gilesthomas.com

Last Thursday I did a talk at the London Geek Night about the business side of founding Resolver Systems; 10 minutes or so of prepared talk and then 20 minutes of Q&A, which was the structure suggested by the night’s organiser, Robert Rees. Skills Matter recorded the whole thing, and the video’s online now (albeit inexplicably categorised under Erlang). Be warned that I was talking particularly quickly that evening, even by my normal standards of gabble, so you’ll have to listen carefully :-)

Other talks that evening were from my colleague Jonathan Hartley, who talked about the tech side of Resolver Systems, and Martin Dittus of Last.fm, who talked about some of the heavy-duty tech infrastructure they use.

We kicked off the beta programme for version 1.5 of Resolver One today. It’s got some really cool new features, including a console that lets you interact with your spreadsheets from a command-line-style interface, but there’s one other change, a tiny one that enables something really interesting — a combination of the spreadsheet’s ease-of-programming with seriously parallel computing that I don’t think is really possible with other tools.

We’ve been in touch with Digipede since Dan Ciruli, their Director of Products, blogged about Resolver One in January 2008. The Digipede Network is a system that allows you to easily code .NET programs that run on a grid of computers — and he’d set up a Resolver One spreadsheet that was able to call into code running on a Digipede Network to perform part of its calculations, which was particularly impressive given that he only needed to spend five minutes or so putting it together. Looking at what he’d done, I found myself asking “wouldn’t it be even cooler if the thing you ran on your compute farm was itself a spreadsheet?”

Since then, in version 1.3 of Resolver One, we added RunWorkbook — a way in which you can call one spreadsheet from another, just like you call a function in a traditional programming language. And then earlier this month, Robert W. Anderson, Digipede’s CTO, put the final piece in place when he blogged about how he’d got IronPython objects running as worker tasks inside a Digipede grid.

Glenn Jones, who’d previously proven his bravery by leading the charge for the port of Resolver One to IronPython 2.0, spent a few days putting it all together; he discovered that a small tweak was required to Resolver One to make it all work, but we now have a working example that’s almost ready for release; a risk-analysis spreadsheet that stress-tests a portfolio of shares against stock market index moves by running simulations for each projected value of the index in parallel on a Digipede grid.

Glenn’s just adding the finishing touches to the spreadsheet now, and hopefully we’ll have it on the Resolver Exchange early next week.

[UPDATE] Here’s Glenn’s announcement of the sheet on our news blog, and on his own blog. Robert Anderson has also posted about it.

I’m a day late, but having just heard about Ada Lovelace day I couldn’t but help make a slightly schmalzy post.

The aim of the day is to celebrate women who excel in technology, and while I’ve worked with some great women developers over the course of my career, there’s one who stands out. Yes, it’s my mother :-)

Back in the 60s, Yvonne Thomas was one of the first women to do Electronic Engineering (or Electron Physics as it was then called) at Southampton University, and she went on to work at various defence-related companies (that being the best place to be in tech back then). By 1974 she was working on ALGOL compilers at (I think) ICL, and then she decided to pack it in to raise her unruly — but generally grateful — offspring. Von, thanks for doing that, and for bringing me up to be technically able. There are few coders out there who can honestly say that they had programming fed to them in the womb, and I’m glad to be one of them.

She’s still coding, and is now happily building an ever-expanding web application that links together all the information she’s found in her genealogical researches.

Right, enough sentimentality. Back to our regularly-scheduled gadget- and business-of-software-related blogging…

I’m very tempted to switch to SSDs for my home machines’ boot drives. Videos like this aren’t entirely representative of what’s easily affordable, but it’s pretty impressive…

We’re running a one-day discount at Resolver Systems today — you can get an unrestricted copy of Resolver One for $75! There’s more about Resolver One here.

Shortly after writing about the correlation between music copyright and composers in England, I read one of Mike Masnick’s thought-provoking anti-copyright posts over at Techdirt, and thought he might be interested in the book review that had prompted my post. I dropped him a line, and last Thursday he wrote an article which mentioned it.

He was kind enough to include a “hat-tip” link to my post as well, so I prepared for a spike in visitors here. After all, Google Reader says that Techdirt has 750,000 subscribers to its RSS feed; allowing for other aggregators, that means that maybe 800,000 people would have read Mike’s article, and although there was no particular reason for them to click on the link to this site, I figured idle interest would probably lead to a few. The question was, how many?

Resolver Systems‘ banner ads tend to get three or four click-throughs per thousand impressions, and Google Adwords one or two per thousand. I figured that a hat-tip would be less effective than either of these, and might get one click-through in every two or three thousand, leading to maybe 300 visitors. On Friday I asked the people I know on Twitter what they thought I might expect, and their guesses ranged from 200 to 10,000.

The actual number was two. Not two hundred, but two visitors. When I mentioned this on Twitter, I discovered that they were both people who knew me anyway (presumably wondering if the “Giles Thomas” in question was the one they knew).

That’s really quite a surprising data point.

[BTW, if you were interested in the music-related posts here, and were wondering when the next one was coming, I’ve moved that side of my blogging over to a new site: the Baroque Project.]

We’ve just announced the winner of this month’s round of our competition at Resolver Systems, and it’s a great one; Marjan Ghahremani, a student at UC Davis, managed to work out how you can call R (a powerful statistical analysis language) from our spreadsheet product Resolver One. You can download a ZIP file with a detailed PDF describing how it works and a bunch of examples.

If you’re not interested in Resolver One, but want to use R from your own IronPython scripts, you may be able to do that too, using her instructions as guidelines — I’ve not tried it myself, but there are no obvious blockers. If you do try it out, I’d love to hear how it goes.

A repost here from the Resolver Systems news blog:

We’re looking for experienced spreadsheet developers to spend a day with us in our London office, building Resolver One spreadsheets, as a way of usability-testing our software. We’re paying £200/day for this, so it’s perhaps something of most interest to current business school students.

Does this sound like something for you, or for someone you know? Drop us a line!

In Variety:

Will Clark is set to direct “Pride and Predator,” which veers from the traditional period costume drama when an alien crash lands and begins to butcher the mannered protags, who suddenly have more than marriage and inheritance to worry about.

One of our customers had been asking about how to call XMLRPC servers from Resolver One. It doesn’t work in version 1.3, and he was having problems getting it to work in 1.4. The problem turned out to be simple and fixable, and unlikely to affect other people, so I’m proud to present a really simple XMLRPC/Resolver One example that you can use as a starting point: a Python script that creates a server exposing an is_even function (which tells you if a number is even or not), and a Resolver One spreadsheet that uses it. There are only two lines of code in the spreadsheet, which is pretty cool :-)