Freelance Propaganda

Remote Desktop Connection on OS

Remote Desktop Connection on OS X -

This evening I've been using my Mac to setup a Groove shared space. Now that wouldn't be remarkable expect for the fact that Groove does have a client for their very cool shared spaces for OS X - or anything other than windows for that matter.

Now they are developing a series of webservices which will eventually allow people to glue together spaces nicely across platforms but for the moment I'm achieving this using a Remote Desktop Connection to a Windows XP box at school. I convinced the IT people that this was worth trying and it works very well indeed. Especially running in full screen mode on the secondary monitor - looks exactly like an XP box - all that rankness is separated from the Aqua goodness by being on a different screen.

File transfer is a bit of a bitch. The RDC client is supposed to be able to map drives and printers (which would be a pretty good trick) but it doesn't work. I suspect that is because of all the Novel networking stuff and also probably the university blocks Samba at the edge (a useful thing really). So the built in RDC doesn't work and trying to map a SMB drive while running the RDC client causes a Kernel Panic - I've had three of them tonight in exactly the same circumstances. See what happens when you mix! I eventually solved it the old fashioned way - FTP. It would be great to be able to one-click turn on WebDav file sharing on OS X. I suspect that will come soon.

Now unfortunately I can't watch streaming cricket over the RDC connection as the screen draws are too slow. I hear rumors though that Time Warner Cable is broadcasting some of the cricket over digital cable - very exciting development.