Home Office Walk Thru
Dave Payne was just showing off his work from home digs. He was asking about my setup, so here it is…
In early 2009 when X_Factor was under heavy development, I was putting in about 100 hours per week (really. it sucked!). At the time it made sense to work from home. I really didn’t even have time to drive to work. But I needed to get the place all setup. Now I don’t work from home anymore, except on my super secret after hours projects.
First of all, my kids are home all day. Like all kids, they are really loud. I had an office in the upper level of the house, but there was a big problem. It had this window that looked over the living and dining room; without any glass. The kids play below and the vaulted ceilings direct all the noise up through the window. So I got some studs and sheetrock and closed it up.
Funiture
Starting out, I didn’t have much to work with for furniture. So I cleaned out the room and headed to Ikea with my credit card in hand. I picked up some EFFEKTIV series stuff. I got a desk that is super good at holding my laptop and coffee off the floor. Then I got some of these cabinets to shove all my clutter in.
Room with a view
I usually work with the blinds closed. In case I wanna checkout the outside, I have a decent view of a little bay on my lake. That way it is easy to wish I was fishing (as if that was hard).
Light
I have the lamp in the corner on a dimmer. Then I just put in some LEDs under the desk for accent lighting. I have the Ikea DIODER strip lighting attached with some 2 sided tape. There is a button to switch among five different colors. You see the green color above (looks like my terminal). The effect really works best in the dark.
Paper Storage
Like Dave, I have a great place to store papers.
Whiteboards
I just have a couple of these glass whiteboards that you buy @ Ikea for $20. I would like to do Idea Paint, but it’s not worth the effort unless I start working at home again.
So there you go. When I’m working from home, this is what it looks like for me.
Changing Service Console Memory
Historically I have used sed statements to alter esx.conf and grub.conf to change the amount of allocated service console memory. So this means that we are doing a search and replace assuming a default memory amount (string). ESX 4 and now ESX 3.5U5 have default values other than 272MB.
Instead of the ghetto sed statements, we can use vmware-vim-cmd (vimsh in older ESX3 versions).
vmware-vim-cmd /hostsvc/memoryinfo 838860800
When doing a kickstart install, it needs to be run after first boot instead of the post environment. Something like this (Tested on ESX4.0U1 && ESX3.5U4):
LOGFILE=/root/build.log chvt 3 ### ### Run once script ### cat >> /etc/rc3.d/S99run-once<<EOF1 #!/bin/sh ### ### Sleep while we wait for hostd to start completely ### ### The sleep value will vary based on how fast your system is. ### As a VM on my overloaded laptop, I use 600s. ### sleep 600 ### ### Alter service console memory allocation ### echo "Changing service console memory to 800MB" >> $LOGFILE /usr/bin/vmware-vim-cmd /hostsvc/memoryinfo 838860800 >> $LOGFILE 2>&1 echo "Done changing service console memory" >> $LOGFILE echo >> $LOGFILE rm /etc/rc3.d/S99run-once reboot EOF1 chmod +x /etc/rc3.d/S99run-once