August 2006 - Posts
These offers are not that widely known, so if you are a UK company and develop software/services using Microsoft technologies then you should definitely look at these couple of offers.
Firstly the Microsoft UK Action Pack - containing 10 licences of Microsoft Office, Windows XP Professional, full server licence of Windows 2003 Server and more.
Secondly the Empower for ISVs offer - with 5 licences for Office, Windows XP and MSDN Universal subscription.
Both offers do cost money, £199 + VAT and £260 + VAT annually respectively, but offer great value for money compared with buying separately.
Matt Davey pointed to this Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) demo (video) of an example trading system by Lab49 - it shows a number of data visualisation techniques.
Also of note is a little project called, Snoop, a Spy++ utility for WPF by Peter Blois. If you are doing quite a bit of WPF development then it is handy to know how to clear .xbap from your machine cache.
Unfortunately it doesn't seem like the online petition to get Microsoft to reverse the name change from WinFX to .NET Framework 3 is going to happen, I totally agree that the name change is confusing now and will be worse going forward, plus our community site RoadToWinFX will need a redesign ;).
If you want to see how to hold an audience and put together an impressive animated slidedesk then watch Hans Rosling, Professor of International Heath at Sweden's Karolinska Institute.
It is part of a wider project, Gapminder, to show Human Development Trends across Income, Regions, Health, etc.
When I saw that there had been discussions about shipping Visual Studio Express as part of Windows Vista. I thought yes they should, it would hopefully introduce a few more people to programming. But unfortunately this isn't going to happen for a number of reasons.
So people will just have to continue to download it separately.
One to remember for later, via Kannan,...
This little Flash game, Goggles, using Google Maps data is fun:
Especially as it reminded me of an old Spectrum game I used to play called Tornado Low Level: TLL.
Flash and Flex, seems to be popping up on the web alot more lately - with web-based video moving away from RealPlayer, Apple Quicktime, etc. to Flash-based players - whether YouTube or Google Video. Mike Taulty spotted that CNet TV videos load and play really quickly with great quality.
Finally, I also liked this Flash page, Speedtest.net, for testing your bandwidth:
After my previous entry about natural language processing, I came across a project by the University of Sheffield called 'General Architecture for Text Engineering' (GATE).
The project aims to be:
- The Eclipse of Natural Language Engineering, the Lucene of Information Extraction, the leading toolkit for Text Mining.
- Used worldwide by thousands of scientists, companies, teachers and students.
- Comprised of an architecture, a free open source framework (or SDK) and graphical development environment.
- Used for all sorts of language processing tasks, including Information Extraction in many languages.
You can read the user guide, watch video demos or download it for yourself.
There is an online entity recognition web service demo, I tried it on the same example as Inxight's Thingfinder - although not as good as that commercial offering it is impressive and extensible.
Certainly worth more investigation for processing and 'understanding' unstructured content.