Desktop & Laptop Coordination

[Owen Densmore]

Well, its time to get a new mac.  I've got a 17" powerbook, so the  
obvious solution is to get a  macbook pro when the next batch comes out.

But I'm kinda thinking about a desktop instead.  I can keep the  
powerbook chugging along for another year, maybe two.  And get now a  
killer desktop.

So the question comes up: for FRIAMers having both a laptop and a  
desktop: what is your strategy for keeping the two in synch?  Or do  
you bother -- instead doing some sorts of things on the desktop, and  
other stuff on the desktop, with a small intersection.

A lot of my work is could really benefit by having great  
performance.  For example, here's a prototype applet for studying  
stadium evacuation:
   http://www.backspaces.net/models/Stadium/applet/
You can change the settings via the keyboard, and navigate the 3D  
space via the mouse.  To really make it struggle, type "f" to bring  
in a real stadium, then "0" to make a 100K agents.  I get about 1.4  
fps.  To really slow it down further, hit "s" twice which makes the  
shape be a 3D box.  This can crawl along at around .5 fps or so.

I went into our local apple shop and it seemed to me that I could  
double that with the latest hardware, with the desktops doing even  
better.

So just interested what folks do who still have desktops and laptops  
both.

     -- Owen

Owen Densmore    505-988-3787 http://backspaces.net
Redfish Group:   505-995-0206 http://redfish.com  http://friam.org/

[Parks, Raymond]

Owen,

   I have given up on desktops at work and at home.

   First, I've used a succession of laptops as my only computer for
about five years at work.  I've had a desktop available for most of that
time, but never had the simultaneous time and motivation to configure
the desktop and get it to sync nicely with the laptop.  My goal was to
have one set of data that is my work that would be available to both
desktop and laptop.  Of course, my requirements are different from yours
- I travel a lot and need my "stuff" to be with me and I frequently use
my laptop as an "attack" system when doing live discovery or assessment.
  I just upgraded my old Mac dual-G4 desktop (which died) to a 17"
MacBook.  I will use that as my primary system and my old 17" G4 as my
secondary and not have a desktop.

   At home, I still have a desktop, but I haven't powered it up in
months.  I have a monster desktop replacement laptop that I use instead.
  I would have to upgrade the motherboard, GPU, and disk on the old
desktop to get it up to the performance level of the laptop.

   I find that as I get older, I enjoy fiddling with hardware and even
software less and less.  I want the computers to work so that I can get
on with my work (or fun).

--
Ray Parks                   rcparks at sandia.gov
IDART Project Lead          Voice:505-844-4024
IORTA Department            Mobile:[phone]
http://www.sandia.gov/scada Fax:[phone]
http://www.sandia.gov/idart Pager:800-690-5288

[Robert Holmes]

I've got three machines that I use regularly for work: a laptop and a
desktop in the office and a desktop at home.  I don't need to worry about
synching my email, contacts or calendar as I use Gmail for all those; I keep
the projects I'm working on synched up by using MS's SyncToy and an external
60GB drive I carry around with me (hardly weighs anything - it gets its
power off the USB port).

I also use a fourth machine (tiny & old laptop) as a dumb terminal onto my
desktop via MS Remote Desktop. It means I can hang out on the deck and still
monitor any processor intensive runs I've got going.

R
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: /pipermail/friam_redfish.com/attachments/20060926/8eaf56b7/attachment.html

[Robert Holmes]

Here's a usability point I forgot about. I much prefer writing code on the
desktop than on the laptop because I can rotate the screen from landscape to
portrait. My code tends to be long rather than wide, so I get to see more of
it at once this way.

R
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: /pipermail/friam_redfish.com/attachments/20060926/2b1a9fd1/attachment.html

[Tim Densmore]

On Tuesday 26 September 2006 13:20, Owen Densmore wrote:
> So the question comes up: for FRIAMers having both a laptop and a
> desktop: what is your strategy for keeping the two in synch?  Or do
> you bother -- instead doing some sorts of things on the desktop, and
> other stuff on the desktop, with a small intersection.

I use rsync for things I want on both - I also ssh to my workstation
frequently for access to stuff I don't really need on my lappy, but need
access to.

