Dual core CPUs, gigs of RAM and tons of hard drive space. What a sweet combination. Even working from home I can run Weblogic 9.1 on a 64-bit Solaris 10 and Oracle. All while keeping my native OS (that would be Windows XP Pro) chugging at a healthy pace. The Solaris 10 was running on VMWare Server while Oracle ran natively in Windows. To allow both my native and virtual OS to run smoothly, I allocated 1GB of RAM to each. This allowed Windows XP to function well, provided not too many applications open. I can manage to run Oracle, Firefox, VMWare, VNC viewer, Filezilla client and Trillian. Not bad, eh? P/S, I actually run the heavy weight software because I was testing out an environment that I need to use for work, not because it was fun (not that it wasn’t ;))

I also remote access my work laptop to build since my source codes are there. This also means I don’t need to run Eclipse on my desktop which would have definitely brought it to its knees considering Eclipse would need an extra 250~300MBs of RAM. For accessing my laptop, I use Ultra VNC because of the love-able file-transfer feature (I used to run a FTP server service on the desktop). By the way, Ultra VNC also offers a whole lot of other features, but the other two that I like most other than the file transfer was the mirror driver and ClearType support. The mirror driver allows high performance display giving the effect of a local desktop due to the fast updates of the display. ClearType support is well, self-explanatory. Ever noticed that Remote Desktop and other VNC clients doesn’t render ClearType fonts which makes everything look fugly on LCDs.

If all of this sounds like I’m doing some fancy acrobatics with the Alt-Tab key combo, relax. I’m not, thanks to my dual-screen 19″ LCDs (a pair of Acer AL1917/1916 if you must know). With a combined screen space of 2880×900, I avoid stressing my fingers and my keyboard by not having to frequently swap between applications. Uber cool. Which reminds me, here’s a screen shot of my desktop at work.

Click for full size image

Yup, the display is pretty sweet. Quality is great too because I’m running these off a 7900GS which sports dual-DVIs. I’ve seen VGA port used on a relatively large LCD - it looked horrible with ghosting all over the place. Yuck. I imagine if I had to use that kind of display while staring at source codes (that means lots and lots of reading), I’ll be getting a pair of glasses way too soon.