I guess most of you now know out of my earlier postings that I recently bought a MBP.

Me and a MPB? Now this sounds curious indeed and there were for sure a few curious view and question I had to stand. But I really wanted to find out about why others think about them as better, by enjoying something new at the same time.

Not really being sure about I later would like it, deciding for a specific model was a someway hard job for me.

Wanting it portable and being aware that buying too small or modestly never is a good choice, the smaller Macbook wasn’t a choice for me ever. On the other hand this large and heavy 17" chopping board seemed a bit to oversized to me. Thinking about to carry it together with cameras and stuff all time during vacation trip gave me some nightmares for sure.

So I finally focusing on a 15" model and looking into the specs, I decided about it is not worth to buy the bigger one. Everything added it more, except the video card memory, easily could added in later by myself easily.

So happy with me and my choise I finally bought the smaller 15" MBP and right from the first second I liked and enjoyed working with it. Getting familiar with it was easy doing and therewith set and found I recently decided to switch over with my video cutting projects to it as well.

Knowing about memory would become an issue then, I checked the Apple pages for more RAM… and found out about their horrible prices!! …..  Checking specs of RAM chips I quickly was sure about normal SO-DIMM would do. So finally yesterday on my way home I made a d-tour visiting a local hardware shop and buying two normal 2GB 667 SO-DIMMs (less than half the Apple offer).

Shortly half a hour later they were fit in and working.

Now (and for sure it would have to be someone else not me) not being able to resist digging deeper as well, I had a closer look at things. And I have to confess that not only the visible parts of the MBP are well designed. Looking behind and voting it, it is a "puter" … not more and not less, but the quality and manufactoring standard is high and … as a friend of me said once …. it’s a sexy feeling to own and work with one!

Virtualization is one of the today’s  key words of modern .IT. Today hardware and software vendors do offer virtualization solutions for nearly everything and all.

Regardless it is a CPU, your memory or hosting package, the disk access or finally an middleware or application runtime layer it needs to share and virtualize, the ready to use managing framework for it is already developed and offered on the market.

Even Apple, this so far manufacturer of nice and trendy hardware for geeks - "Show me one person not being aware about this brand new  iPhone 3G!" -  is now part of the game. Finally since opening their world, no longer using own hardware for their MACs and porting OSX to Intel CPUs things like Parallels and VMware are part of the big game and the world has changed.

But …. What does this mean for customers and application owner. Do we have to forget about all? Or perhaps to throw away all our nice but old applications and sites?  …. What kind of world we developers have to work in tomorrow?

Good Question!

Following actual market researches, lower costs for application development, system integration and application maintenance,
accelerated integration of applications, more flexible adaptation of existing applications to future changes in technology and, not least, the ability to develop and market new products and services more quickly – are just some of the many benefits that
companies are expecting from a new approach to application design resulting from the introduction of service-oriented architectures (SOA).

Will this influence the work of small business owners? Such one or two man shows designing special and individual tailored customer solutions?

For me the answer is YES. Perhaps not today and with a bit of luck not right tomorrow (the reprieve to learn about!). But certainly in a predictable time frame we all will have to deal with it …… Why?

Experts are in agreement that an infrastructure that is not flexible quickly comes up against its limits, resulting in logistical, as also performance problems. Today only a service-oriented software design (using web service technology, for example) involves the development of modular, reusable software units that can be distributed across different systems. And therefore is able to deal with common hassles and business impacts like software upgrade, maintenance, server crashes and downtimes in a reasonable and appropriate way.

Early this year I changed my hosting provider because of feeling more and more disappointed about their leak of professionalism. For years my former hosting partner offered a solid hosting at a fair and reasonable price to me - At the end and shortly before I left they just and basically had ignored and /or missed to do their homework!

Two years ago I was able and willing to wait a few hours until my mail host was up and running again. Today I’m no longer and I really  insist in receiving all my sms, emails and micro blog postings instantly without any service interruptions.

 I basically expect - as for my feeling all customer do - my site and services up and running all time! There is no way for me to think about missing inquiries and business I might loose out of some service disruption.

The new provider I decided for does now offer grid-Services to me. Oh!! … How exciting you may now throw into our discussion.

Sure there are still issues and hassle to deal with, but since then my pages were never down for more than a few minutes and my emails came always through - Not to speak about the plenty of more resources I do now get at a similar rate like before!

You see?! There are impacts on our daily business. And virtualization and a service orientated application design does for sure have a serious impact and direct impact on our all business.

Thats my opinion and my 5ct on the topic! You have another one?

It must now be 5 or 6 weeks since I started my lets say more or less ‘inofficial’ project and a real run through a lot of new stuff. 

Being interested in it since a while I wanted to figure out about whether or not I really would like it. Not going the risk to waste a lot of money by directly buying some real one and later finding out about there is no way for me to deal with it.

Quickly being sure I indeed like it, since two weeks now I own an original shiny one …. just playing with my ‘playground’ was still an issue. :-/

Last two days now I found myself sitting about some .kext files with a hex-editor trying to patch them getting the wireless device up and running on my clone baby.

Not being sure about how many older settled users ever tried to modify some kernel extentions themself, I’m sure everyone will get it is no easy doing for sure. Stepping back looking at things, I really do now think it is time to give up finally.

I’m no hacker and from the beginning from me is was intended as a non serious basis only used for getting familiar with it. Without the original sources and deeper knowledge about far more technical specifications there is not any chance to get it up and working within some reasonable time for me.

Nevertheless is was and still is a great adventure for me gettng familiar with. Just now I will dump the clone and use the original to make some money by using it seriously for work!

I never tried to hide that deep within me there is still this little boy willing to easily get fancy and interested  in everything new and shiny …

As mentioned I actually have two private "projects" going on. But are related and belong to the same field of interest. There is the new fancy gadget I bought lately. And while playing with it does make pretty much success and giving me a lot of pleasure, the other field still sucks. It’s mostly forced by entering totally new ground and touching and working with things never were written to run in this environment.

Some one could say it is all about lost time. And time is indeed what I actually spend much for it. Just already ages ago I found about myself that it is wise to follow my own preferences. And thing I was interested in earlier at a time no other one was, later on turned out into a big hype.

So I tend to call it playing, as for there is no real serious background behind. But at the end it is just dealing with my innermost interests and getting familiar with things early, which soon might be essential to know about anyway. So for me it is no lost time for sure!!

Funny point is that about all my effort getting it working, two other guys have recognised and now got interested themself. Now we are sticking our heads together frequently, by nearly feel like a group of pioneers or discoverer touching new and undiscovered ground.

I have to confess that I’m something like a version junkie. The message about a never version is available normally immediately switches me in explorer mood and whenever I can effort the few minutes downloading and installing the newer software I hardly can resist to do.

Isn’t it a great and good feeling, knowing about you run on the most recent code including all error and security fixes, as also a great set of new features to work with? And finally to finding out a about the new features the software does now offer to make your life simplier?

Just these days I have to say that it nearly gets too much. Counting all the time it needs to get the OS, the virus scanner, your major applications and all those thousands of little helpers you have installed up2date, I really start to wonder whether or not that all make sense!

When I want to power off the system - Why does it insist telling me to wait until all hotfixes are applied?

Really, it isn’t that long since software was shipped on zillions of diskettes  - Yeah! I’m speaking about those times before cds and dvds turned into the ususal installation media and updates were just one mouse click away like today - and nearly nobody did make effort patching or updating his/her software without a new major software version was available.

Is it really just me? Or do others also start to think about update should get splitted in obligate, recommended and nice to have and every software should offer you the option to choose between different update strategies?