Trials, Victor Laszlo Style

ecto didn't really work out for me. After trying to update a post a second time, I started getting an URL related error I didn't want to bother debugging, and uninstalled it.

Mike Salisbury, QA & Support Manager at Quantrix, sent me a nice email yesterday with a new trial key for the new updated version of Quantrix Modeler 1.2. Mike was gracious enough to help me out back in May with a similar although disparate problem after I posted to the Quantrix Modeler forum. This time, I didn't do that, but Mike found me anyway. Whatever I may think about their serial number and trial licensing scheme, I have to say that Mike goes out of his way to help people out -- thanks Mike.

Sadly, like I said the other day, I'm not sure I have much use for Quantrix Modeler now. I'm not doing the kinds of analytics I was doing at my previous job, and the only straight-up financial modeling I do is for my own personal finances. Not that having a more flexible tool for that than Excel and Quicken (and the occasional MATLAB graphs and Mathematica toys) would be a bad thing, just that I don't know if it would add so much more that it would be worth the cost. Outside of a purely financial context, I can see some potential uses for Quantrix, but again, mostly all for my own projects or one-off "what if" type ideas. Mike, if you're reading this, give me some ideas of what people are using Quantrix for outside of finance. I'll be sure to check the forum too.

In other news, Laszlo got open sourced on the 5th, which is way cool. I was really excited when I saw Laszlo demoed at Lightweight Languages 2, but due to it's commercial nature, I knew I wasn't going to be able to play with it or use it any time soon. Now that's changed, I'm looking forward to building some cool stuff with it, especially user interfaces for some web apps I already have in the personal projects pipeline.

Programmable Nibbles

I'm playing with ecto right now as a desktop blog client. This is the first post with it. Waiting for w.bloggar to get updated, figured I might as well take another client for a spin.

Some programmer notes and blurbs:

• Programming Ruby, Second Edition shipped last week. I got my PDF on October 1st and this past Saturday the postman woke me up with the delivery of the hardcopy. Not a bad way to start the weekend.
  
• My current employer, Alexa Internet, just launched some brand-spankin' new web services (in beta) this week. Check out the information on the Alexa Web Information Service. Basically, the data you get in the Alexa Toolbar can now be fetched from us programmatically with both REST and SOAP APIs. Pretty spiffy. In my "spare time", I'm working on a library in in Ruby to make it easy to build AWIS-powered apps.
  
• Possibly my favorite blogger and Rubyist who I haven't yet met in person, why the lucky stiff recently added Chapter Five to his Poignant Guide to Ruby.
  
• Quantrix Modeler 1.2 was recently released from the folks over at Quantrix. I was testing a previous version for some analytics when I worked at a previous employer, but didn't get around to really putting it through its paces. I don't have any huge need for it these days; I'm doing most of my analytics (which are not so much a function of my job as they are a hobby, and a component of my other projects) in Excel, MATLAB, and friends. I did download and install the new trial version today, but getting it authorized was too much of a hassle just to play with the new features.
  
• Franz Allegro Common Lisp 7.0 should be released soon... lots of new features make it look pretty interesting. Maybe before November?
  
• Playing with Flickr these past few weeks. While it won't stop me from writing my own photo asset management software (eventually), it is pretty nifty. The sharing features are definitely nice, as is the simple fact of them hosting all my photos for me, rather than having any of my servers get pummeled should I take an interesting shot one of these days. The Flash UI is amazingly well done, I am seriously impressed with their use of Flash. Almost makes it feel like a rich desktop/client-side app, but with the plus-sides of the web too. I hope to get some time to play with their web services API soon as well.
  
• Jenson got back from his Arctic Cruise this Friday. Evan anounced he was resigning from Blogger/Google last night. I smell a party.