While working away I was listening (okay, and peeking once in a while) at the live stream from the announcement from Google about Chrome OS, an operating system they've been working on. From what I can tell, it's going to be some stripped-down version of Linux with a window manager that runs one thing: the Chrome browser.

Now, while I think a netbook is great for someone like my mom, or my daughter, I cannot imagine myself doing any sort of serious programming work on one. Or can I?

So, first of all it looks like is a non-starter. That means I would likely have to use something like Mozilla Bespin as my editor. A quick Google search showed me that you can edit remote files using Bespin, so that is a good thing. But I would miss doing all the system-level things I've grown accustomed too. Would make it pretty much impossible to do command line testing of code.

And what about all my tools for managing databases? All the web-based database manipulation tools (like phpMyAdmin or phpPgAdmin can probably meet that need. But then I'm looking at some sort of web-based SSH client to be able to look at things like server configurations or slow query logs. Again, it's probably doable but is it optimal?

Anyway, it's an interesting thought. Perhaps I should spend some time trying to see if I could actually be productive using the tools I just mentioned above.