My development environment
Last year in February I bought an eBox; a small pc of 17 by 12,4 centimeters with only a few connections and hard drive. The idea was to create a small set-top box with it and eventually turn it into a digital signage system.
But it became quickly clear that my new small PC wasn’t powerful enough for this task. After first trying to run Windows XP Embedded and afterwards DSL, I still couldn’t play high quality DVDs. For the most small movies everything was OK, but when the bit rate was getting high, my movies didn’t play fluently. Here I was with a small PC that wasn’t very useful. What was I going to do with it? Sell it, give it another destination, etc. ?
Lets turn it into a file server. But just a file server? It’s an expensive solution to only serve as a file server. Ok, let’s also turn it into an ftp-server, accessible from the internet with the use of DynDNS. Yeah, that would be cool 
. It was indeed cool to create such a server, but my server was quickly covered with tons of dust and wasn’t very often used…
...till this week. On monday I took my eBox to work and gave it Tim: a Linux guru working in our team. After 15 minutes a CentOS Linux installation was started up with the use of PXE. If I had to found out everything to make it work, I would have cost me more then a week, but for him… 10 minutes! After 20 minutes I had a Linux installation on my box, 20 later an update of all the software and 1 minute later my first crash 
: a kernel crash. Lucky I could revert to a previous version, and everything was back working.
Later this week I installed Apache, Subversion, Trac and Hudson. And today the installations are finally finished. I now have my own development environment with version control, wiki, continuous integration, nightly builds, etc… installed on it.
The nice thing about this solution is that all these things don’t need to run anymore on my laptop. Everything is accessible from my home network and even from the internet with the use of DynDNS.
The whole setup of this environment took me only 5 days (not full time, but every evening 2 to 3 hours). I’m totally not a linux guy ( I love my mac ), so I think I can be proud of myself that I did all this work in this short period of time. And now back to development…