Lukas Svoboda: Strategy, Architecture, Governance & Technology

Over the last few weeks Vodafone have released the "Vodafone 1210" - A Vodafone branded Windows Mobile Smartphone originally manufactured by ASUS. The beauty of this thing is the price - $599 retail for a full MS phone in NZ. The only real lacking feature is no camera. But it is fully 3G. It is also only Win Mobile 5 but not 6. No mater I think this great value for money and going on my shopping list! There is quite a bit of info on this in NZ already mainly on geekzone. So here are a few links to find out further:

Vodafone NZ Product Page | Geek Zone Review | Geek Zone rant on locking (and unlocking) the phone | Forum Discussion on the 1210

It would have been sometime early 2006 but I went and did a guest lecture at Auckland Universities' Computer Science 734 grad paper. I did a shorter version of my normal Model Driven Architecture/Development talk, if you want a copy of it download the PDF from this link.

Tomorrow and Friday I'm chairing the 2nd Annual brightstar IT Archtiecture conference. This conference attracts the cream of Architecture speakers in NZ and is limited to a small audience. More information can be found here at Brightstar.

Check out big screen headlines so far one of the best plugins for Vista media centre. It's incredible. Beautiful interface and extremely usuable application for MCE. I've been running it for a while at home on my MCE setup.

Boo - a language for the .NET CLI targeting some of the frustrations of C#. Python like in some syntax, it's simple and strongly typed allow development supposedly quicker than normal C# .NET apps. Be interested to know if anyone is actually using it commercial, certain has some interesting aspects to it!

In what appears to be a very obvious response to the Microsoft/Nortel alliance, Cisco and IBM have joined forces.

"Microsoft Corp. subsidiary FRx Software Corp. today announced that Microsoft Forecaster 7.0, the latest release of the company’s budgeting and planning software, will be released to manufacturing on March 28, 2007. This latest version of Microsoft Forecaster focuses on enhanced usability, adaptability and visibility, giving organizations confidence that their budgets are realistic and accurate, and enabling them to monitor business conditions and respond to new business opportunities and challenges to improve overall performance. "

Can't say I knew much about that side of Microsoft's business, but a new version of the Microsoft Forecast Product has been released.

Okay, it's pretty slim - but this post on techcrunch hints that a competitor to google apps may well be on the way from Microsoft. Personally this doesn't surprise me in the least. In fact I would be more surprised if MS wasn't doing it.

Apparently Microsoft has delivered a mysterious white space Internet devices to the FCC in America for testing. This device could be hugely significant as it aims to use the "white space" or gaps in unregulated radio bands to provide ubiquitous Internet access. Something like this will leave the teleco's quaking in their boots as it would completely bypass their stranglehold on connecting to the Internet. The implication is free wide spread access to the Internet. Bring it on I say. More coverage at MarketWatch.com.

This video features Scott Guthrie, one of the guys responsible for the ASP.NET AJAX Framework. Quite entertaining!

Okay, I am extremely impressed with blog posting in Word 2007. Recently I embarked on a journey to find the best offline/client blog software. In my journey I installed many different pieces of software and had problems with most. Some had really strange interfaces and many just did not work with the dasblog system I use for my blogs. So today I noticed the "new blog post" document type in Word 2007 and I decided to see what that's about. It initially give presented a wizard which allows quick and easy configuration of my blog site. It comes with a number of defaults blog sites but also support the MetaWebAPI and ATOM api in the "other" option – so it's perfect if you have setup your own blog software. I selected "other" and pointed to my blog and hey presto it just worked. The document template also allows you to manage and publish to several accounts . It's great as since it's just basically a document you can write offline and publish when you are ready and it goes without saying you get all the benefits of the standard and familiar word interface. Nice product feature Microsoft, very useful for a lot of people who are starting to blog.

Just testing out the new blog posting feature in office 2007. Will be very useful if this works nicely!

Just curious as to who is reading my blog these days - please post a quick comment (anonymous if you prefer) against this post to let me know if you are reading my blog.