Sweet deal...

We just got a really good offer to participate in a major tech event next year. Obviously we were caught off guard (money and time wise) We will have to do some figuring out...

Winding down?...

Our vacations are winding down. And given the amount incidents during them, we are almost happy they are over. Ready to go back to Santiago and enjoy the Galician waves, and the rain:-}

I finally got a laptop powerful enough to run VS 2005, so devriot .Net will resume.

I am helping some friends' startup (phurnace) developing one of their tools. It feels good when a friend thanks you that one's work did not blow up in front of the VCs and made the point.

In the bay for more than a day...

Due to unexpected family emergencies, we will need to extend our stay in the Bay area for another week, were it not for the sad situation this would be a great change in plans.

We will try to make the most out of it. Some fine sushi dinner is waiting for us...

The trip to Austin was as expected, one meeting went well (the RCP project one) the other a no-go.

This friend of mine really needs to get her QA process faster, more manageable, and easier on the developers. But they have already started using junit and when things got difficult they turned to xml.

It felt like the moving sand trap, the more they moved deeper they sank. It was also challenging to explain how one could write tests without writing code and not to spill the beans.

Anyways, we will be around the San Andreas fault for another week.

600--, 100++, Thread me!

Well, close to 600 downloads of the white papers. In little over a year, it seems like a good word-of-mouth.

The beta downloads have passed the 100 mark. With little prodding too. The interesting thing is that some of the downloads of Mac and Linux versions are coming from the Microsoft world(?)

I have been working more on my friend's project lately since we also have to pay bills :-} and working on the .Net add-in.

On the tool itself, another friend of mine came asking for help. This developer, like many others, was facing the daunting task of having to develop their own code plus the unit tests for that code.

In this case, there was also a lot of java, parallelism, and heavy database access involved. No wonder :-} Regrettably, our load and stress logic is not ready.

Hopefully, she will forgive me...

VSP, bootstrapping!

The add-in architecture we had is not good any longer. Using a Visual Studio Package makes much more sense. So we are dealing with that now because it is a tad different from what we had.

And I just got off the phone with a friend/client that needs some Java work...

Downloads of the eclipse beta are going well. No complaints so far :-}

One would think that...

After all the unfulfilled promises that the spanish national team has provided its supporters over numerous soccer world cups, people would react more cautiously to a good match (4-0 over Ukraine on the opener)

After all, Ukraine could have had a bad afternoon.

But politicians from the left to right are trying to score some points. This match reflects the triumph of the Spain as seen from the left, right, up, down, south or north.

Funny, if the team loses in the quarter-finals, as it has happened since 1950, are the politicians going to blame the other side too?

During a weekend when Alonso got closer his second F1 title, and Nadal won his second straight French Open, what is all the fuss about? A good game?

Until Spain reaches the final and wins it, the press should pay more attention to other issues:

Did you know that Wayne Rooney's transfer fee is 8 times the total amount invested in seed money in Spain and bigger than the seed money invested in France (both figures for 2005)?

Ain't that funny?