(no subject)

[stormdog]

I find myself moving more and more toward using my laptop as my primary computer and only booting up my desktop when I need to. At this point, 'when I need to' still consists of whenever I want to check my email since it's residing on my IMAP server and I have Thunderbird installed on my desktop and not my laptop. I also don't have Trillian (which I'd probably use a lot more on my laptop anyway and should move it there), Photoshop (for which I'd want my desktop multi-monitor configuration anyway and won't put on my laptop), or Quicken (whose efficacy is pretty much hardware platform-independant) on it.

What I'd really miss moving to the laptop as a primary workstation is the large amount of screen real estate afforded by having a couple of mid-sized CRTs plugged into the same box. I could plug a monitor in to my docking station and still have a second monitor, but I'd be stuck with the laptop's flat panel as the primary, and with my tower I could have three or even four or more of them if I wanted to. I'm not currently aware of any solution for more than two monitors (and only one external and user-choosable) with a laptop.

I wish there was an easier way to synchronize data between two platforms, especially things like email. Since I run my own NT domain, it would not be hard to set my laptop up to work with offline copies of whatever folders I cared to have and set them up to synchronize with my file server. That's easy. What I wish I could do is to have it be that easy to synch my mail across multiple computers. Alas, as far as I can tell, there is no easy way to do it with any open source email client like Mozilla or Thunderbird.

Even though I have an IMAP server that keeps all my mail online, I still can't syncrhonize my mail filtering rules. That's really frustrating since the mail filtering rules are one of the best things about Thunderbird. They're fantastic! But if I have all the filtering set up that I want on my desktop, if I were to connect in with my laptop, I'd be forced to sift through all the mail sitting in my inbox one at a time until I connect back in with my desktop and it all auto-sorts once again. Either that, or I have to go through and manually create matching rules on all machines involved and keep them up to date with each other.

If there was even a way to just copy and paste some file within Thunderbird that would copy all the rules from one installation to another, I could deal with that. I could write a really simple batch file that would do it with just a double-click. But I can't seem to find a way to do it.

That, along with the calendar functionality of Outlook, is almost enough to make me think about switching to Outlook at home. After using it at work for over two years now, I have to say that the collaborative functionality of the Outlook/Exchange platform is really nifty! Of course, for that, I would have to install an Exchange Server instance on some of my hardware. That might not actually be a bad idea just for job experience. I really am torn though; I know that Microsoft thinks standards are for the little people and couldn't care less about interoperability as long as people are giving them vast piles of money. I love the way open source encourages people who are passionate about what they're doing to develop software that's optimized for real life use. The people who really know what they're doing produce code not because they're getting paid, but because they want good code and know how to produce it. I'd love to keep using open source wherever I can, but there are pluses and minuses to both sides. Opinions?

I get tired of waiting for my desktop to boot up too. I know; it's petty. But it's annoying. And I can't just leave it on all the time. Not only to keep power bills down, but because the 80mm, 82CF/M Vantech Tornado on the CPU heat sink that draws .75amps by itself is loud!

I dunno. I guess I'll put a couple things like Trillian and Tunderbird on my laptop tonight. I'll put them on the multibay drive I have; it's a fully separate hard drive that can be configured to boot into a separate Windows installation. I avoid mixing work data and home data whenever I can. It's really better for everyone all around that way.

posicat, having seen my computer room, tells me that what I really need is a KVM switch, and he's probably right. I could put my secondary monitor for my desktop on a KVM and plug the second input into my docking station: then I could run both machines at once and be able to see their primary displays, and switch the secondary monitor back and forth between secondary desktop display and secondary laptop display. That would be pretty cool, and definitely worth experimenting with.

After the fourth quarter of this year, I won't even be able to say that my desktop has better performance than my laptop. The Athlon XP3000 that I bought a year and a half ago has been a real workhorse, but the systems that the help desk is upgrading to in Q4, the HP NC6400, are nearly as fast (2GHz as opposed to my 2.1GHz Athlon, and yes I know the Athlon does more work per clock cycle than the Intel and speed alone isn't a fair comparison) but they have a dual core Pentium M and, at 2GBs of RAM, have quadruple what my home brew Athlon system has. Wow.

I guess that's about it for now. I just had some rambling to do and a ride home during which to do it. Comments are very much welcome from anyone who got all the way through the techno babble without falling into a coma.