Naïve question

Been installing FineReader under Windows today. The question is why does installation process pause when I click'n'hold on the window title bar to move it? No reply...

Split screen vertically. You won't find it in `man screen`

Now I know what `serendipity' means. It's when you are not quite awake, sit at the keyboard, your fingers fumble and you suddenly see that your xterm window where `screen' is running, gets split in two, but not horizontally (one above another), as it should according to the documentation, but vertically (one beside another). I didn't even understand what keys I pressed to get this effect. `man screen' includes only familiar `split' command. It took me some time to google out the answer.

It turns out that this feature was included in `screen' quite some time ago, but somehow nobody cared to describe it in man. Pressing `C-a |' splits the screen in left and right regions. To get rid of one of the regions, use the usual `C-a X' or `C-a S'.

MySQL Proxies

While searching for a MySQL proxy solution, I found the following four products:

• MySQL-proxy
• Spock proxy
• DPM (Dormando's proxy module)
• Proximo

At least two of them share the same codebase, MySQL-proxy being the forefather of Spock proxy. Spock proxy tries to increase performance by eliminating the scripting layer. The goal of Spock is to provide efficient sharding, not fault-tolerance. Dormando's proxy positions itself as an alternative to the official MySQL-proxy, and it tries to retain compatibility. It even supports Lua scripting. I'm not sure, though, if the API is the same. And, finally, Proximo is written in Perl, which means its performance is lower than that of the other competitors. But Proximo is in very early stage of development and has a promising architecture. It may have good future.