Since I am now spending the vast majority of my time working out of the home office, I decided to invest a little cash in taking care of two of a programmer's most valuable assets – my wrists and back. I've been using my new acquisitions for a few weeks now so it's about time I reported on the experience. First up: the Goldtouch Ergonomic Desktop Solution featuring this keyboard and this mouse.

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.