Below the cut is a highly illegal picture of my 17″ Powerbook G4 (1440×900 screen resolution) at work, connected up to my 24″ SGI/Sony GDM-90W11 CRT monitor (1600×1200 screen resolution), with the big screen being used for Eclipse, and the small screen showing my web browser open to Sun’s Java API documents, as well as a couple of convenient Terminal windows including one dedicated to pgsql.
The Safetype keyboard and mouse are also plugged into the Powerbook. All I really need now to make my work environment complete is a KVM so I can actually switch over to Linux and check my Lotus Notes and build in the dynamic vob.
So this is what I do now – I bring my laptop into work, hook it into the corporate network, and rsync my laptop’s /vob to my snapshot view on the Linux box. I run clearviewupdate on the snapshot view to get everything I’ve changed overnight checked into the vob, and then rsync it back so that everything that got checked in gets turned back to read-only. At that point, I’m good to go and I can plug the keyboard, video and mouse into the laptop and work. When I’m ready to leave at night, I unplug the laptop from the monitor and put the keyboard and mouse back on the Linux box, and run the same procedure all over again.
I also have a dynamic view of the same development stream, so I can build the bits of code that are actually working. (I can’t build in the snapshot view because you can’t make a snapshot view anchored at /vob, and far too many Makefiles have hard coded full paths instead of relative paths).
It’s all pretty sweet so far.
The reason why I called this picture “illegal”? Because the company I work for, whose primary business for about a hundred years has been cameras and film, doesn’t allow picture taking on the premises.
The one small change I’d make to that process if it were me? Use VNC or X11 or whatever to just get the Linux desktop stuff on the Mac.
My work environment is an iMac and a Windows box. The Windows box is mostly for Clearcase and Sybase Central. The iMac is running Leopard, so I have a full-screen RDC session on one of the virtual desktops.
It’s an arrangement which works surprisingly well. I know many modern Linux distros have fairly straightforward support for VNC as a remote-desktop thingo so it ought to be pretty easy to set up.
Wow, a CRT! I remember those! I don’t see a Dilbert cartoon on your cube wall. Please rectify this.
Seriously, looks a complicated, but sweet, setup. I started learning Java myself recently, but Eclipse is the least intuitive IDE I’ve ever used. I guess I just need more practice?
Re environments, I do everything on my Macbook Pro. Terminals to the Linux servers. If I wanted to use Linux GUI apps, I’d do it with X11 rather than VNC, but that’s just me. Windows runs in Parallels if I ever need it (thankfully, I hardly ever do).
These days, I do all my Linux development in a VMWare virtual machine running on my laptop. No need to connect with or synchronize with anything until you want to deploy.
One of the main reasons I need to go to the Linux box is to, ironically enough, check out Lotus Notes running in a VMWare virtual machine running Windows. I imagine trying to view that through VNC would be pretty horrible.
I’d like to replace my Powerbook with a MacBook Pro so that I can run Lotus Notes in Parallels Desktop, and just use X11 for stuff like the clearviewupdate.
That’s not too bad — you could instead use RDC on the Mac to just view the Windows session. At home I have a VMware session running XP which is almost always just accessed via RDC.
I’ve also had to do VNC viewer running on a Windows box accessed via RDC tunnelled over SSH. Usable, just, for small jobs.
I do not understand your keyboard.
K.
Karen, watch http://www.safetype.com/safetypemovieQ.htm and all will become clear.
OT, but I find that keyboard intriguing. Is it really as intuitive as the video suggests?
I find it pretty intuitive while typing the normal letters. Numbers or the symbols on the number keys require using the wing mirrors a lot – fortunately the labels on those keys are turned 90 degrees so they look upright in the mirror. For typing more than one number at a time, I’ll use the number pad in the flat part in the middle of the keyboard.
Sometimes I’ll be typing away and even though I’ve typed it dozens of times in the last couple of minutes, suddenly I can’t remember where one of the symbol keys like the close square bracket key or semicolon key is. Usually this happens when I’ve just typed one and I have to backspace to correct something, and need to re-close the bracket. In a case like that, either you end up having to crane your head around to look, or you force yourself to stop thinking about it and go back to just typing automatically.
I have to say, though, that while I have one for home as well, I don’t use it because it’s PS2 and the USB adaptor tends to drop a character a few times a minute. Also, I had it on the KVM in my office but Vicki complained that she couldn’t use it when she needed to use the old Power Mac, so I put a Mac keyboard on the KVM.
Is the new keyboard as comfortable as it claims? I have/had ct mainly from using the mouse; at least I think.
I’ve been using the keyboard since September 2005 and it seems to have helped my wrists a lot. (Hmm, I should probably fix the picture links in that post since I moved my picture gallery.)
Back when I was working for Ohio Electric in 1994/1995 I got terrible carpal tunnel, complete with shooting pains along the insides of my fingers because the ergonomics sucked so bad there. I bought a pair of wrist braces with a steel insert in the bottom, and that helped a lot, although the pain and weakness never really went away. I used to get flare-ups where I’d have to dig out the braces and wear them for a few weeks every year or two. I haven’t had a flare-up since I started using the SafeType keyboard.
Hm, I’ve had good experiences with the “native” Lotus Notes client both on Linux (Debian Etch & stable LN version IIRC) and the MacBook (LN 8.5 beta)…