A Portable Development Environment

My wife needs to use a Windows-only program for the next few days. I have Windows Vista installed on Parallels on my MacBook Pro, so that shouldn’t be a big problem. Since I was initially hesitant to leave my comfortable environment on my laptop, I first setup a VNC server so that she could use VNC from her Powerbook to use Parallels and Vista on my Macbook. While this technically worked, it was not a very pleasant solution. Vista is already slow, adding Parallels and then VNC on top made it just about unworkable.

So I set her up with an account on my Macbook and moved back to my old home on the Powerbook. My development environment felt a little dusty there from my several month absence. Most notably my emacs environment was broken because I had moved some things around to make space for my wife’s account (the fink went away, for example). I have some of my most important personal documents backed up in a remote subversion repository, but my emacs files and directories are not yet there (a mistake, I know).

I’ve also been using Gnus for my email and I’ve encountered a couple of problems on that front now. First, my email is local to my laptop (I use POP so that I can read my email when I’m offline on ferries and subways). Second, my emacs configuration is not setup for me to run in the command line, so I cannot simply ssh back into my laptop. I’m not sure if I’m going to take the time to figure that one out or not. I’ve been tempted to switch back to mutt or from emacs to vi, but I’m not that desperate yet.

I don’t realize how tied to my local computing environment I am until I’m forced out. Most of my files and code are easily enough replicated… just about everything is in subversion. But my tools, be it emacs, eclipse, firefox and a dozen or more other utilities, including maven, have been ever so slightly tuned and tied to my laptop so that moving them over to a new environment (or an old, un-updated one) is a chore.

I’ve thought about using a server more, but again, I need to be able to regularly work offline. So really I just need to be better about having my environment backed up into something like subversion so that I can replicate it and synchronize it easily. A lesson learned I suppose.