The joys of working at home, #928

[jducoeur]

Note to self: the interaction of cats and power switches can be unfortunate. I really need a new power strip, that's not quite so easy for someone chasing a ball to turn off.

(OTOH, the nice thing about using a laptop as my primary dev machine is that I didn't actually lose anything...)

Comments

[goldsquare.livejournal.com]

The more surges they dampen, the fewer surges they can dampen. So, yeah, time to upgrade. (Emerald? Blast from the past....)

We have a very large box of them, that Robin no longer uses for her company. Almost everything in the house that is on an extension cord, is also on a surge suppressor now.

While you are thinking about that - are your TVs, routers, stereo and other expensive electronics all on surge suppressors? These years, a lot of homes lose a lot of equipment because of a lightening strike on their local circuit. Robin purchased a SERIOUS "power conditioner" for our most expensive electronics, and we will be using that again for the new "media center" she wants to construct.

You may also want to consider, instead of a simple surge suppressor for your office setup, a battery backup system instead. Place your router and wireless base station on that as well... They are relatively inexpensive these days, and you can get a used one for almost nothing, and just replace the batteries.

[jducoeur]

While you are thinking about that - are your TVs, routers, stereo and other expensive electronics all on surge suppressors?

Mais oui. Some on better ones, some on lesser, but I generally don't buy ordinary extension cords these days. I use the old cheapies for things like LED clocks and lamps (things that cost < $50 to replace), but anything interesting goes on at least a low-end surge suppressor. (When I get the new TV, that'll get coupled with a really fancy one.)

And it's true that a battery backup is a fairly good idea, although I probably won't bother for my simple laptop. Once I get more serious about the server (and switch my development center from our XP Home box over to a small linux machine), that probably deserves a battery backup...

Server

[metageek.livejournal.com]

Once I get more serious about the server

Are you planning to run CommYou off of a server in your house, or is this something else?

Re: Server

[jducoeur]

Something else -- more or less. At the moment, I'm doing development on my laptop, and using our home desktop as the SVN repository and backed-up machine; it will also probably serve as the initial host of the experimental version of the Facebook app. That's not optimal, but it works for the short run.

In the medium term, the intent is to get a modest Linux box to be the central dev server. That will host SVN and get backed-up, and should be more reliable than the Windows machine. It will also become the host of the experimental app. The *real* app will get hosted on commyou.com, once I choose a hosting service for that. (Pair has the slight edge there, since that's where I registered the domain, but I'm still considering my options.)

But I expect I'll always maintain at least two concurrent hosts of the system, a dev one and a real one; for the time being, the dev one will always be at home. Hence the desire for a more stable platform to run it off of...