Sixth Sence

http://www.ted.com/talks/pranav_mistry_the_thrilling_potential_of_sixthsense_technology.html  Check this out, the video is about 15 mins long, but well worth the time, a device for the future, with the discussion of Project Natal, Touch Screen, Surface etc, this comes across as a possible killer device / app.

Integration of the physical world and the digital in such a seamless fashion is fascinating and clearly a direction that will only gain momentum, in my opinion.

Given that the device is inexpensive to manufacture, and the software will be open sourced, this looks to be game changing, levels the playing field.

Accepting Innovation Award (SIFMA 2009)

Check out the following link http://www.windowsfs.com/uncategorized/innovation-in-equity-trading, this was back at the end of June at the SIFMA Conference, clearly my dress sense was a little miss-guided.

New Silverlight Components

Infragistics has released the following, Silverlight Components, check out the Pivot Grid, this looks pretty good, excel users will feel right at home with this.

Back from the Dead

Its been a while since I actually blogged, getting back into the habit again, so stay tuned.

xamDataGrid, NetAdvantage For WPF

I have been using the Beta version of Infragistics WPF toolkit for a couple of months now and have given it some slack but I am somewhat disapointed with the recent production release in a number of areas;

1. Peformance is bad, really bad, to the point where I can not justify using this for a major project that I am working on, and am seriously looking for an alternative, Xceed comes to mind.

2. There appears to be no ability to generate Summary rows in the xamDataGrid, this for many users is a very important feature, and I use it frequently for financial reports that  I need to generate for the client.  It is interesting that there is a Header concept but no equivalent Footer concept, BTW Exceed has this!

3. Did I mention that performance is bad !!!!!, this really is the show stopper as far as I am concerned.

I am willing to give this toolkit a chance, but the above issues need to be addressed soon, otherwise I have to find an alternative.

Web Services on Wall Street Part II

Looks like my collegue hit the spot at this weeks (14th Feb 2007) Web Services on Wall Street.  The session was well attended and I managed to answer a number of the attendee’s questions as well

WeakReference be damned

Nice come back on the reasons for the usage of WeakReferences

WSonWS

I will be spending my day today at the WSonWS conference, a  collegue of mine from Eikos Partners will be presenting, if you are there check out the session entitled ‘Microsoft .Net 3.0: A Serious Play for SOA on Wall Street?’

Tiger on HP

Given all of the hype around BootCamp and Parallels on the Mac, to allow the running of XP/Vista on Mac hardware, I started to wonder if the reverse was possible, i.e. running the Tiger OS on my trusted DV6000 from HP.  Why you may ask would I want to do this, firstly because I like my HP, secondly battery life on my HP running Windows is approx 5 hours, but on the Mac it is about 2 hours, and no extended battery can be purchased, and finally because I do not want to buy another laptop, I already have too many to count, and do not want to buy yet another one.

Reseach on the web, has not provided any information, perhaps I am asking the wrong question, so I decided to talk to an Apple employee at one of their stores.  It seems that I was the first person to ask the question, ( I find this hard to believe ), the tech support guy in the store was a little suprised I asked my question, and came up with the following reply ( this is summariezed version  )

Tiger will only run on hardware that has a special type of memory chip, the OS looks for the tweak and will only run if this tweak is found.

Take this for what it’s worth, a little more digging is needed I think, and perhaps a little experiment of my own, does anyone know where I can get a copy of Tiger for free ?

Mini Meltdown

A mini Bill Gates melt down