What If I Could Happily Live And Work On Several Computers ?

My topic today is not, for me, hypothetical ...

... and I would be delighted to hear from anyone else in this predicament, and how they approach it.

For a couple of years now, I have been spread out over all the computers that I have been asked to work with. (including some of my own). This includes the following:

• my old box from home 3 years ago (running linux)
• my old box from my Blueline contract 3 years ago (W2k) that became my new home box when the contract was finished.
• my first MMillerAssociates laptop that prooved too lame for Oracle's bloatware to work on.
• my second MMillerAssociates laptop which is still a great box.
• my desktop/server box that is currently my primary work box, dual monitors, 3 gig memory etc.
• my personal laptop
• external storage
  • usb
    • thumb drives
    • external USB hard drive
• taxonomy storage issues
  • various uses
  • multiple uses, single location
  • how to index
  • how to find
• google desktop brings smaller box to crawl
• can't find stuff using windows reliably
•  

All but two of these are in semi-retirement, but I still have just enough stuff on them including software that is still set up for old tasks to not want to ditch them.

In addition to these, I also have dozens of systems over the years that I have or had access to, some of which I am held accountable for knowing how to get into them and log in, etc.

I also have these two hosting services:

• my web sites (including this one) with dreamhost.com
• my java sites to be on geekisp.com

I also have lots of old programs that I wrote from 2000 and even before, that I still pull from occassionally.

I also have a nice little cache of data on google docs, and lots on gmail as well.

Don't even get me started on applications and application specific files, but they are all over the place and on so many boxes I wouldn't want to think about it.

The obvious question: What and how to make universally accessible ?

The how is the easiest part: subversion, using eclipse as the manager.

The what is getting easier, but still not crystal clear. Problem identifying it is the one of form and usage, so many files in so many states with so many different types and styles of dependencies that it is really hard for me to adopt and stick to a common approach.

How Many Times Have I Tried to Get Organized ?

zillions, but every time I do I seem to solve one problem and create another. For example, for months I was simply keeping everything I could on google docs. That worked great, as long as it was docs. (google docs is great but that's another whole story).

issues to consider:

• passwords and usernames
• what apps am I using at the moment
• what stuff is just trash and should be moved out of the way as quick as possible
  • practice apps
  • previous versions of docs in "scratch" state
  • stuff like that
• where are the default locations for the apps to store their stuff and how mutable are they ?
• for subversion which file are binary and which are ASCI
• how to have all this stuff NOT get in the way of apps that consume the data
•  

I'm going to keep studying this situation, as I have been, and keep updating this page when I get it finally simple enough to understand and communicate.

Update 080109 - The Work Folder

The big challenge for me has always been what to subversion and how to organize workspaces and projects and files within projects.

Everything in projects and workspaces has always been fine, it get subversioned, I'm done, the world is good.

But it's all those straggling files that didn't fit in this configuration (such as my random daily files in My Documents for example. These files are the ones that are constantly in a state of chaos, on one box or more, and in different versions and none ever knowing which state is the current state.

Duh !

I made one folder named /work and the simple rule is that everything that goes in this folder is in a workspace that gets committed to subversion. All my workspaces go into one place, and everything that is important to me goes here.

There are still some issues to be resolved, least of which is all the dad gummed programs that I use that default to My Documents as their storage space and provide no way to rewire that default. So you have to drill down to /work/workspacename/projectname/ to store or retrieve any file which slows me down and irritiates me when I'm in that flow.

I'm going to try this approach out anyway for a few days and see how long it takes me to evaluate whether it is a good idea. Couldn't be any worse than current state.