Back in May I made the comment that Mobile device convergence is not nirvana, yet if you'd read the post on my personal blog, Choosing a phone based on its case, you would have seen I'd chosen the K800i.

The phone does, of course, blow my arguments against convergence out of the water. It provides a wide combination of features that I used to use separate components for, but which, now, I can just get by with one unit that I'm always going to take with me.

I was reading Solid-State Disk: Soul of The New Machines, where Robert Mitchell talks about solid state disks and their move into the laptop arena.

There are some obvious benefits -- better performance and longer battery life, for example. The lower power requirements and almost instantaneous 'on' speed mean that it makes a huge difference to the way you use your laptop.

The use of solid state memory for storage is increasing -- the MP3 player market was where it started and exploded, followed by the extended use in digital cameras and USB thumb drives.  The size is shrinking and the capacity increasing --something nailed home for me this weekend when I bought a 1GB Memory Stick Micro (M2) card. It's smaller than my thumbnail, and almost a quarter of the size of the 1GB Memory Stick Pro I bought just last year my digital camera.

I’ve been playing with Solaris 10 6/06 (or U2, as I’ll refer to it here) – the mid-year update to the Solaris operating system. For what is classed as a minor update, there’s quite a lot here in the new release, such as ZFS, and there’s a lot more hidden behind the scenes that will appeal to both desktop and server users.

I spoke to Chris Ratcliffe at Sun about the new release, and you can hear the well-deserved enthusiasm for this release, not just because of the headline features, but because of some of the other aspects of the new release that I'll get on to later. Ironically, Chris was in the same area and Sun office that I used to work right next door; I'd often visited the office, and even borrowed a CD or two from them during the early days of Solaris testing and deployment at the company I was working at. Sometimes IT really is a smaller community than you realize!

I'm in the market for some storage at the moment, as I try and move away from the monolithic big computers here in the office to the smaller, neater, and quieter, solutions available. Stories like this one:Three terabyte desktop network drive ships are therefore catching my eye.

3TB in a desktop (well network attached storage) sounds extravagant, but is it really?

Once you start to sit down and work it out, suddenly, 3TB seems small. Let's look at a typical home environment - if everybody ripped a fairly typical 250 CD collection at full rate that would be about 160GB of data. Add a few thousand photos and you could easily be over 500GB without even noticing. Add in some movies from your video camera and you can easily tip over the terabyte. With DV video at 3.6MB/s you get about 284 seconds/per GB, or 80 hours to the TB.

Yesterday I commented on the fact that having a sixth sense was nothing knew, but that normally it wasn't applied to watching closely what your developers are doing. That was because the original referred to another CW short, Develop a Sixth Sense About IT... which talked about a new software package that monitors the files your developers have open.

I was, mildly, criticised for not taking these matters seriously. That couldn't be further from the truth. As a developer and writer I am more than aware of how you should monitor your rates and achievements. I do it by placing information into iCal and tracking that with a separate project management package that compares the recorded times with my predicted times.

In this piece Develop a Sixth Sense About IT..., which completes the expression with:

... with software that measures the effectiveness of your programmers. You won't need extrasensory perception to know how well your application development teams are working if you use a new tool that keeps tabs on their activities, claims Pamela Roussos, vice president of marketing at 6th Sense Analytics Inc. in Raleigh, N.C.

At the the heart of this is software that monitors which files are open and ergo tracks their use and editing. I'm not quite sure when covert monitoring became a sixth sense though.

I have to admit to being completely unsurprised at this announcement: Boeing to end in-flight Internet service.

The problem was always going to be the price. Today's computer users, business and consumer, are getting used to the idea of free WiFi when outside the home or office. If I go to numerous cafes, restaurants and many airports and other locations, I can get free, unfettered, Internet access through my WiFi connection. Even hotels are beginning to realize that the costs charged for a weeks Internet access (which can often be as much per day as a month of ADSL access at home) are putting people off paying.

TV recording through some kind of computing device is very popular, and as Made to order MythTV states:

You can buy a TiVo, a TiVo-like video recorder, or a Microsoft Media center PC, but who knows how long you'll be able to keep/record all your shows - so - I usually try and get folks to take MythTV for a swing, an open source alternative.

I've been recording shows digitally now for more than three years. I originally used three boxes running Windows XP that ranSnapStream in the server room, with a Windows XP based box running on a Mini-ITX system in the lounge. It was comparatively quiet, but still need ventilation and the fan was annoying.

TV recording through some kind of computing device is very popular, and as Made to order MythTV states:

You can buy a TiVo, a TiVo-like video recorder, or a Microsoft Media center PC, but who knows how long you'll be able to keep/record all your shows - so - I usually try and get folks to take MythTV for a swing, an open source alternative.

I've been recording shows digitally now for more than three years. I originally used three boxes running Windows XP that ranSnapStream in the server room, with a Windows XP based box running on a Mini-ITX system in the lounge. It was comparatively quiet, but still need ventilation and the fan was annoying.

About a year ago, I started planning some changes to the IT infrastructure here at the home office. For years, I have had a huge number of servers, largely to support the work I do across different platforms. However, as more and more OS seem to gravitate towards x86 and with virtualization like VMware and Parallels becoming easier to use and more efficient I've found I can easily start reducing the number of servers, and the number of platforms to, basically, one: x86.

My problem is one actually experienced by many companies; they need a server but can't afford to dedicate a single room to the task of holding the box, so it has to live somewhere in the office. Even in an office where there are lots of computers already, having a quiet and efficient solution helps to lower the ambient noise in the room.