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I use multiple machines in the course of my day. My Linux box, my laptop or my home tower. My home tower is the one that is connected to a really nice set of Yamaha speakers and where I keep my iTunes library. I've been looking for a way to control iTunes from whichever computer I happen to be using at a particular moment. 

I've been looking for this kind of control not only to flip through songs, but pause music when phone calls come in etc. The one thing that all my machines have in common is that they are all running Firefox. PlayerPal lets all of my machines connect to my home tower and act as a web remote for iTunes (or Windows Media Player if you're so inclined... I'm not). So one of my permanent tabs in Firefox on all my machines is set to PlayerPal.

Really geeky I know, but since my Smart Phone can connect to my wireless network, I can even use that as a portable remote control as I walk around my house!

-Charles Angione

I'm a big fan of vmware and run the majority of my development and test environments off of two physical machines with lots of memory and disk space. I usually create what I call base images of say Ubuntu or Fedora with all the  updates and then make copies of the virtual machines for specific uses. This approach has been great but I've still got to the actual work of taking a base image and making  say a subversion server.... Till now.

vmare has introduced the Virtual Appliance Marketplace  where you can now find specifically configured machines all ready for download! Want a Fedora 8 image? One is available. Want a small Linux image? Try the "Damn Small Linux Virtual Machine". Want a machine that is specifically configured as a subversion server? They have one of those too.  I might even give Sun Solaris 10 a spin (I've never been able to configure Solaris in vmware right but now that I don't have too...) The machines run in vmware workstation, player and server.

To the geeks that like setting up operating systems, I salute you!

-Charles  Angione