New machine blues
I hate getting a new system. I’m not a person who enjoys tinkering with her computer’s configuration. Once I’ve got something working, I tend to leave it. Which means I tend to forget how I got it to work in the first place. Which leads to royal headaches when I need to change machines.
Work “gifted” me with a newer laptop… a dual core machine that’s supposed to speed up our build cycles. (On my old machine, a single build cycle, including clean, compile, build, and unit tests, could take up to 7 minutes – bleah.) Distributing the load across the two chips, I’m supposed to get a notable improvement. Except that it costs me a day’s worth of work to get my new machine up and running: install Eclipse, install Oracle, install Tomcat, set Subversion up, make sure Ant’s configured, get my hosts files all working correctly, is Cygwin going to let me XTerm into our production environment, etc, etc… Undoubtedly, I’ll find six different things I’ve gotten wrong that I have to figure out how to fix. And, of course, the versions of tools out there are now newer than the ones I had, which always gives me pause. Even the JDK is at a new minor release version (no, I’m not taking that beta 6 version, thank you very much). Oy, my nerves.
Right now, my VPN client is happily blocking me out (nicely, on both laptops), and subversion isn’t giving me any feedback as to whether it’s on my system or not: typing svn gets me a grand bit of squat. If I mistype it as svb, I at least get a command not found response. Svn gives me nuttin’. Arrrrgh.
Tomorrow I turn in the old laptop and flounder on the new. Luckily, I don’t need to do any “real” work until after Thanksgiving.
1 comment October 30th, 2006