Finally back to work after the marathon 34 day work/vacation trip that brought me to England, Holland and Thailand.

The jetlag from 12 timezones is brutal compared to the standard European 6 time zones that I'm use to.

Scimatic Software will be moving over to the new office January 2nd.  Everything should be up and running early January.

Small NPlot note: download count is now 1366, not bad for the first month on sourceforge.

At the moment I'm sitting in my least favourite location in Toronto... Pearson Airpot.  What did poor Mr. Pearson ever do to have the most boring place in the city named after him?

I'm off for a 5 week business/vacation trip.  The business end of the trip brings me to Bath, England for talks with a start up instrumentation company and to Utrecht, Holland to do some onsite work at a client. The vacation end of the trip brings Heather and I to Thailand for just under 3 weeks.  we are both really looking forward to Thailand.  This will be the first trip to Asia for the both of us and the first time that we've had to relax in a while.  In typical fashion we will be planning on the plane ride over (thankfully is is long, 11 hours from Amsterdam).  We're planning on site seeing in Bangkok and then heading south to find a nice beach hut to rent.

Starting in January, Scimatic Software along with Tiny Planet will be starting a small scale Coworking space.  The space is located on Fraser Street in Liberty Village, pictures here.

The 1300 square foot space will be shared with 4 individuals, all of which are from different companies.  The purpose of this space is to give another option to people working from home offices.  Working from home sounds like a dream but it gets old rather quickly.  The hardest aspect of a home office is the separation between work and personal life. A lot of times there there is no clear definition to when the end of the work day actually occurred.  Working from a home office is sort of like keeping grad school hours (though with much better pay!).

Since our first release of NPlot was released on November 11,2006 we've had 127 downloads in the first 6 days.

It's nice to see that there is a loyal following towards the project.  I've been in contact with some developers with good ideas and features that they want to bring to the project.  If anyone looking to help out with the project that hasn't contacted me yet, please contact me here.

My development will put on hold till the end of the year as I'm off on a 5 week business/vacation trip (Thailand yeah!!).  I will also be meeting with a European company that has done a lot of development for NPlot and with luck will be donating the work us.

NPlot version 0.9.10 is now up and ready for download on Sourceforge.

A big thanks has to go out to Angel Marin who is responsible for configuring the Sourceforge project and this first release.  I'll have to pull my weight when I'm back from my 5 week business trip/holiday.

For developers that are interested in helping out with the NPlot project, please feel free to contact me.

The NPlot project is now licensed under BSD and is now on Sourceforge.

I will be maintaining this project with Angel Marin, who has been a machine in configuring the project.  I'll be working on general improvements and getting a version up on mono on Mac OSX.

I'm also on the hunt for screenshots of companies/individuals using NPlot. 

The NPlot project may be heading to Sourceforge... stay tuned...

I have been using an Open Source graphing component called NPlot on a couple of projects.

I noticed that the last post on the site mentioned that development has pretty much stopped.

Since I develop scientific software, pretty much every project I do has the requirement that it must graph something.  Reading this news that NPlot development is stopping I contacted the creator of the project to see what options were out there.

With the agreement of Matt Howlett (NPlot creator and maintainer), Scimatic Software will be maintaining its own version of NPlot.  Scimatic's version will be called Graphique.

This is a quick test from a new beta tool from Microsoft for editing blogs.

Setup was fairly easy to use with Drupal.  I found a good set of instructions here.

The interface and usability of WLW is quick slick for a beta.  Links are easy to insert, pictures are also easy:

From the Toronto Star:

"Steve Allan, out for his morning walk, was passing by the house when it exploded.

Coincidentally, Allan formerly owned a home that blew up in the same location 10 years ago and has since moved to a home on a nearby street, neighbours said. He suffered multiple cuts to the right side of his body and was taken to hospital with non life-threatening injuries."

Maybe it's time to move far far away...