Techblog

Oracle, since acquiring Sun Systems, has been closing many of the open source projects that Sun once operated. This now includes OpenSolaris. You can see the end of life cycle announcement here:

http://www.sun.com/service/eosl/eosl_opensolaris.html

For those not aware I recently migrated my servers to a different hosting company. I had been with my previous company since 2005, but they didn’t offer me solutions to meet my growing demands. In the process I began to reflect on my journey and I thought about how technology changes over time.

So much has changed in the past 10 years. 10 years ago the buzz word for web design was Flash. Adobe flash was exploding in the market and people were designing entire websites in flash. Including this geek. People could visit an entire website and navigate for hours between content without ever leaving the first loading page they landed on.
Flash presented a couple great advantages:
1) Faster loading speed vs each page content being loaded seperately. Flash maintains a central library of graphics and compresses them in just the right way to keep their file size small and sharing the bulk to the user during loading cycles. Great since people lacked the internet speeds we have today.
2) Don’t know java or basic? With Flash you could have stylish graphics that users could interact with.
3) Need to develop a web form? This was only a couple click and drags away in Flash. Compared to other web development software available at the time flash changed how people looked at web design.

Visitors to your website only had 1 problem. Refresh. When your entire website is based on a limited number of flash designs you ran into the problem where browsers couldn’t identify where you were in your session and thus has no reference point to bring you back to. Often users would drop sessions and then complain.

Fortunately, flash has found it’s place in our world. Today flash is still used to stream media, navigate websites, games, and so much more. People have even found ways to insert cookies into a browser from flash programs.

If one lesson could be learned from flash it could be that we should use technology appropriately. Just because a butter knife can unscrew a bolt doesn’t mean it should be used for that purpose. In the same way that you can build a website out of flash doesn’t mean that you should.

I find many companies improperly using technology. Virtualization may be the networking buzz word for today. Everyone is so excited about the benefits of virtualization that they don’t properly weigh the risks. I am definitly looking forward to seeing where virtualization takes us and to see where virtualization fails to meet market demands. I will definitly be talking about virtualization, but right now everyone is talking about the good points for virtualization. I don’t want to be hasty when writing down my pros and cons review for it.

After closing down Techblog for several years I find myself with enough ‘free’ time to start blogging once more.  My plan is to bring back some of the more popular blogs on technologies that people still use today as well as new blogs on technologies that were never covered.

For those who are reading Techblog for the 1st time I would like to provide some background information on myself. My name is Ryan Wagner and I have been working in the IT industry since 1995.  During that time I have worked with SMB, Fortune 500 companies, and multiple goverments.