They say that boys like toys and I am no exception. There are two toys that I still find myself talking and smiling about. Those are my Alienware Area 51 notebook and VmWare a virtual computing environment.

I was first turned on to Alienware notebooks by Dave Anderson of Smalltalk MT. Dave in into “desktop replacements” because one he needs to be mobile but also because he helps his clients develop simulation systems (un-mentionable government agencies) as well as computer games. I actually witnessed one of those games in action and it was very impressive. This was a full-blown motion picture with story line type of game. The graphics were just amazing. I myself used Smalltalk MT to integrate DirectMusic into a VisualWork’s music ed application I was developing for a client. VisualWorks can of course wrap C/C++ libraries but often it is convenient to create a C library that provides a facade into a large C subsystem such as DirectX. Smalltalk MT is great for this. I then used VisualWork’s DLLCC (C wrapping framework) and wrapped the Smalltalk MT created dll. Smalltalk MT essentially allows one to code in Smalltalk and generate true native dlls, exes, Com and ActiveX components. I often say that Smaltalk MT is the best C/C++ development environment in the planet but that is of course because I get to code in Smalltalk . Seriously, the upside there is that one gets the productivity of Smalltalk but gets to deliver highly optimized Windows components when it actually matters to do so.

The main reason that I love my Alienware is that I get to be mobile and yet do what requires a full blown desktop, all in a stunningly looking notebook that is built like a Mercedes. I have already mentioned some of what I do above. Other applications include hard-disk recording for example which I use for my guitar practice and composing.

Another reason why my Alienware is really handy is to run multiple VwWare vm instances. VmWare allows one to essentially host multiple guest computing environments within a host environment. For example one can have multiple versions of Windows running at the same time co-running with Linux vms. This greatly facilitates simulating enterprise applications which operate over a heterogenous network. At my current gig, I am re-architecting a financial client server application that directly engages an Oracle database into an n-tier distributed system that is fault tolerant , provides for load balancing and is independant of RDMS vendor (well at least the major rdms will be pluggable). We will be using VisualWork’s Opentalk st-st messaging, load balancing , snmp capabilities (currently in preview) as well as MQ integration. GLORP ( a TopLink re-incarnation by the one of the original architects) will provide for database pluggability, other technologies such as stunnel, LDAP, Samba , xml/https are in the mix. Get the picture ? The capability to recreate most of this in one notebook.provides for some real productivity gains..