The importance of you work environment...

When the new computer arrived this week I immediately got it up and running, of course. I installed Suse Linux, as that it now my OS of choice, I got all the important applications working and that was about all I had time for on that first night. Since then I've been quite busy with my real life, which I am determined to have. That has meant that today was the first day I could really begin to actually use the machine. What I had forgotten was just how important it is to have a work environment that you are happy with.

In preparation for the arrival of the new machine I had moved things around in my living room, and the workstation is in a much better position. I can sit and work and not feel as crowded as before. However, in moving things around and not really trying it out till today I had not realised just how little light I get in this corner. Need to fix that soon.

Your work environment goes much further than that though. I spent a lot of this morning getting my old machine set up next door simply so that I could get a lot of files off of there. Simple things like my collection of desktop ladies (very important to being able to work). I've spent a lot of time today ripping my CD collection. I dug out some old cables to hook this computer up to the Hi-Fi. Things like that also help.

Finally I started to look at my development environment. Previously when moving from one machine to another it has simply been a case of moving some files across. This time though I have gone from Windows to Linux, which means that I have a lot more new stuff to get used to and also it is not simply a matter of a one to one mapping. Simple things like all the little batch scripts that I used to rely on to make my life that bit easier. All of these now need to be recreated as shell scripts.

I am fairly religious about backing up data, I still have experiment write ups from when I was in high school. But stupid me, I didn't back up the Tomcat configurations from my old Windows machine where I was previously developing. Usually not a problem, but I had a very custom configuration in Axis to support the Quintanona code that I was developing. It's been so long since I touched that project that I cannot remember these settings, so I am having to go through my code and reverse engineer them. It won't take me too long, but it is just one more little annoyance.

After a day of all of this I am close to being able to finally do some development, although I still have some work to do on a set of Ant scripts that I used to use. Next week I should be back to development, I cannot wait...