[Michael Gizzi]

I just keep stuff I need on an external 80GB WD passport usb drive,
which works with 2 desktops and one laptop.  And keep all email and
calendar on gmail and google calendar.  Sometimes I end up with files
on the laptop when I need it in the office, but most of the time it
works out fine.  No elaborate syncing though.

On 9/26/06, Tim Densmore <tim at backspaces.net> wrote:

> On Tuesday 26 September 2006 13:20, Owen Densmore wrote:
> > So the question comes up: for FRIAMers having both a laptop and a
> > desktop: what is your strategy for keeping the two in synch?  Or do
> > you bother -- instead doing some sorts of things on the desktop, and
> > other stuff on the desktop, with a small intersection.
>
> I use rsync for things I want on both - I also ssh to my workstation
> frequently for access to stuff I don't really need on my lappy, but need
> access to.
>
> ============================================================
> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
> Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
> lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
>

[Marcus G. Daniels-3]

>
> On Tuesday 26 September 2006 13:20, Owen Densmore wrote:
>  
>> > So the question comes up: for FRIAMers having both a laptop and a
>> > desktop: what is your strategy for keeping the two in synch?  Or do
>> > you bother -- instead doing some sorts of things on the desktop, and
>> > other stuff on the desktop, with a small intersection.
>>    
I put code and technical documents in Subversion, and sync via that (via
a WebDAV/Subversion apache module).
Unlike CVS, Subversion handles renaming of modules without much hassle,
and handles binaries.

Btw, a few years ago I played around with the Inter-Mezzo filesystem
(http://www.inter-mezzo.org).
Idea there is to have the kernel keep a transaction record of all reads
and writes against a file(system) and store them in a log.
Resyncing is then just a matter of replaying the transactions to the
target machine (e.g. the desktop).
It worked pretty well, but unfortunately it isn't maintained much these
days.   The developers moved on to work on the Lustre distributed file
system.

Marcus

[Robert Holmes]

Tim's post prompted me to see if there was a version of rsync for windows.
The two options seem to be:
(1) install cygwin - rsync comes as part of the package. (I'm not a great
fan of cygwin so I decided against this approach)
(2) install microsoft's resource kit tools for MS Server 2003 (
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=9d467a69-57ff-4ae7-96ee-b18c4790cffd&displaylang=en).
They include robocopy which isn't a clone of rsync but has pretty good
functionality. It seems to have much tighter control of exactly what is
getting synchronized than SyncToy does.

R




On 9/26/06, Tim Densmore <tim at backspaces.net> wrote:

>
> On Tuesday 26 September 2006 13:20, Owen Densmore wrote:
> > So the question comes up: for FRIAMers having both a laptop and a
> > desktop: what is your strategy for keeping the two in synch?  Or do
> > you bother -- instead doing some sorts of things on the desktop, and
> > other stuff on the desktop, with a small intersection.
>
> I use rsync for things I want on both - I also ssh to my workstation
> frequently for access to stuff I don't really need on my lappy, but need
> access to.
>
>
>

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: /pipermail/friam_redfish.com/attachments/20060927/0b5c357c/attachment.html

[Parks, Raymond]

Robert Holmes wrote:
> Here's a usability point I forgot about. I much prefer writing code on
> the desktop than on the laptop because I can rotate the screen from
> landscape to portrait. My code tends to be long rather than wide, so I
> get to see more of it at once this way.

   That made me think about how different uses require different user
interfaces (and I don't mean GUI).  I use a wide screen because I
frequently have more than one app I'm using at a time (I can usually
multi-track on three tasks at once).  A co-worker uses three 20" LCDs
instead of two 24" not because of cost but because when he looks at the
center of his virtual screen he doesn't want to look at the bezels of
two monitors.  One application where it is nice to have multiple screens
going is reverse engineering - you can have one that shows the state of
the virtual network and servers, one that shows the software under RE,
and another that shows the IDA Pro view and such stuff.

