Private browsing and freenx save the day

Recently I noticed a co-worker switching to incognito mode in Google Chrome when testing a Flash app. I didn't know why at the time but it stuck in my head and only a week later I found out why (the hard way): my browser seemingly randomly stopped reloading swfs. The browser continues to use the cached swf even though I reload the page or clear my browser cache - which is a common problem for Flash developers (see here for Adobe's suggestions). Incognito mode (or private browsing in Firefox) starts with an empty cache, so it's just a matter of a few key strokes to ensuring your Flash session is running the latest swf.

• Google Chrome: Ctrl-Shift-N
• Firefox: Ctrl-Shift-P

This week I installed kubuntu on a newly freed up desktop at home, intending it to be my development machine. But I don't want to sit at my desktop to work/play. And I've always missed the good ol' days of XDM at my university lab when we used to log into a remote server from a Solaris workstation.

So I setup kdm to accept remote connections and installed XMing on my Windows laptop and found the whole thing boring - my session seemed to crawl. I could work but only if I was very patient.

Another co-worker recommended freenx saying it used a different protocol than vnc. I'm working on it now - it's essentially a heavily modified X protocol running over ssh. They use several techniques to speed things up, including better compression, caching, and eliminating round-trips between the client and server. This lets them claim near-local performance over modems. It's impressive - it was a cinch to setup and it works as advertised. Latency is noticeable in some cases (scrolling through long web pages) but in other cases, like typing or clicking, I don't notice any latency. It's Christmas come early!