Platform Agnostic

For the past few months i’ve been using mainly windows for web development, because I seem to find myself doing a lot of testing in IE, and I was fed up of lugging my powerbook to and from work (on a skateboard), so I nagged netsight into buying me a cheap laptop to use here and to take on client visits. Set up on an iCurve stand with a second monitor it has proved to be a nice little set-up. One thing I have noticed is that it gets into a panic if you do something such as unplugging a cable at the wrong time and I do find myself rebooting quite often compared to my mac. It is nowhere near as portable and robust as the powerbook. Always paranoid of the viruses too..

At home i’ve ended up running ubuntu linux with windows running as a virtual machine in the excellent and FREE vmware server. The powerbook will shortly be married to an apple studio display as a living-room friendly multimedia machine and workstation. I have probably spent an unhealthy amount of time getting myself in a situation where I can do everything from every machine – using putty in windows to develop on the linux and osx machines, vnc, terminal services, shared folders. I justify this because I am after all a developer and I have my reasons for using all these setups. If I wasn’t a developer I would just stick with the powerbook.