Platform Agnostic Personal Computing

I think that unconsciously, I’ve been trying to get as close as possible in the last year to a platform agnostic computing environment. Whether it be about web tools or applications in general, I’ve tried to find options that would work on Windows, Linux and OS X.

Since then, I’ve been using more and more cross-platform solutions: Firefox, Thunderbird, OpenOffice. I’ve also decided to ditch any client-side tools for blog posting and use whatever the browser offered me. I find that this makes it quicker/easier for me, as my posts look exactly as I want them to be and besides Performancing (which I don’t like), I can’t think of any other truly cross-platform WYSIWYG blog tool.

As for my development environment, I’ve decided that Eclipse was the way to go. I’m actually finishing my last installation of it on a VMware image running Ubuntu 5.10 (if you’ve followed my installation saga recently). I today run it on WinXP SP2, Ubuntu 5.10 and OS X 10.4.6. Each installation gets Eclipse 3.1.2, PHPEclipse, Subclipse and the Web Tools Project. The linux platform also gets OpenLaszlo and Ruby On Rails, which require server components. That way, I’m prepared to tackle pretty much any type of coding I can pretend to manage for the time being.

Besides common applications and dev environment, I now also use my domain to act as a subversion repository. Single point of contact. Great. Easy. And yes, I do plan to install a backup schedule of my complete domain (and MySQL databases) using rsync, as soon as I can sink my teeth into a good starter manual.