And more where will mine be in the near future? I was looking at Macbook Pros today and I am seriously considering switching over for quite a few reasons. The first reason is that I really want to get stuck into learning Python or a non-windows programming language, and it seems Mac OS X is a natural extension for Python. I’m not looking for a programming language alone though and would prefer a technology stack instead.

The .NET framework is a technology stack that stretches quite far, from desktop development, database development, web development and mobile development, and you dont have to learn separate programming languages for each. I dont just write code for web development purposes – I write whatever I need for a particular job. Windows Powershell seamlessly integrates with the .NET framework’s BCL (base class library).

It seems to me that because Mac OS x is a UNIX system at the core it would integrate well with hosted content on Linux- or Unix-based systems, which means that you become part of a technology stack. With my limited knowledge and experience on Ubuntu I was able to connect through a shell to a Linux-based webhost, and I was able to traverse through directories and files. This seems like a natural extension of the development environment to me.

A while ago I noticed that at least two Microsoft people left to work for Google and while this may not seem like much of an event I find myself questioning the platform(s) I use for development. At heart I am a curious and innovative person who will generally seek to use something to solve a particular problem, regardless of what technology it uses. I have also been guilty of some fanboyism with regards to things like Visual Studio and C#, but I too realise that being a fanboy of something tends to make you a bit ignorant of other things. I have for instance decided not to learn PHP simply for the reason that I dont like its syntax style, the dollars just seem to clutter the code and PHP is not such a widely applicable language such as C# or Python. You could write any type of application with either Python or C# – windows-based or web-based. I also seem to think PHP is not quite on the same level as Python or C# in terms of language maturity, but that is just an opinion.

I started this blog about two years ago while I was still working at another company and in that same year I won an award at my company for Innovation. At the end of 2008 I resigned at that company and moved to another company, where I am presently working. I can honestly say that in the year and a half that I have worked at this company I have gained some significant skills, particularly C# skills and web development skills (in particular AJAX). I have gained some SQL Server skills too and I have come to work in a bigger team than I had previously. Being in a bigger team makes you more competitive, and it also makes you more aware of others, but it also exposes people’s weak ego’s. This blog has not had that much traffic, but I didnt see it as a money-making thing, I just wanted a place where I could try and express what I experience, and I think for that purpose I have succeeded.

Here is to another 20 years!

At the moment I have two domains:

• Fremus.co.za
• Fremus.net

The difference between the two is that one runs on an Apache HTTP server and the other runs on Internet Information Services (IIS). Why two different web servers? WordPress is my favourite blogging platform, and although .NET has a few blogging platforms available (BlogEngine.NET and Subtext) I have been using WordPress for a few years now and have come to really appreciate it for its powerful simplicity. I also do not want to create two separate blogging systems, one for the .NET website and the other for the WordPress one. I want to show that both systems can work together to build a single brand.

www.fremus.co.za will focus on all aspects of blogging and will cover general areas of technology, .NET specific technologies and general interest. I may from time-to-time blog about personal issues and feelings.

So then why have a web server that runs on IIS? Well I am a C# developer by day, so I thought I would like a portal where I could publish or demo solutions I develop, and .NET just does not run on Apache (maybe Mono solves this) at the moment for me. Thus its clear from this that Fremus.co.za will act as the home for my blog and Fremus.net will be used for .NET development. What is not clear is how I will use the two to create some sort of brand. Clearly both serve a different purpose, but I feel both represent some sort of personal brand.

So with that in mind I decided to fire up my mindmapping tool, Cayra, and started to map some ideas on how the two websites will feed off each other. And basically I came up with a strategy that focuses the .NET side of things to have a homepage that is dedicated to the following items (areas on the home page):

• An ATOM/RSS feed of the posts from www.fremus.co.za
• An area dedicated to ‘Social Feeds’:
  • Twitter – Here I want to look at .NET technologies that provide cool ways to interact with Twitter. My thinking is to have my own status updates plus several Twitter threads. It might be useful to write some code that assimilates this functionality. I have been looking at LinqToTwitter for this purpose.
  • Youtube – I thought it might be a cool idea to list the videos that I watch. And there are API’s available for it.
  • Galleries – I would like to write some sort of gallery application that displays photos I have taken of places I have been to. I am going to be buying a digital camera soonish.
  • I will only have links to LinkedIn and Facebook profiles, have no immediate plans to use API’s
• I want to create an area that shows/tells of the projects I am currently busy with. I have two projects I am working on at the moment, which I will detail later

The goal is to create some sort of personal brand that represents me and what my passion is. The brand should ideally be reflective of how I would express myself and how that expression would materialize to the rest of the world, and technology is a part of that brand.

