OSUser: BeOS Journal #14 - Two Machines, One Modem

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BeOS Journal #14: Two Machines, One Modem Scot Hacker, ZDNet 09/16/97 The software archives at BeWare continue to fill up (there are around 300 BeOS applications out there already, with more being added every week), and I realized I was going to need a little more bandwidth before I began some massive download sessions. While support for my BitSurfr Pro ISDN terminal adapter is already built into BeOS' modem selection dialog, the modem is inconveniently attached to an NT box across the room, and I don't feel like moving it from machine to machine all the time. I decided to track down some software that would let the BeBox and my NT machine share a single ISDN connection over the home LAN. WinGate is a software proxy server designed to do this. Happily, WinGate is free if you only use it to hook up two machines, which was my intent. Setup is a cinch: make sure you know the hostnames of the machines on your network (I made it simple by naming them ntbox and bebox), edit the "hosts" file on the machine(s) to be served (under BeOS the hosts file lives at /boot/beos/etc/hosts), and tell all your Internet-capable applications that they should use the networking services provided by a proxy server -- in this case, the machine specifed in your hosts file, rather than your ISP's. You tell your applications how to behave by making entries in their proxy dialogs. So in NetPositive (BeOS' built-in Web browser), I pulled down Options | Preferences | Proxies, and under HTTP: I typed "ntbox" and told it to listen on port 80 (the standard HTTP port). So at this point you're thinking there's got to be a hitch, right? Anyone who's ever spent much time building networks knows there's almost always a hitch. Wrong. I clicked a link in NetPositive, the BitSurfr across the room fired itself up, and four seconds later (literally) I was surfing at 128K from the BeBox. I then went through my system and filled in the proxy settings for all my Internet apps, and I'm all set. The only real drawbacks I've encountered so far are: The fact that I can't ping or FTP from the command line, since there's no way to configure Terminal to use a proxy server. I have to boot both machines even when I only intend to use the BeBox. But it sure beats spending another $200 on a second ISDN terminal adapter! Don't have a 95/NT machine? There are other options for other platforms. If you're running Linux, you can recompile the kernel to support IP masquerading, which accomplishes the same thing. Mac users can purchase SurfDoubler from Vicom for $99 (for two machines -- three or more costs more). Anyway, it's a great solution, a snap to set up, and a great money saver for small networks. And it's nice to know that Be machines flow into the home networking process so smoothly. Grabbing the goods No download picture is complete without a good FTP client, so I started by installing Laurent Pontier's KFTP, an excellent file transfer client worthy of any webmaster or software hound. KFTP does just about everything WS_FTP and Fetch do, plus one nifty multithreading trick: if you download multiple files simultaneously, it will automatically load-balance them, displaying a window showing the byte count of all files in simultaneous progress (see screen shot). And it will decompress downloaded files with the click of a button once they're on your local system. Very nice. Next up was the preview release of BeatWare's commercial office productivity suite. That's worthy of a column all by itself, so I'll have a full write-up of that later, but suffice to say that I'm writing this column on the first office suite available for BeOS, made by one of the first full-scale commercial companies dedicated to developing software just for BeOS. That's quite a commitment, and these companies deserve your support. Learn more about commercial applications being developed for Be on Be's home page. I've been fooling myself that one of these days I'll teach myself to program and write my first application under BeOS, and that that app would be the perfect text-based HTML editor. Dream on -- I may as well decide to learn Latin in the little spare time I've got. The next-best thing is to wait for someone else to write that app, and it looks like Charalabos Papazissis is the first out of the gate with h.Scribe. This is not the kind of editor you learn your HTML chops in -- it's the kind for people who already know their tags inside out and just want something that'll give them quick access to the most commonly used tags and operations. It's not quite a BBEdit or HomeSite just yet, but it's clearly headed in that direction. The important thing is that it exists. Since BeOS is a MediaOS, it's no surprise that there's a definite preponderance of sound, video and graphics applications rolling out already. I had a great time with BamBam, a classic two-track audio editor for BeOS. Since it handles .WAV files in addition to several other standard sound formats, I was able to easily bring over some existing sound projects I've been tinkering with on other platforms and just keep working normally. As would be expected, BamBam lets you transform, warp, reverse, filter, and otherwise mutilate/enhance left and right sound channels into either unrecognizably bizarre audio collages, or gorgeous examples of digital harmony, depending on your inclinations. I did more of the former than the latter. While not one of the most useful applications I've ever tested, one of the most innovative is Douglas Irving's SineClock. Utilizing the principle that multiple simultaneous sine waves (whether in nature or in science) produce natural interference patterns which manifest as morphing rhythms, SineClock runs three sine waves over the top of one another, and generates an audible tone and visual graph of the results. There are no settings, no File menu, just a simple little applet that you can run in a window at the bottom of your screen while you work. While it at first seems somewhat unimpressive, after a while it has a terrific soothing effect on the soul, sort of like laying on the beach listening to the waves while a monk rings the Tibetan brass bowls a few feet from your head. I'm in love with SineWave, and keep it open for long periods while I'm working on the BeBox. I see it as a terrific demonstration of the kind of creativity displayed in the Be programming world -- an effect to be expected when you build an operating system that appeals so strongly to the lunatic fringe. There's a lot of Be software out there already, and a lot more to come. I'll continue this later. |
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