In 1995 the only web browser you heard about was Netscape, there were one or two others around but nothing had the market presence of Netscape, well over 90% of the market in the early days. There was all sort of talk that Netscape was the next Microsoft and that Netscape would dominate the PC browser for years to come. At the time many people believed this to be the case but how many times have you heard it said that someone was going to dislodge Microsoft, even in those days?

Before the Internet became as popular as it is today create software for users who had PC’s was pretty straight forward, you created a thick (sometimes referred to as a fat) client. This meant the user had to install the software on their PC just like Word. Today however things are not so clear.

The past few years has seen a wealth of technologies come along that have changed the scene and give the developer more choices as to how an application can be built. However whilst there are many choices around what type of application can be summarised into a couple of options;
- Thick client

There are different ways to add drupal blocks into the core body of a page, here is a useful article on this.

http://urlgreyhot.com/personal/weblog/drupal_tip_1_inserting_blocks_content_pages_blog_entries_etc

One of the things I am currently spending a lot of time looking at is Service Oriented Architecture, SOA. Many people look at it from the technology point of view and try to take this bottom up approach and sell it to the business, without really understanding where the business is going.

Now it is true that not all businesses do not fully understand the fact that there is technology out there which can help their business, but in the first instance it is very much about a top down approach of looking at how SOA will be a benefit to the business. There is no point embarking on a SOA project if it does not have the relevant backing from management.

Yep been a very long time since I was last here to post something, so many things happening over the past few weeks and off course never enough time.

Anyway will be posting some work related things here as well over the coming weeks.

This is a classic Dilbert and how many times do you still see this...

Have never seen or heard of this before, Skis made from stone, http://www.zai.ch/index.php?id=11&L=1. Makes for very interesting reading.

I've been using a Vodafone 3G datacard for over a year now. I was paying £25+vat for 250mb download per month. Now that wasn't too bad as long as I was careful about what I did online. But sometimes it was slow, rarely got 3G and usually just ended up at 384k.

Well recently 3 have been advertising their new Broadband service on the radio. I took at look at the website, here, and the pricing of what you get is way much better. For £10 (inclusive of VAT) you get 1GB, £15 3GB and £25 7GB! After spending a bit of time reading the website I decided it was time to change.

This is what it would have been like filming 24 back in 1994. How it brings back memories!

Have you ever seen Steve Ballmer trying to sell you a copy of Windows, well here is how he was trying to sell us Windows 1.0 way back when...