Sebastian Grant

Today I had a few tasks to complete:

1). Get one of my spare boxes set up as a web server. Check all the hardware is still functional, install a very bare Linux setup, then configure Apache and Tomcat with a bunch of VHosts.

Well I started to do this but quickly discovered that my spare box only has a wired ethernet card and couldn’t be bothered to compile the USB WiFi drivers – a job for another day. Or a better idea would be to hook up another powerline adaptor somewhere I can discretely stash away a 24/7 live server.

2). Get a virtual machine setup on the old PC to install Windows 7. This first means backing up a load of stuff to DVD just to make space on the hard disk!

I changed my plan on this one… instead of VMing it (which would have obscured the real “performance” of Windows 7) I decided to re-partition the drive and dual boot. Now, I’ve always been wary of partitioning a live system and rightly so it seems.

There are plenty of blogs and podcasts going around at the moment with names such as “10 CSS Tricks I can’t live without” and “20 essential web developer resources”, well this is going to be another of those blogs – I am not going to tell you which software to download or which tricks you should employ because I know I will have people commenting such as “Hey Mr Skelli Man, you forgot to say this” and I’m not going to call it “The things I can’t live without” because, as Paul at BoagWorld.com said in his podcast, someone would turn around and say: “Well he hasn’t said ‘Breathing’, you couldn’t live without breathing!”.

So instead, I’m going to tell you what hardware I use, then the software. I may go on to mention some web standards and useful bookmarks too – although that may be for another time because it is almost midnight and the Cranberries are singing me to sleep…