Pablo Fernicola's Personal Blog

Now and then I get people asking me what I have been up to (and not blogging about it). Well, last week we released the Tech Preview for one part of the project my team has been working on.

Tech Preview blog

This is a very exciting milestone and kicks off the public phase of what I expect will be a fairly impactful set of tools to help with scientific information dissemination. And, certainly, information related to medicine and related fields tends to impact all of us at one point in our life.

With the fresh HD DVD news, I am going to kick off a discussion on my views on the future direction for HD and video content consumption, based on my personal experience.

I love movies and enjoy watching the good ones several times, going back to them as if they were great books. I also enjoy the extra material that comes with many discs. But, this behavior does not match the mainstream public, so one angle in this discussion will relate to the different audiences, and another to the technologies involved and their likely evolution.

Read below and see if you agree with me that the future is in streaming content...

With great sadness I received news this weekend of the passing of Tom Dowdy.

Came back from vacation to find that my primary desktop computer (Dell Dimension E510) would not power up, and the light on the power button was blinking an amber color. And, as it turned out, the 1 year warranty had expired a month earlier. I tried unplugging the different devices, resetting internal connectors, but the problem would not go away. This has a happy ending, so in case you also run into a similar problem with your Dell system, read on ...

Got this question on email today:

I need to build the fastest possible 2D grid control for a trading application (no 3D whatsoever). Should I use DirectX or GDI+?

Which is a pretty good question. We give a lot of overview and background material in the SDK, but not a lot of prescriptive guidance.