Synergy: Share keyboard and mouse between computers

I just learned about Synergy which is a software KVM (without the "V") and it looks pretty slick.

http://synergy2.sourceforge.net/about.html

Good programmer vs. knowing a programming language

From http://weblogs.java.net/blog/flozano/archive/2005/10/what_makes_prog.html

It's just like giving a good programmer a course of drawing software. He may learn all about using the software, but he won't be able to create nice, pleasant figures. You need a different skill set to create graphics than to create software.

Declaring variables

A pet peeve of mine is when a variable is declared way before it is needed. It is much easier to understand a piece of code if a variable is declared just before it is needed. That immediately tells me that it isn't used anywhere before that or in any wider scope.

I also find it annoying when a variable is declared with a null value and them immediately assigned a value.

String value = null;
value = "hi";
should be:
String value = "hi";

Not that one reason to do that the first way is if the second way would create a line that is too long.