Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) promises lots, not least of which is the ability to migrate your SOA application to a grid like environment.

Actually migrating your applications and realizing the difference it can make is a different story. But DreamWorks have managed it, They've converted many of their internal ERP applications into SOA applications, and that has reduced their server requirements, giving more rack space to the server farms that render CGI animation.

In one of my first posts here at ComputerWorld, I talked about the Nokia 770 as a potentially useful business device, along the lines of the pads you see frequently in Star Trek. Finally they are beginning to appear in the hands of reviewers and interested users, and there's a good example here. There are also reviews here and here.

There are few things more likely to put you in a bad mood first thing on a Monday morning than the power going off at 8:45am. Not only was this minutes before I was due to start work, it was also just seconds before I was about to make my first cup of the coffee for the day!

As usual, I double checked that everything was working fine on the UPSs, and waited 10 minutes, before safely shutting the servers down a full half hour before the UPS batteries would have run out. I wait ten minutes, just in case it's a minor blip, and I always shutdown early if I can so that there is some juice left in the batteries in case I need to bring the machines back up to get some information.

Whenever you talk about a GUI under Unix or Linux, your first thought is KDE or Gnome. But KDE and Gnome would be nothing without the X Window System, or more simply X11 or X, on which they rely. Free Software Magazine has an excellent, in-depth look to answer the question What is X?.

X is a windowing environment that provides a bare skeleton for GUI operations. Ignoring the display elements for a second, one of the key elements of X is that the computer on which the application is running, and the machine on which the interface to that application is provided do not need to be the same machine. I can run Mozilla on one of my Linux servers, but control and use the application on my Mac OS X desktop.

In a thoroughly unsurprising twist to my adventures with the iMac Core Duo, this morning I fitted 2GB of RAM to my iMac and the difference it has made to the speed and responsiveness of the machine is astounding.

RAM always does make a difference - not one of the machines here has anything but the maximum amount of RAM it supports - but it is always interesting to see where the differences in speed become most noticeable.

On this iMac all applications are a lot faster, boot up is now in the 15-20 second range, and applications hardly get the opportunity to bounce in the dock before they are open and ready.

I hate adverts on websites, and I find the Google text ads some of the worst as they can completely ruin the flow of the text. This is worst on many blogger sites, where an advert will be inserted straight into the area where the text content of the blog is concerned and often, frankly, it just looks ugly, not to mention highly confusing if you are trying to read the entry online.

The graphical ads are usually tolerable, as long as they are placed in a suitable location that allows the text of the content to flow around the ad itself, just as it it were a photo or image as part of an article. That doesn't mean I like them any better, but least you can more easly tell where the ad begins and ends. More annoying are those animated and flash ads that have an annoying habit of sapping CPU time while you view them, to varying degrees.

So I've had my shiny new Intel iMac for a few weeks now, and it has now fully replaced the original Apple transition kit (made easier by the purchase of a MiniDVI to DVI cable so that I could plug in a second monitor). In fact it is so good, it has changed my feelings about desktops and laptops.

The iMac is great, and very quick (and hopefully it will be a lot quicker once the 2GB RAM I purchased arrives tomorrow). I would easily recommend this iMac to anybody, but more on that in a moment.

I have already been reconfiguring the server hardware, which, as I mentioned last year, started with some rationalization of the servers. I had a wide array of servers to support the work I did, from HP-UX and Sun boxes (including a relatively recently purchased Ultra60), a Mac OS X server (based on the old G4 box) and four different Intel based servers, from a dual CPU unit, through two identical AMD units right down to a VIA EPIA 10000.

Terminal 5 at Heathrow is being built at the moment, and after what seems like years of basic construction they are starting to get into the fitting out of the T5 terminal with the technology that will support the airline and shop operations.

There's a good overview of the some of the challenges and progress at Silicon.com. To quote from the article:

In any construction project these days, IT integration has become a major part of the process. With T5, BAA tells us the IT systems represent the greatest risk for the project. There are 100 shops that need network connections, and the airport itself will have wireless services, flight information boards, mobile networks, CCTV and building management systems. And, what's more, all these things must have a certain amount of scalability.

Just when you think you've got everything covered ...

In my post this morning on the problems of finding Intel compatible versions of my key applications, I mentioned Quickeys, a product which I've been using for over 10 years now.

Today, just an hour after my morning post, they announced a Universal Binary edition of Quickeys. Intel Mac users rejoice!

I've been using an Intel based Mac as my main machine now for a few months, first with the developer transition kit (DTK), and now with the shiny iMac Core Duo that Apple sent as replacement for that unit. However, I can see it taking a long time before I reach even an all-Intel version of old environment, and for some applications I may never get an Intel version.

The problem with any transition like this (and remember that any long time Mac user like myself will remember the move from 68k to PowerPC) is waiting for the applications that you use regularly to be migrated to the new platform.