fine, I’ll upgrade the hamster running that thing and hopefully be done with it.  In the meantime a friend of mine has agreed to host me on his network, i|o server, and it’s only fair to say if you’re looking for hosting you ought to check out his offerings.

I’m sure the few of you, one of you, well I’m glad I’m back up, gives me a place to post my blathering on about this tool or that.

For those interested, or curious, where all the old posts are… they’re coming.  In setting up this version I decided to go with dasBlog instead of continue with .Text or even the new Community Server.  dasBlog has a significant following and a dedicated team of volunteers updating an open code base, that’s important to me.  I’ll be moving the old posts over, I can still power up the old box and hang it out the window to cool while I transfer them.  I’ve found DotText2DasBlog a very cool looking bit of code Aaron Junod's released unto the world.  It’s also in CVS with source so I’m toying with the idea of hacking it a bit to allow permalinks to transfer (doing some URL rewriting with dasBlog so all the old links still work, on the very off chance someone actually clicks a link).

Off to other things, there are tests to be written and code to be written to make them pass.  I’m searching for a good deal on a DVI Y cable (something to split the DVI output to drive/mirror to two LCD’s), so if you know of one, drop me a comment.  "The Ultimate [Pairing Station] Setup" is showing it’s age as well. 

The solution Jonathan describes worked well enough but recently the number of times we’ve been dropped from VNC for whatever reason has increased from a minor inconvenience to a major annoyance.  The second problem, if the pairs are not set up just so one pair is often only contributing through VNC and not watching the output from the pair workstation itself so lag makes driving almost impossible and riding only slightly better waiting for the screen to repaint, if it repaints at all.  The new idea is to use the dual head cards and dual input monitors (1 DVI and 1 analog input per LCD) to have live output from both pairing stations going to each of the four monitors.  The input (mouse and keyboard) we’re currently handling through USB, we’ll back this out to hubs going into one or the other workstation so to chose a pairing station you select the input on the monitor and, if necessary, pull the USB from one hub and place into the other.  I forgot to mention the LCD’s we have from Dell have 4 USB ports on them and a single USB cable to pass through to the workstation, so we’ll only be moving that cable from hub to hub, keyboards and mice will stay attached to the monitors.

We looked at some other solutions, reverse KVM’s and the DVI splitters (which are bit pricey to suggest as a viable solution).  Even after we have the Y cables in place we’ve almost hit our maximum, we can support 4 developers in 2 pairs on 2 pairing workstations, we just can’t scale beyond 2 pairs in our current setup.  If we get to that point I imagine we’ll consider going back to the traditional single workstation with two chairs and you physically pair.  We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.