What’s in your EVE space?

Well, the latest EVE blogger craze seems to be posting pics of your EVE workspace. And so here’s mine, albeit some months ago.

Many empty bottles of diet coke were carefully removed before this picture was taken

The setup is fairly simple. There’s a 22″ monitor running on a Mac Mini for trading and work, the 24″ and 17″ widescreen displays are running on the desktop machine, which is a custom built box running Win7x64 (the only Windows machine in the room, out of 12 machines). That machine is based around an Asus mainboard with an E6600 2.4Ghz chip, a 275 series BFGtech OC2 graphics card, and 4GB of DDR2 RAM. There’s ~1.2TB of disk space across a bunch of disks in that machine, and another ~5TB distributed throughout the room. The storage is mostly full of backups and development snapshots of databases.

The multimonitor setup is either used with an EVE client per monitor, or more often just the one EVE client on the main machine or the Mac depending on what I’m working on (Perl is on the Mac, Ruby is on the dev server via the desktop). The 17″ monitor is nearly always showing IRC (Xchat) and any Pidgin windows I have open for MSN/SILC/XMPP. All in all, it works out great.

The desk above is my setup while I’m at university in term-time; back home in the holidays, this is how things usually look.

(Excuse the shoddy censoring of design notes on my whiteboard)

Same setup, though you get a look at the desktop this time. The minifridge is vital to day-to-day operations, and it gets dragged along to uni. The netbook above isn’t really useful for EVE, being a netbook and all that, but it is handy as a little linux machine.

Also in my EVE space are 4 fairly beefy network switches, various other bits of networking gear (particularly a Ubiquiti Networks Bullet M2HP running in bridge mode while I’m at uni to bridge my wired network in my room with the wireless LAN to the router downstairs), an APC Smart-UPS 1500VA rackmount for handling powercuts (though the router isn’t on battery backup, so this doesn’t permit uninterrupted EVE quite yet), and a grand total (at this exact moment) of 6 other server-class machines in 19″ pizzaboxes. These boxes get used for testing things, one is set up as a file server, one is set up as a development server (where I do all my work for EVE Metrics etc).

Aside from computers, there’s always a comfortable chair, my trusty speakers and amplifier, and a large pile of books. Recently I’ve been keeping some weights in reach of my chair so I can do some reps while I wait for things to load or compute, which has been working well. As far as books of the moment go, I’ve just finished Terry Pratchett’s latest, Unseen Academicals, which is very much worth reading if you’re into Pratchett’s stuff. Secrets and Lies: Digital Security in a Networked World by Bruce Schneier is my new ‘current’ book, though Iain M. Banks’ stuff gets reread quite often these days.