I regularly check out www.jimmyr.com for the top digg posts and images and I also clicked through to another very popular web design portal called Smashing Magazine and found their one of their latest articles with 30 “free” wordpress themes from which I found my current website’s theme. Its really quite clean and crisp

So I noticed that my site had an incoming link (the WordPress dashboard shows this) and I clicked on that link and came across this site where they have an exact copy of one of my articles. On the same site I clicked through to the WordPress blog and saw that they have updated their theme directory. The theme directory seems to contain a few nice looking themes and one in particular seems cool, and I have decided to use it. Its called Amazing Grace and worked well the first time. Its interesting to see that WordPress 2.6 now creates a little theme preview window. Nice touch.

The primary context for this website is to provide individuals or organisations web-based solutions. From this context it is possible to conceptualise an exact offering, not just from a solution point-of-view but also from a value-driven point of view. Solutions have to solve the problem they are there to solve but solutions also need to add value.

How do you formulate a concept? Where do you start searching for ideas and more importantly where do you get your direction from? Direction is reasonably important when defining a concept or searching for a concept. A concept needs a context within which it can be defined. Companies who specialise in the development of training material, for instance, have to understand or find a context for the training material that they create and from the context they develop a concept and from the concept they develop the training material. The concept will work within the boundaries of that context. So basically any concept needs a context…

What can help you find a context for developing a concept? Developing one or more websites is an example of a context, and the method you use to go about constructing a website could be considered the concept within that context. Creating or developing websites means that you adhere to some strict rules and guidelines, e.g. developing standards-based websites is an example of the rules that you must adhere too, and those guidelines shape your concept. Another guideline that needs to be considered when developing a concept is time and money, something that can be forgotten sometimes.

Why is it important to define the way you get to a concept? I guess you have to learn somehow.

Web development as a context relies on a few important things, but most of all it relies on a clear understanding of what it is you are developing and also how that understanding will be presented (Web design). I sometimes struggle to differentiate between web development and web design. Do people differentiate between the two because design-minded people and system-minded people think? Are those design-minded individuals simply Photoshop jockeys who will ignore web standards as long as their design looks right? Do system-minded people have a superiority complex? I wonder.

Weird name for a blog huh, well weird at least to me, and maybe to other people as well. It’s basically a combination of the first three letters of my first name, Fredrik and the last three letters of my surname, Erasmus, which when combined gives you Fremus. The idea came as a suggestion from a friend, and to be totally honest, I did not like it too much at first, but I even mentioned it to my mom and she liked it too. Fremus was thus born. Fremus also refers to a lions roar or lions that roar…

I want to make an acknowledgment quickly – I am a lazy Microsoft Windows User, who does not like to struggle much with PC problems, and who generally steers clear of anything that looks too hectically challenging. I like things to be one-click solutions ALL THE TIME. Guess thats a bit dreamy, but thats how I would like things to be. Unfortunately they are not, which is good, because it forces me to actually do some work to make something work. Let me give you an example, a pretty ftp client vs a command line utility such as PSFTP. I have generally, 99% of the time, been using FTP clients such as Core FTP Lite for uploading web content, until today that is. Today I used a program called PuTTy, which allows you to connect to a web server through a shell, which then allows you to use a command line interface to manage files. I found this particularly useful, because I uploaded some content earlier using a FTP client and I placed some files in a wrong folder and wanted to change it and ended up creating a folder with a different name (but I actually wanted to use the original folder name). I couldn’t delete the folder because there was some hidden content in it which then prompted me to do some searching on shells, which lead me to PuTTY. Using PuTTY I could access and delete those hidden files. The point is that FTP clients can sometimes be buggy, and crash for some reason, whereas using a shell there is just no GUI, which means less bugs. Thats my two cents anyway..