Random Ramblings

Over the past few days I have been gathering quotes to do a PC rollover.  Amongst this I had a discussion with one of the rep’s about the use of wide-screen monitors, specifically in a business/corporate environment.

Now I get the attraction for a home user, with many PCs acting as a media centre, thus the call for wide screens to watch DVDs and other visual media.  I’ve had a wide-screen on the past 2 notebooks and am in the process of purchasing some new wide-screens for my PCs.

However, I don’t see the point in having a wide-screen monitor sitting on an office desk.  There are going to be no wide-screen formatted media being shown on these monitors, and the software we use on them has been developed for standard aspect monitors, thus the use of a wide-screen monitor would seem redundant.

What also troubles me is that wide-screen monitors are usually cheaper than the equivalent “size” standard screen.  While I do get that it does take time for business to catch up to the consumer, just think of the number of corporates using Windows Vista, I don’t see why people who prefer standard screens should have to pay a premium over the wide-screens.

The next time we do a rollover, chances are standard screens will be long and buried and thus I thought long and hard about it, but I have had to accept wide-screen monitors in this order. The equivalent size is around $40 more expensive for a standard screen, which is not much but in an order of 50 it’s the cost of a PC in savings.  But I’m still uneasy about the whole thing.

When trying to think of something, anything, to blog about in the past it has been a random hodge-podge of irregularly-updated posts about nothing and anything at the time.

Considering over the next 12 months I will be embarking on a rather large feat to develop 3 new applications, one of which is a web app, and to continue maintaining the 2 applications that are currently deployed, I think I’ll use this blog to document that journey.

The applications we currently have deployed are:

• a customer database, trust account management and reporting system: almost all of the day-to-day functions for our offices involve this software in some way, shape or form (.NET 1.1); and
• a student database: we run a course each year as a way of gaining our seasonal staff and their details and progress need to be tracked (.NET 2.0).

These applications have been constantly updated and expanded (specifically the first one) to improve the workflow for our staff and have both been developed over the past 3 years.

The new applications are:

• a rostering system: the current rostering process involves updating an excel spreadsheet which can be rather cumbersome and has a somewhat messy format (.NET 1.1);
• a backup system: backing up data to other PCs in the office, and to allow the backup to CD weekly (.NET 1.1/2.0); and
• a web-based customer engagement application: to allow the organisation to seek clients who prefer to interact either outside of hours, or are more tech-savvy and prefer to interact with an organisation online (.NET 2.0/3.5)

The first two aren’t terribly exciting.  I’ve already started on the first one, the basic UI is completed and functional, the next bit will be to implement the report generation.  The second is to replace the mostly manual process of backing up data to CD, and to once again regain a nightly backup process within the office.

The third is the most exciting.  I’ve been out of the web game for some time now.  I mean, our current website has still got a table-based layout, with some CSS for formatting only.  I want the application to be functional and useable without sacrificing the security of the client’s sensitive data.  I had intended to get this up and running by June/July of this year, but many delays brought me to concede it for another year.  I am still optimistic that it can be completed by June/July next year and given that I’ll be starting development on it in the next month, I hope that I can churn out something good quickly and work on making it better.

So, please join me on my path of discovery as I fumble through creating these applications, and learning more about what the web has to offer a developer.

Thanks for coming to visit. I’ve just changed over to WordPress for this blog, and I’m in the process of writing my first full post on what I hope to achieve with it. Stay tuned, all will be revealed shortly.