Moved my blog
All my new posts will now be found at this new location.
Transparent Models
I went to a decision analysis talk at Stanford the other day; the speaker was Max Henrion, the founder of Lumina software. There was some nostalgia in going back to the Terman building, listening to a talk in one of the seminar rooms, seeing some familiar faces and also in realizing how much I evolved as a quantitative modeler and became much more rooted in practices coming from software engineering. Most of the talk revolved around the limitations of Excel; specifically, how error in an Excel models are easy to introduce, and hard to spot.
2007-03-05
Launch of the first pilot AMC
Beginning of February, the first Advance Market Commitment (or AMC) program has been launched, with a pilot targeted at pneumococcal diseases. It was all pretty exciting news Applied Strategies has been working since a while with the pneumoADIP team, they are a great group of people, incredibly dedicated to making that vaccine available where it is really needed, and it is satisfying to see their effort pay off. More selfishly, I was also glad to see that the website dedicated to the AMCs contains the presentations put together by Applied Strategies.
2007-02-27
Upgrading to Vista
I just upgraded to Vista and began setting up my machine, and right after the initial excitement comes a huge blow. The VMWare Workstation 5.5 does not install, and Tortoise causes all sorts of problems. Damn! Two of my favorite development tools are gone. Fortunately, the good guys behind Tortoise have already fixed the issue, and released version 1.4.3 over the week-end. Thank you guys, you rock. Just tried it, and it works a charm. It also reminded me of how much I rely on Tortoise now, and how great a tool it is.
2007-02-04
"Young Guns"
Chris Cariaso, from Fight and Fitness (my gym), is fighting in Young Guns, a mma event to be held Saturday, Feb. 10th, 7:30 pm, in the Civic Auditorium in San Jose. Prelims start at 6 pm.
2007-02-04
People before patents
A few days ago, a good friend of mind sent me a this petition launched by MSF (Doctors without borders). In short, Novartis, the pharmaceutical company, is suing the Indian government over patent issues related to cheap AIDS drugs produced in India, and widely used in the developing world because they are affordable. Check the links if you want to know more.
2007-01-25
Domain Driven Design
Its confirmed now, Ryan Ehrenreich and I will be giving a presentation on Domain Driven Design at the Bay.Net user group in February. I am pretty excited about it and the timing is perfect. We just completed (OK, nearly completed) a project where we experimented with lots of ideas coming from DDD, and it is a great opportunity to look back at everything we did, and try to extract what really matters. In parallel, I am also going back to the book by Eric Evans, review some fundamentals. I am enjoying this quite a lot: both exercises fuel each other, and reveal aspects which were not clear to me before.
2007-01-23