In designing a SOA based system I believe the number one concern should be latency. As I discuss in my article on RPCs and Protocols, getting latency right is extraordinarily hard. So my advice to people designing SOA systems is – worry about latency. If you manage to get past latency then you can spare a thought for re-use, this is where loose coupling and versioning come in. But in my opinion most people can safely ignore both issues. After all, even if you try to tackle them you're likely to get it wrong (and no, that's not an insult, the 'experts' who design nothing but protocols and protocol implementations screw it up all the time) so why waste time and energy when you could be focused on shipping your service?
Month: September 2005
Does Anyone Know of a Good Quality USB KVM?
And now, dear readers, I ask a favor. I have a PC (for work) and a Mac (for life) in my home and they share the same keyboard, mouse and monitor. I have an old PS/2 KVM box that works really well so when I bought the Mac I wanted to hook it in to the KVM. The problem is that the Mac only uses USB peripherals. So I made the mistake of buying the Y-Mouse, an adapter that converts PS/2 connections into USB connections. As I explain here, the Y-Mouse does not work very well for me. So what I'd really like to do is buy a USB KVM. I actually don't care about the "M" (e.g. Monitor) part, I have a HP 2335 and use its built in monitor switch (which guarantees me the absolute best image possible). So what I really need is a USB Keyboard/Mouse switch.
I did some research and all I could find were complaints about USB KVMs, the main issue being switching time. It seems that switching between machines can take several seconds. Does anyone know of a good quality USB KVM that can switch really fast? If so please drop a comment on this article. Thanks!
N.B. I am aware of Synergy. But Synergy has never worked very well on Mac's and my PC is actually running a VPN which ends up meaning that the keyboard and mouse commands would have to be routed over the open Internet, this is both a security and a performance nightmare.