Jamie had a meeting with a prospective client in London last week. It went alright, but it's going to be at least a few months before it kicks off.

One of my favourite coders Reg Braithwaite shuttered his blog a while back, and I thought it was a huge loss. Everything he wrote got me thinking, and I only understood half of it on the first pass. I got to meet Reg at SciBarCamp and he seems like a really personable guy. I see him in the neighbourhood at Le Gourmand, but I haven't re-introduced myself.

For the first time since I joined Scimatic, I'm working from home. Which is a big change for me, since at my last job, all I did was telecommute.

In general, I'm a big fan of telecommuting and distributed groups. It's how I worked for the last seven years at my previous job, and I found that the benefits far outweighed the disadvantages. The primary advantage is one of efficiency:

I switched to a MacBook Pro about a year ago.  A dirty little secret is that I do all my word processing in Windows.  I needed to purchase Office 2007  for a client project a while back and its price tag made the decision for me.

On the Mac I wanted an open source solution for quickly editing documents.  I know that Pages is great and Office for Mac can be ok at times but I already paid for Office 2007.

The economy is in a death-spiral and we're heading for the Second Great Depression.

Well, that's what everyone seems to be saying. Bad time to be a small software company. Bad time to be self-employed. Start heading for the exits because les bon temps cessent de rouler. Maybe all of those things are true, but I'm actually pretty happy to be where we are right now.

A small update to the AnIML Tools project was released today. The functionality to navigate between AnIML nodes in the Colobus viewer was moved to the Main Menu and Toolbar.

I've been working on some data fitting routines lately. My natural response was to grab my copy of Numerical Recipes, and thought that their section on the Levenberg-Marquardt algorithm would be useful. I mentioned it to Jamie, and he said "you'd better check the license."

I'm pretty excited that Yoichiro Nambu, Makoto Kobayashi and Toshihide Maskawa won the Nobel Prize for Physics this year.

As Jamie said, we're doing some Python development in Eclipse, so I cooked up a quick Vibrant Ink-ish color scheme for PyDev. Here is the PyDev preference file for Eclipse.

I have finally found the time to put a bit of development effort into the AnIML Tools project again.  Today version 0.2.0 was release and hopefully will make the introduction to AnIML formatted files a little easier for new comers.

This release was many usability improvements.  A much improved installer in now implemented, an online help system has been built into the project.  There are also now direct links to the feature and bug reports on the project's sourceforge page.