Are We There Yet?

If you're counting, I've gone yet another 12 days without a post. Life has slowed down a bit, although not entirely for positive reasons. Of the two projects I spoke of in my last post that have kept me from the time to blog, I've only completed one of them. Thankfully, it's the one I get paid to do. The other project was put on hiatus because I didn't feel as though I had enough things to do already so I decided it was time to have another bout of kidney stones. Not one to do things half-heartedly, kidney stones wasn't enough to knock me flat on my back, so I had my appendix removed, too. Joy.

I've also decided that one of the things that's kept me from being a frequent blogger is the fact that I simply can't post short entries. Just browse through my archives and you'll see that it's virtually impossible for me post something less than 5 paragraphs. Those types of posts take time to compose and edit. I don't know if it's because I've got too much to say about things or if I'm just incapable of getting to the points of things quickly. Either way, it doesn't lend itself well to posting on a whim when a topic of interest strikes me.

I guess I'll just see how things go over the next couple of days and do my best to make some time for the blog. Posting is therapeutic at times. It's nice to have personal forum where I can talk about things that interest me (even if I'm only talking to myself - God, there's a psychologist's bill waiting to happen). I've had a revolution pertaining to remote desktop software that I'll try and get finished soon and posted here.

Remote desktop software is a fascinating concept that has become a necessity of my life, much like my cell phone and my weekly night of shooting darts at the bar. I don't know how I ever lived without it. I work for a company that develops a piece of software that makes using remote desktop software (depending on which one you use) a bit easier to manage - it solves the dilemma of mapping a dynamic IP address to a static domain name making it simpler to access your computer from whever you are without the need for an IP poster or other such nonsense.

Anyway, I was looking at the different types of remote desktop software that's out there for purposes of writing tutorials on how to use our software with the remote desktop software. In my experience, I've found that there are 3 pieces of software that are the most popular for Windows PCs - RealVNC, GoToMyPC, and PCAnywhere. I've played with each of these (or at least tried to) and I've come to a pretty concrete conclusion: the easy choice for is RealVNC.

I'm going to start my rant with PCAnywhere. PCAnywhere is a Symantec product, which right away should be sending shivers down the backs of every geek. Norton Anti-Virus is about the most intrusive, useless piece of software I've ever encountered. It's a rarity that I meet someone who doesn't think the same. Symantec is a behemoth in the Internet security/communication industry with the bed-side manner of Josef Stalin. It's their way or the highway. Whenver I've dealt with Symantec in any way, shape, or form, I've always walked away from the encounter feeling worthless - like I don't matter to them. But, what you say? What does this have to do with PCAnywhere? Well, nothing in a direct way. But it's mainly because I have nothing to say about the software itself. Why? Because Symantec offers no way to try PCAnywhere. They charge $20 just to try it out for 30 days. They even have the nerve to think that charging $200 for the software somehow qualifies it as a "consumer" product. Remember what I said about bedside manner? At $200/copy, the majority of the computing world can't afford PCAnywhere.

The next stop on the rollercoaster of remote desktop software is GoToMyPC. At least I got to use GoToMyPC, which as far as the software itself is concerned, I was fairly impressed with. I don't like the fact that they use a java applet to download and launch the installer for their software from their web site, which is too much hand holding for my liking. Can't I download the installer by itself so I can copy it to my other machines or burn it to disc with other essential software? You access your PC by logging in to your account on their website, which will let you initiate a connection to your remote PC.

On the surface, it's all good. The application that runs on your remote PC is small and doesn't require much in the way of resources. The client software that connects you to your remote PC is clean, well organized, and easy to use. I was horribly disappointed with the performance of it, however. GoToMyPC utilizes a third party server that coordinates the connection between the remote PC and your client PC. On the plus side, this eliminates the need to configure most routers and firewalls on the remote PC since it never accepts an incoming connection. However, I'm not comfortable with a man-in-the-middle of my conversation. All data is encrypted during the connection, which must have a significant effect on the performance as does the fact that a 3rd party server (who knows where it's located) controls your connection.

There were 3 things that completely turned me away from GoToMyPC, performance notwithstanding.

1. They require a credit card to enable the trial of the software. Why? Because they want to be able to automatically renew your service after the 30-days OR 60 minutes of connection time is exceeded. I don't like giving my credit card out just to try something and I absolutely HATE services that pretend they're doing you a favor by automatically continuing your service after a trial if you don't terminate it.


2. In order to cancel your trial, you must call a customer service representative. That's right. A company that provides remote desktop software completely over the Internet and allows you to automatically enable a trial online requires that you call an 800 number, wait in line, and go through the wonderful process of explaining why you don't need their services in order to cancel something that's "free". That's another pet peeve of mine.


3. GoToMyPC has followed the lead of Symantec in pricing their service. The cost is $20/month or $180/year for ONE PC. Two PCs costs $30/month $270/year. I guess it's not like they had a choice in the pricing, though. Something has to recoup the costs of their 3rd party servers, bandwidth, and customer service representatives on call to take your trial cancellations.

Is there remote desktop software out there that's worth your time? Yes. It is RealVNC. RealVNC is developed by the people responsible for the original VNC Viewer application created by AT&T Bell Labs. Why is it so good? First, it's simple to use. Install the server application on the PC and set the password. To connect, you can either download the client application and run it or use your web browser to connect to the PC since RealVNC supports a Java viewer. Second, it's free. It doesn't get any better than that. I'm not an open-source (RealVNC is open-source), all software must be free zealot, but if a piece of software does the job and does it well while being free, I'm not going to complain or hold it against the developers or some other such nonsense. Thirdly, because it's open-source, there's a pile of add-on's that make it easy to secure your RealVNC connection via an encrypted tunnel or making the interface to IP mask limiting easier to use. Finally, RealVNC is fast and efficient. I've used RealVNC on normal broadband connections that lets me interact with the remote PC virtually in real time.

If you have a need for this type of software, I definitely recommend checking out RealVNC. It's not as user-friendly as most commercial software is (although Symantec produced software isn't exaclty what I call user-friendly either) and their time between releases is random at best, but I really think it's the best of the bunch out there.