I'm trying to improve my working environment and I'm still searching for that perfect keyboard that practically types bug-free code all by itself. At the moment I'm using a Logitech Wave for my Windows need and an Apple Wireless Keyboard (the one without a numeric keypad) when doing OS X stuff. I'm quite happy with the Logitech Wave but ...
I needed to run memcached locally for dev on my Mac G5 so I have 8 Gigs now. I also use a RAM disk for running scripts on large files. Have you used extra ram for any interesting tasks? ...
The discussion of Dual vs. Quadcore is as old as the Quadcores itself and the answer is usually "it depends on your scenario". So here the scenario is a Web Server (Windows 2003 (not sure if x32 or x64), 4 GB RAM, IIS, ASP.net 3.0). My impression is that the CPU in a Webserver does not need to be THAT fast because requests are usually r...
I have the Xming X Window Server installed on a laptop running Windows XP to connect to some UNIX development servers. It works fine when I connect directly to the company network in the office. However, it does not work when I connect to the network remotely over a VPN. When I start Xming when connected remotely none of my terminal w...
Is there a way to get MS virtual PC 2007 to support multiple displays? Or is there another virtual machine product available that will allow me to work with multiple displays? At the company I work for we do all of our development in virtual machines. We currently use MS Virtual PC 2007 for this. I would love to be able to spread my mac...
Jeff Atwood is often expounding the benefits of triple monitor setups for developers, and I have to say I agree with him. However, we are about to take on a good number of new developers and are hoping to kit them out with a nice development environment. I was wondering, if given the opportunity, what you people would think of as the p...
What's the best way to convince management that buying nice big monitors for developer workstations is worthwhile? (Whether big monitors actually are worthwhile is totally irrelevant, I'd like to convince my boss anyway.) ...
As a programmer I need a place to store my stuff. I've been running a server in my parents closet for a long time, but I recently came across a decent 2U server. I have no experience dealing with hosting companies, beyond the very cheap stuff, and I'm wondering what I should look for in a colo or if I should just keep my closet server. ...
So, the answer should probably be presented in tiers for the size of the application, but I'm wondering about people's experience with choosing where the disk drives used by the database should reside. Here are some of the options: JBOD - (just a bunch of disks) Old fashioned internal disks - fast but not very expandable NAS - Slow bu...
We are currently working on a new version of our main application. one thing that I really wish to work on is providing support for multiple monitors. Increasingly, our target users are adding second screens to their desktops and I think our product could leverage this extra space to improve user performance. Our application is a fina...
What would you consider the ideal computer configuration for software development? Also, what upgrades would you look at for a development computer? ...
Hi, This is a low level question. For a little bit of context, I'm working on a boot loader on an x86 machine. When the BIOS copies the contents of the MBR to 0x7c00 and jumps to that address, is there a standard meaning to the contents of the registers? Do the registers have standard values? I know that the segment registers are typi...
In E (specman) I want to declare variables that are lists, and I want to fix their lengths. It's easy to do for a member of a struct: thread[2] : list of thread_t; while for a "regular" variable in a function the above doesn't work, and I have to do something like: var warned : list of bool; gen warned keeping { it.size() == 5; ...
I'm a bit newbieish when it comes to the deeper parts of OSX configuration and am having to put up with a fairly irritating niggle which while I can put up with it, I know under Windows I could have sorted in minutes. Basically, I have an external disk with two volumes: One is an HFS+ volume which I use for TimeMachine backups. The ot...
Aside from the software developers working on embedded systems and hardware modeling or any other job that deals with software for or on hardware, how much should a software engineer know about the underlying hardware that they might be developing for? Should it be treated as a black box that just works or should there be a very strong w...
Let's say I have a certain budget to buy the displays for my development setup. With that budget I can either buy one larger monitor with a higher resolution or two smaller monitors and set them up in a dual-monitor setup. What are people's preferences and why? I'm interested in perspectives related to a development setup as opposed to ...
How do you back up your development machine so that in the event of a catastrophic hardware malfunction, you are up and running in the least amount of time possible? ...
I'm a big fan of screen real estate. I love big monitors and multiple monitors. I ran dual 19" CRTs for years, and switched to dual 19" LCDs a few years ago. That's still what I run at home, but I recently started a new job where I wrangled a big hardware budget and promptly blew a bunch of it on twin 24" monitors. I really love thes...
I need to spec a laptop for some Solaris development work I've got to do. I need something that will run Solaris 10 reasonably well - dual core with 4GB of memory is the sort of thing I'm aiming at. Solaris is a little bit picky about device support, so I'm hoping someone in the SO community has a solid recommendation on what works real...
Can anyone recommend a system or piece of software that will allow me to keep track of the assets in our (small) company. Ideally I'm looking for something that will track laptops, desktops etc, as well as software we may have purchased. Would be a bonus if it also kept track of less tangible things like domains. Free would be nice, b...