New Development Setup

For some reason, I never have time for anything over the Christmas holidays. Blogging suffered especially. Let's fix that:

If there's one software solution I had always wanted, it's the ability to share folders across multiple machines and operating systems in a completely transparent way. That means the syncronization has to be as hands off as possible and the folder has to behave like a normal folder. I finally got my wish with Dropbox. It's entirely possible there has been a solution like that before, and I missed it. Regardless, Dropbox is perfect because it's free (for up to 2GB of storage) and clients are avaible for Windows, Mac and Linux. That's great for me because I use each one on a daily basis.

The client can currently monitor only one folder, but it comes with some file sharing capabilities. For people with security concerns, I think it should be possible to store a TrueCrypt volume in Dropbox. The client is smart enough to segment files and upload only the segments that have changed.

The next new tool in the mix is VirtualBox. VirtualBox is an open-source virtualization solution by Sun that is, again perfectly for me, available on all OS. It allows me to have a Linux server for development whenever I need it, which saves me the money of building or hosting one. It's not feasible to upload the whole server image to Drobox, but you can create a shared HDD image. I created the server image on one machine that I copied to all my machines. Then I created a 50mb (or whatever) harddrive that I copied into Dropbox and mounted in the server. It's hardly a perfect solution but it will have to do until I come up with a better solution. This way doesn't allow me to duplicate config and packages between the server images on the different machines, but at least working data will be.

And finally, Eclipse 3.4 is out and PDT 2.0 has just been released. It's still a bit rough around the edges, but Eclipse now has a vastly improved update manager. There's an irritating issue with the plugin-source manager (can't edit source URLs). PDT has finally added "Mark Occurences", which I've missed since I switched to PDT from an abandoned PHP plugin for Eclipse. It also and seems to be handling variable typing better.

All around exciting new stuff. Most of it is open source, too, and while Dropbox is not, it's built on top of Amazon Web Services. And I can't get enough of those.