Packing your laptop for travel and working on the road

Updated 6/Oct/08

When you travel any distance with a laptop it helps to have some good habits for packing, carrying and using your computer

What to pack:

1. If you travel abroad then a universal mains socket adaptor is required. I quite like this one, make sure it’s as robust as possible because sometimes they can be a little fragile.
2. USB Charging cables for phones, iPods etc. Saves taking the mains based charger and having to share the mains adaptor when abroad. Some laptop BIOS settings allow you to configure the USB ports to supply power even when the laptop is off or on battery, which is useful for overnight charging but you can flatten your laptop battery so be careful
3. Security cable for laptop. I prefer a combination lock to avoid having a key to lose. Get one with as long a cable as possible as anchor points sometimes need a stretch
4. If you use a mouse then get a smaller laptop model to pack — it could save you get getting RSI using the built in trackpad or trackpoint all the time. The really small laptop mice may be too small for prolonged use or larger hands so check before buying.
5. A small mouse matt. Hotel room desks etc. are often covered with glass (or worse dirt) and will not work with laser mice so get a small mouse mat. Pack it so it stays flat
6. I have always carried a spare LAN cable, however I am using it less and less as wireless becomes more common.  Depending on the places you go it can be useful, especially in hotel rooms, but beware buying retractable cables (sight unseen) as some are bulky.
7. Have small bags to place cables and mice in. It makes finding things a lot easier. Ziplocks plastic bags will do when you can’t get nylon or cloth
8. Headphones can be useful for music and VoIP calls (needs a mike as well). I don’t recommend USB headphones as they may be bulky and take up a sometimes precious USB connection. You need to experiment to see if a bluetooth headset works for you. If you can spring for headphones that work on the plane as well that’s a bonus but I have not bothered for a number of years as airlines now provide reasonable quality headsets (ignoring issues of noise cancelling headphones). It seems to be hard to protect expensive headsets without bulky cases so I get cheaper headsets and save the space.
9. Consider the use and packing of a 3G modem. In Australian hotels broadband access can be very expensive (A$20-30/night) and with the added convenience of 3G it can make a lot of sense. Shop around for the best deals. In the US free wireless access seems to be included as part of the hotel package — but check before leaving. And check how much 3G access costs when using global roaming, it can be VERY expensive.

Avoid wrapping the power leads tightly around your power brick — it stresses the cables and causes failures (I had a colleague who did it all the time)

Have a specified order and placement for all your items in your luggage. Do it enough and you won’t have to think about it and you’ll know were everything is.

Invest in a good quality laptop backpack. It will save your spine from being pulled to the side  and leave the hands free for other things. Business travelers can get smart, black, bags now. It should have a padded laptop compartment, or use a laptop sleeve. In addition make sure that the bag has enough additional packing for your other travel needs. e.g.

• Paper notebook/journal/Filofax
• Pens
• Paperwork (use file folders to protect loose paper sheets), magazines and books
• On longer trips passports, toiletries and spare plastic bags. I wrote some additional notes on trans-Pacific travel earlier
• Anything else that supports your travel flow and work flow.

N.B. When travelling, even with carry on luggage only, assume you will loose access to your suitcase for 24 hours and need to work/live as best you can from your backpack

Lastly make sure that you have the correct work processes and tools on hand to make the best use of your time away

How software developers can make customers life hard

For the benefit of all you young developers out there who are being steered into a life of developing useful and valuable software I’d though offer a few hints and tips on slowing thing down a bit for your customers to increase support revenue:

• Make error messages cryptic or generic e.g. “Error writing file”
• Do not document the underlying architecture, diagnostic features or data formats
• Make sure that products require significant setup after installation or, better still, each time they used in a new project (excellent way to increase consulting revenue)
• Make the product appear flexible and powerful by doing the same thing different ways in various places

Surely it can’t be so hard to be a better (Emacs and Docbook) geek?

I recently decided, despite using nothing but Linux on my laptop, that I had become a suite using purely graphical Office tools (Evolution for calendar, email etc, OpenOffice to write documents and presentations and so on). I was becoming a very rusty geek!

Time for Plan A. Migrate email, task management etc to emacs, start using Docbook for presentations and document creation (in Emacs of course) with git to protect my precious work.

However so far it all feels a bit hard…  There is no consensus on the best way to configure Emacs for laptop email using IMAP services (mix and match any of Dovecot, fetchmail, Gnus, RM, procmail, etc etc); and getting a decent fop processor working is harder than it should be (I got going instead with dblatex in the end) — now writing Docbook documents seems hard as well — all that XML  *sigh*. I’m not even feeling at home with git yet .

Update 29/Aug/08: Sacha Chua has some great advice to share on using Gnus for email

Anyone have some tips or encouragement to share?

Pre Sale demonstration techniques for Open Source Geeks

Open Source Industry Australia were kind enough to invite me to present last week on pre-sales demonstrations techniques. My main message was about delivering a Value based message — which is explained rather well by the following

Farting in Church « The Sales Wars

Here’s what decision makers care about:

* Improved Revenues
* Lowered Expenses
* Efficiency of Operations
* Managed Risk

As well as talking about a Value based approach I also added in some general tips. Enjoy, and of course feedback is always welcome.

Handy Hack: Run vim for Windows under Cygwin

UPDATED 30/Jan/09. With apologies for any confusion, previous example was completely wrong

For reasons I cant quite remember running the Windows gvim.exe binary directly from bash can lead to problems parsing path names. So I created an function as follows:

function gvim() { (
unset a
for i in "$@"; do
    case $i in
        -*)a=" $i $a";;
         *) if [[ -f $i ]] ; then
  a=" $a $(cygpath --absolute --dos "$i" )"
     else
  touch "$i" &&
  a=" $a $(cygpath --absolute "$i" )" &&
  rm -f "$i"|| echo "failed"
     fi
    esac
done
/progra~1/vim/vim72/gvim.exe $a&)}

Introduction to using Make to build software

I’ve placed another presentation online that I gave to Linux Users of Victoria. It’s a short and very basic introduction to make (as used by software developers).

If you are intrested in make then you maight also like my presentation on using make and subversion together. (Beware that it’s a lot more meaty than this short introduction).