posted on Sunday, January 02, 2005 11:14 PM
by
anoras
New Year's "Cruft"! Everything must go!
Back in 2002, Doctor Dobb’s Journal columnist Verity Stob wrote an excellent piece about “cruft”, which is the inevitable state of decay that ensues as soon as you start using any operating system. My laptop has become decrepit - cruft force 8. At force 8, the entropy has reached the point where your computer defies Newton’s first law of motion and installing additional software actually improves performance. Therefore; this is the last post I will be writing on my current Windows installation. I’ve been defeated by “cruft” – everything must go! When I get back to my office tomorrow, my trusty Dell Latitude D800 is having a well deserved hard disk reformat, and I’m going to reinstall all my software.
I’ve compiled a list of the tools that will have the honor of being installed on my virgin Windows XP installation. If there are other tools you think I should install, speak now or forever hold your peace. In addition to all the baseline applications such as Microsoft Office 2003 Professional, Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 2003 and similar, I will be installing:
I’ll also be installing lots of frameworks such as Spring.NET, NUnitASP and many more, but first and foremost I’m after feedback on must-have tools I’ve missed out on. A change from previous setups is that I’m not going to install any Microsoft SQL Servers or BizTalk Servers directly under my desktop OS, these will all be Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 instances that I can start on demand. I’ll also investigate the possibilities of using Microsoft Cassini instead of Microsoft Internet Information Server to host ASP.NET applications that are under development, to mimic Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 2005’s ASP.NET debug environment with Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 2003. If I succeed, rest assured I will brag about it here.
When reinstalling I’m also going to ask our network admin to demote my domain account from local administrator to a normal user, and I’ll start practicing “development with least privilege” once and for all.
I’ve got my fingers crossed and I believe that my new year’s restoration will go as planned. The next time you’ll hear from me I’ll be back at cruft force 0 with the SysInternals “Blue Screen of Death” screensaver installed, no more than nine directories under my root and every thing running crisply. Wish me luck!