   Which brings me to one of the pieces of wisdom I have picked up in 23
years of buying and using personal computers - Put your money and
interest into the parts that change the form of information.  Keyboard,
mouse, graphics card/monitor, disks, and, nowadays, USB drives and
CD/DVD drives will be the most important to you.  Get the best you can
in those components and then use up the rest of your budget on the
motherboard, processor, and memory.  Sometimes I even put the memory in
the list of primary importance.

--
Ray Parks                   rcparks at sandia.gov
IDART Project Lead          Voice:505-844-4024
IORTA Department            Mobile:[phone]
http://www.sandia.gov/scada Fax:[phone]
http://www.sandia.gov/idart Pager:800-690-5288

[Roger Critchlow-2]

unison has always been good to me when synchronizing between Windows and
Linux, http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/unison/, and I see it's available
for OSX, too.  But the problem is always getting a bit tired of waiting for
the synchronization to complete when I'm in a hurry, so I don't do it.  I'm
using rsync onto a usb laptop drive for some purposes these days, but even
then the time involved is a bit tiresome, and the possibility of getting
mis-synchronized (ie, overwriting a newer file by accident) is present.

-- rec --


On 9/27/06, Robert Holmes <robert at holmesacosta.com> wrote:

>
> Tim's post prompted me to see if there was a version of rsync for windows.
> The two options seem to be:
> (1) install cygwin - rsync comes as part of the package. (I'm not a great
> fan of cygwin so I decided against this approach)
> (2) install microsoft's resource kit tools for MS Server 2003 (http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=9d467a69-57ff-4ae7-96ee-b18c4790cffd&displaylang=en
> ). They include robocopy which isn't a clone of rsync but has pretty good
> functionality. It seems to have much tighter control of exactly what is
> getting synchronized than SyncToy does.
>
> R
>
>
>
>
> On 9/26/06, Tim Densmore <tim at backspaces.net> wrote:
> >
> > On Tuesday 26 September 2006 13:20, Owen Densmore wrote:
> > > So the question comes up: for FRIAMers having both a laptop and a
> > > desktop: what is your strategy for keeping the two in synch?  Or do
> > > you bother -- instead doing some sorts of things on the desktop, and
> > > other stuff on the desktop, with a small intersection.
> >
> > I use rsync for things I want on both - I also ssh to my workstation
> > frequently for access to stuff I don't really need on my lappy, but need
> > access to.
> >
> >
> >
> ============================================================
> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
> Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
> lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
>
>

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: /pipermail/friam_redfish.com/attachments/20060927/c5f4f04a/attachment.html

[Giles Bowkett]

Generally I just put everything on a server manually, although what
I'd like would be a nonlocal filesystem I could mount from either
machine.

--
Giles Bowkett
http://www.gilesgoatboy.org

[Parks, Raymond]

Roger Critchlow wrote:
> unison has always been good to me when synchronizing between Windows and
> Linux, http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/unison/, and I see it's
> available for OSX, too.  But the problem is always getting a bit tired
> of waiting for the synchronization to complete when I'm in a hurry, so I
> don't do it.  I'm using rsync onto a usb laptop drive for some purposes
> these days, but even then the time involved is a bit tiresome, and the
> possibility of getting mis-synchronized (ie, overwriting a newer file by
> accident) is present.

   I tried various synchronization schemes between my Powerbook and both
Linux and Windows boxen.  My goal was to have a USB drive I could plug
into any of my computers and start working.  I have never achieved that
goal.

   One thing I found irritating was OS X', apparently deliberate,
inability to write correctly to other file systems.  NTFS supports file
creation, modification, POSIX change, and POSIX access date/time stamps,
but every time I copied my home directory from OS X to an NTFS removable
drive, all files had that date/time for all dates.  That made it
impossible to use my Lacie drive as my home directory on all systems.

   As for Linux, OS X refused to interact with anything Linux without
3rd party help.  I didn't have time to make it work.  I just checked and
the Apple site has no information through search under support on linux
file systems or Ext3.

   The whole area of synchronizing my work to make it available on
multiple systems is one in which OS X has failed me.

--
Ray Parks                   rcparks at sandia.gov
IDART Project Lead          Voice:505-844-4024
IORTA Department            Mobile:[phone]
http://www.sandia.gov/scada Fax:[phone]
http://www.sandia.gov/idart Pager:800-690-5288