In China Without Backups

For the last several months William and I have been heads down programming on a couple of projects. As with any startup, some code is showing promise and other has been shelved. There will be lots of upcoming details as I start blogging again.

In the meantime, I’m just trying to recover from a hard drive crash. Luckily, I religiously keep back-ups. Unluckily, they’re currently safely stored in the United States while I’m on a two week trip to Hong Kong and Guangzhou, China.

After several attempts to fully recover the disk, I ended up purchasing a 500 GB Samsung drive for 500 RMB from a local computer market in Guangzhou. I installed Snow Leopard and began recreating my working environment.

I keep my most important files in a personal subversion repository. This includes a lot of home directory config files such as my emacs config, bash profile, org-mode files, custom scripts and all the other small little changes that make any particular computer feel like home. Beyond that, the following software was immediately installed (in this order):

• iTerm
• Emacs
• Google Chrome
• Firefox
• Adium
• Skype
• Dropbox
• MacPorts

Once I got to MacPorts, I could then go about creating my development environment by installing Ruby, MySQL, a number of gems and other tools.

Another customization I do, even before installing software, is to switch Caps Lock to Control. I can barely use a computer without that.

One thing I learned from this is that I need to keep a separate copy of my private ssh key somewhere secure. Luckily I was able to at least mount the old disk and recover quite a bit of my personal data, including the ssh key. Otherwise, I would have been without it until I return to the US next week.

My email setup is still not properly working, so for the time being, I’m back to using GMail. This is giving me a chance to rethink use of gnus as my email client. I might try switching to sup or not much.