New workstation

I've got a new workstation at $WORK. (Well, where else would it be?) It's pretty sweet: i7 quad-core processor, clock speed > 3GHz (honestly, I barely keep track anymore), and 8GB of RAM. 8GB! Insane.

When I arrived in 2008, I used a -- not cast-off, but unused P4 with 4 GB of RAM. I didn't want to make a big fuss about it; I saved the fuss, instead, for a nice business laptop from Dell that worked well with Linux. Since 90% of my work is Firefox + Emacs + XTerms, and my WM of choice at the moment is Awesome, speed was not a problem and the memory was fine.

Lately, though, I've discovered Vagrant. It looks pretty sweet, but my current machine is sloooow when I try to run a couple of VMs. (So's my laptop, despite a better processor; I suspect the 5400RPM drive.) I'm hoping that the new machine will make a big difference.

Just gotta install Ubuntu and move stuff over. Fortunately I've been pretty good about keeping my machine config in Cfengine, so that'll help. And then build some VMs. I'm always surprised at people who feel comfortable downloading random VM images from the Internet. Yeah, it's probably okay...but how do you know?

One thing that Vagrant is missing is integration with Cfengine. Fortunately, the documentation for extending it seems pretty good (plus, I can always kick things off with a shell script). This might be an excuse to learn Ruby.