Author Archives: bhartsock

How to create the perfect home office – Part 2 – The equipment and software

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After you get your furniture right, the next step is setting up all your equipment. For me, my desk revolves around three computers. My desktop which is really just there in case I get the urge to game. My Mac for pretty much everything non-work related. And my work laptop.

The Hardware

There are only two things that matter to me with hardware. Number of wires and awesomeness. I am not going to go into too much depth regarding my hardware decisions, just a couple of pointers that helped make my home office sweet.

For the computer decision, go with laptops or all-in-ones for all non gaming activities. Desktops should only be needed if you need ultimate performance. If you want to read about my MacBook Pro, I have already posted a good amount on it. I highly recommend it.

The Epson Workforce 610 is a great printer to add to your home office. It is an all-in-one that works on Mac and Windows and only requires a power cord. The wireless on it is easy to setup and I haven’t had a single problem out of it. (It is important to note I print maybe 2 pages a week and scan 1 page a month. I am not a power printer user, so I can’t speak to how it holds up under heavy load).

The other key piece of hardware for an office is wireless routers. I highly recommend buying variants of the Linksys WRT54G. With a quick firmware upgrade to DD-WRT you have a whole slew of networking options at your fingertips.

The Software

What I bet you didn’t realize was how important software is in your home office. Software can replace hardware and wires. How you ask?

Synergy is a software KVM (it is actually much more than that but for the purposes of your home office, it makes having multiple computers a breeze). Now you don’t need multiple keyboards or KVM’s with ridiculous amounts of wires going everywhere.

If you have an external hard-drive, I have news for you: you don’t need it anymore! Jungle Disk + Cloud Files gives you cheap, unlimited storage. Yes I work for Rackspace, but I was a Jungle Disk customer long before they joined our team. I have had hard drive failures, multiple reformats and numerous computers. Jungle Disk has helped me through it all.

Future improvements

Even though I claimed my home office is perfect, which it is, it has some improvements I want to make.

Connect360 helps share media between your Mac and XBox 360. Windows supports sharing with an XBox 360 out of the box, but it is lacking on a Mac without this piece of software.

The speakers I have are 10 years old (which doesn’t bother me) but it has 7 wires for 6 different pieces of equipment. Too much. I’m thinking the Klipsch ProMedia 2.1 Wireless Speakers are the way to go. There are only 3 wires (none going into your computer) and 4 components.

My keyboard is wired. Not a big deal, but one less wire is always nice. I like the Logitech Unifying system but I might just go with the Mac periphials. (I want somthing a little ergnomic but finding a cool ergo keyboard is pretty hard).

How to create the perfect home office – Part 1 – The desk and furniture

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The furniture in an office is the second most important aspect of the office next to the computer. Your furniture defines the look and function of your office. If simplicity is your goal, you need furniture that has clean lines and plenty of unobtrusive storage. If multi-tasking is your goal, you need a desk with lots of surface area and room. Don’t take your desk decision lightly. My last desk lasted 10 years.

Don’t fret however. I have done the legwork. I have found the hands down best furniture for your home office. (In all actuality, I first saw this furniture at the Jungle Disk offices in Atlanta. Props to that team for having great furniture).

The Desk

The Galant series at Ikea is the worlds best desk system. It is extremely configurable, very sturdy, and very sleek. I have yet to see a desk that rivals it. Not too mention there are plenty of accessories and add-ons to add additional functionality to your desk. Here are just a few sample pictures of different configurations.



I encourage you to go to Ikea and look through the many combinations and pick one that you like. Or just go to the store and see 8 or so different configurations of the same desk.

In the subsequent posts on my office, I will show you some of the nerdy benefits of this desk system as well (namely a nice frame for running wires and plenty of surface area for velcro).

Effectiv Furniture

The Effectiv system is just a nice storage system. Like everything Ikea, it has plenty of options and is very functional as well. In my setup, I am storing everything from hanging file folders to pens and pencils. Again, some more sample configurations.



The final picture

Putting it all together, this is what my office looks like with the desk and storage cabinet. As you can see, very sleek while still having a ton of storage.







Other minor things to note, in the pictures I have the Markus chair and the Galant Drawer system to put the finishing touches on the office furniture.

In summary, think hard about your furniture. It is super important. Stay tuned for next weeks post on equipment and software.

Setting up your Mac for .NET development

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Last night I spent a few hours getting my Windows virtualization setup so I could use Visual Studio from the Mac. It ended up being way cooler and easier than I thought. All it requires is two simple things, Parallels and mklink.

Parallels

I was hesitant about paying $79 for virtualization software when other software like VirtualBox is completely free. My advice, try the free trial of Parallels and you will understand why it is worth the price.

It allows you to create shortcuts to Windows apps in the Mac Dock.

Integrates the Windows task bar with the Mac menu bar.

Putting it all together, you get to run Windows apps right beside Mac apps in what Parallels calls Coherence mode.

Some other notable features are:

  • Integration with Bootcamp partition
  • Integration with Windows start meu
  • Much more…

The overall performance is good. I noticed some slowness when dragging windows around, but for everyday usage, it runs great. There are some oddities of using Parallels in Coherence mode, but no deal breakers. I definitely recommend it because of the low overhead in context switching between Mac and Windows applications.

mklink

Even with Parallels, Windows runs on a different filesystem than the Mac. It does offer shared profiles, but I only wanted to share my Visual Studio project files.

mklink is a tool I had never used until last night. For those of you familiar with Linux, it is simliar to the ln command. Here is how I used it.

mklink /d "c:\Users\Brian\Documents\Visual Studio 2008\Projects" \\.psf\Home\Documents\Projects

What this simple command will do is create a symbolic to my Mac home folder for all Visual Studio projects. From Windows, it works like a normal folder.

Now, I can easily code side by side in TextMate and Visual Studio straight from OSX.

How to create the perfect home office – The Series

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Ever since I purchased my house a year ago, I have been trying to create the perfect office. After lots of thinking, a little bit of work, and a few trips to Ikea, I have finished my journey (for now). I wanted to write a few short posts that take you through the creation of the office.

My goals for the office were pretty simple.

  • Support lots of equipment (I use 3 computers in a given day)
  • No wires
  • Fung sei (my translation means clean and simple)

Over the next few weeks, I will post on how I got there.

  1. The desk and furniture
  2. The equipment and software
  3. The wires and wires and wires

And just to give you a sneak peak of the finished product, here is my home office.

Really nerdy chat room

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Here is an excerpt from my team’s chat room today:

(4:31:42 PM) brian.hartsock: i saw a good blog post on how to reuse moq verification steps somewhere
(4:31:43 PM) brian.hartsock: http://blog.brianhartsock.com/2009/09/01/using-extension-methods-to-clean-up-mocks-moq/
(4:31:45 PM) brian.hartsock: oh there it is :)
(4:34:39 PM) kendall: I don’t know…is self-promotion allowed in the group chat room? ;-)
(4:37:40 PM) kevin: I promote myself to Supreme Ruler.
(4:40:46 PM) jake: as long as you don’t promote yourself to a distributed transaction