My long-standing obsession with Mozart/Oz is no secret, but I often find it difficult to articulate precisely why I'm so fascinated by the language. I never seem to make much headway by describing the power and elegance of its novel control structures such as first-class computation spaces – which, by the way, I would rank right up there with continuations on the list of "language features that sound useless but are actually incredibly powerful"...but instead of going down that esoteric road, let me demonstrate a short and eminently useful little hack that I put together last week, one which really highlights the power of the Mozart platform.

The Mozart/Oz programming language provides a comprehensive distributed programming subsystem, and when it works, it's a thing of great power and elegance. But when it doesn't work, it tends to fail out with error messages that are exceedingly unhelpful. This is particularly troubling if you're working with a high-level abstraction such as Parallel Search – the error messages are far removed from the code that you're actually writing.

Inspired by a recent request for help on the mozart-users mailing list, I've decided to compile a quick troubleshooting guide for Mozart remote connections. And when I say "quick" I really mean it - there's only two steps but they can solve a lot of common problems with getting the distributed programming subsystem up and running.