Friday, August 12, 2005

Chicken of the VNC




This week I was doing a lot of UNIXy stuff on the computer that is due to run the spectrometer. Since it is not being used right now, it is a great time to get these things taken care of. Some of the problems that I had this week I was not able to fix to my satisfaction, but the main problem I did fix. That was to set up the computer to accept VNC connections. Essentially a VNC server allows you to run a computer remotely without taking too big of a hit on speed. When done properly it can be fairly secure as well. We were having a lot of problems running the program that runs the spectrometer, which is the only program that we want to run really. But it turned out that by setting a few strange variables associated with the program we were able to get it going. So I spent most of the afternoon writing a few scripts to make sure that the connection is set up properly without requiring too much knowledge on behalf of the user. I'm glad I got it to work though as it made for a satisfying end to the week. For those of you still mystified, Chicken of the VNC is a VNC client (a program that allows you to connect to a VNC server) for the Mac, I just thought the logo was great.

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