Protean

I love the idea of Web 2.0 - I jumped on the social networking bandwagon at a fairly early stage getting involved with AOL’s attempt to compete with myspace with its AIM pages. Its great that people with shared interests can join a network and interact with each other in a way that couldn’t be done before.

And I currently maintain profiles at LinkedIn, flickr, facebook & twitter, youtube, picasa, pprune.org and SSC. These profiles I can handle quite nicely along with my own hobby sites and various shopping websites that I use. I have always argued that privacy concerns can be managed (more…)

In writing this post I was thinking about those tools that aren’t necessarily for database programming but at the same time I wouldn’t want to be without. It then got me to thinking about what software surpassed my expectations in what ways.

Whilst I’m a fan of open source technology, frequently it has left me cold. Or there have been times when I’ve installed some software that I really wish I hadn’t and wandered how I could have been so lax as to risk my data and operating system on an untested application. But then there are occasions also when I’m pleasantly surprised. An open source application that does something better / faster / easier than its proprietary counter parts, or an application that I’ve purchased that does everything it says on the tin without paying through the roof.

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