Category: Uncategorized

I was watching the Xbox One announcement yesterday, and even though I missed a part of it due to my dogs needing to a walk in the rain, I thought it looked pretty interesting. Honestly, I don’t think the hardware looks that nice, but one can also hide it in a cupboard I suppose. What was very uplifting though, was the new voice and gesture controls as well as the responsiveness of the machine. I have done enough demos to know that sometimes they are not necessarily a reflection of the truth, but I will give Microsoft the benefit of the doubt here.

What will be really interesting though, will be the content that we can access on the Xbox here in Denmark. Microsoft has not really been good at launching their products in Europe (Bing and Zune for instance), so I am not holding my breath here. Of course there will always be apps for Netflix and eventually HBO Nordic, but regionalized content is most likely not in the works. Personally I would be throwing my money at the company that would allow me to stream the entire cycling on my Xbox. Just sayin’. Hopefully local Danish content will find its way to the Xbox, but considering the foolish TV licensing scheme we got going on here, I doubt it. On the other hand, with a good selection of content, we could get rid of our expensive TV subscription from TDC.

We will definitely get a new Xbox for the living room, although it has to be hidden away somewhere.

http://www.legeparadiset.dk/

Der er ingen tvivl om denne amerikanske families kærlighed til Danmark.

I deres lejlighed i Ørestad med udsigt til en af Københavns mest berømmede nye arkitektoniske perler lige overfor – det cirkelrunde Tietgenkollegium – er der PH-lamper flere steder, børnemøbler af den danske arkitekt Hans Wegner og Arne Jacobsens 7’er spisebordsstol.

De to højtuddannede udlændinge Joe Kiniry og Genevieve Fu har deres egen lille andel i Københavns igangværende befolkningsboom, som betyder, at hovedstadskommunen hver dag vokser med 30 personer.

Eller 1.000 om måneden. Og som vil føre til, at byen om bare 15 år er vokset med en femtedel.

Som Politiken fortalte forleden, er netop amerikanerne den nationalitet, der for tiden bidrager mest til den vækst.

Faktisk består en tredjedel af Københavns menneskevokseværk af immigranter, hvor også polakker, tyskere, svenskere, indere og briter i høj grad bidrager til væksten.

Flytning på trods af kærlighed til København
Politiken satte sig for at finde ud af, hvorfor en amerikansk familie overhovedet finder på at bosætte sig her.

Det amerikanske par siger det selv, endda i munden på hinanden:

»Vi kunne ikke være lykkeligere noget andet sted i verden«.

Og de ved, hvad de taler om, for de flyttede for tre år siden til Danmark fra Irland, hvor de mødte hinanden, og Joe har før boet i Frankrig, Holland og Italien, Genevieve i Frankrig og England.

Alligevel er der risiko for, at Joe Kiniry og Genevieve Fu – han professor på Danmarks Tekniske Universitet i Lyngby og på IT Universitetet i København, hun uddannet arkitekt – om et år forlader Danmark.

Source: Kim Faber & Flemming Christiansen @ Politiken

As part of an American-Danish family I know this situation all too well. I think we are doing it all wrong here in Denmark.

Everybody loves a comeback, well some people love a comeback anyway. After I bought myself a Nokia Lumia 800, after I put my HTC Radar in the washing machine, I have been following news about the Finnish phone maker. The last couple of years have been rough on Nokia, and having worked with some former Nokia guys, I have heard a lot of stories about what has happened there.

It seems like the first Lumias did ok, but not so well to restore Nokia to its once mighty status as king of phone makers. Although they seemed to do ok, it never really became a turnaround for Nokia.

Today, I stumbled across a blog post from WMPoweruser.com who had an interesting bit of news concerning the Nokia stock.

“… found Goldman Sachs has increased their stake in Nokia from 61 million shares to 116 million over the last quarter, an increase of nearly 90%.

Barclays increased their stake by 115%, while Credit Suisse added 94% to their holdings.

Morgan Stanley made the biggest jump, increasing their stake by 400% to 32 million shares.

Overall in the quarter, 112 institutions increased their Nokia shares by 128 million shares, whereas 163 institutions decreased their Nokia shares by 77 million shares. In net, the institutional ownership of Nokia increased to 17%.

The company has a had a recent massive run up on news of early sales success of their new flagship, the Nokia Lumia 920, and is today trading in Europe at EUR 2.56, up nearly 82% from their July low of around 1.404 Euro.”

Source WMPoweruser

Personally, I am rooting for Nokia. I think it is pretty cool to have a northern European company that is mingling with big boys like Apple and Samsung. I also hope Windows Phone 8 will take off as a viable third operating system, so we the consumers, won’t have to live with the yoke of a duopoly. So, as Black Friday is about to start in the US, here’s to Nokia making a successful comeback.

Back in the “good old days” I started looking into BPM, or more precisely the BPM notion. They way we intended to use it on that particular product was, to apply a universal way of modeling processes across department, teams and continents. Said in a different way, we wanted to make sure that everybody drew things in the same manner. Of course, this is pretty standard, however, our organization was not only a result of an acquisition, but also an organization that had a lot of sub contractors, both foreign and domestic.

The plan was a actually fairly simple; to train people in the use of BPMN 2.2 and upgrade their Visio installation and then basically make BPM diagrams a mandatory part of any specification, user story etc. True to form, these were never implemented, despite the fairly big investment in BPMN, and since nobody really had the time, mandate or ownership it seemed like the project fell between two chairs and died quietly.

Now the scene has changed, at least for me personally. In my new organization we are also working on implementing BMP, but in a much larger scale. Not only do we use the notion as a normal part of our every day work, we are actually going to implement the processes underneath, in order to manage our work flow. Pretty cool stuff actually. We are still pretty early in the process, but I am looking forward to getting my hands on Jdeveloper to see what we can actually do with this thing. Until that day comes, I have signed up with our good friends at Orbus to the stencils I need to get this show on the road. Hopefully I will get around to writing more about implementing BPM as our project progresses.

I started my new job this monday, and although I have only been here for a week, I thought a small blog post was in order.

Basically, I have changed industries. Whereas I used to make software for a software company, I know make software for a financial institution, or market maker as they would call it at the Stock Exchange.

Granted, I have not been here so long that I can write a comprehensive post about the suttle differences between the two industries, but I am quickly forming an opinion. Simply put, the world of finance is much more structured the the world of IT as I have experienced it so far. Of course, I came from an SMB and moved to an enterpise sized organization, but the attitudes are very different.

The finance guys seem much more focused on planning and analyzing, whereas the IT guys guys seem focused on execution. At Evenex we were able to think up something in the morning, and start developing in the afternoon. It’s a gross exaggeration but you get the idea. In the finance industry, so far at least, the emphasis on project models and methodologies are pervasive and very important to the development.

It is way too early for me to form an absolut opinion on which I prefer, but so far I am really liking the fact that I have the time to perform the necesary analyses before we start to actually code.

Nuff said