JamieMcQuay.com

Samples ELN has been mentioned in Scientific Computing and listed in the LIMS Software Directory with a nice review! We are busy at the moment working out some new exciting ideas that I will be blogging about soon!

We are pleased to announce that we have started working with the Nitz Lab Group at the University of Toronto.  Mark’s group will be using Samples as their first electronic notebook experience.

Happy New Year and welcome to 2010! (by the way, where is my flying car?)

To kick off the new year we’ve updated the design of the Scimatic website.

We’ve been deep in stealth mode for the past little while.  Watch this blog over the next couple of months for some exciting announcements from us at Scimatic… one small hint to kick off the new year:

We Build Software for Scientists

I'm pleased to announce to we are in the planning stages for a SciBarCamp (July 8-9, 2009) in Palo Alto!
Thanks to Attila Csordas who was the instigator of BioBarCamp which took place before last years SciFoo, we've decided to carry on this tradition that he started.  I'm also happy to pass on the news that Attila will be planning another BioBarCamp event later on this year.

I've been getting annoying telemarketing calls from 818-870-9190.  The call is an automated message that my car warranty is about to expire... after some searching online I found out (here and here) that this is a scam.

I got an email from Microsoft the other day that started off with:

Dear JAMIE,We’ve noticed that you have chosen to stop receiving communications from Microsoft. We’d like to take this moment to ask you to reconsider.

Since when did Microsoft start using the ex-girlfriend play book?  What's next, will we start "accidentally" bumping into each other on the street?
Mircosoft, it's not you.... it's me...  I'm leaving you for Open Source products and communities that actually give a damn about their developers.

I just discovered the best feature ever...
When using Eclipse with Subclipse you have the option to role back code for every save that you've made locally.
This might not sound like much but I've been burnt several time in visual studio where I think I'm deleting the correct file and click OK to the "This file will be permanently destroyed" message.

I've started a Twitter feed for us at Scimatic.  Jim and I will be using this account to announce new blog posts and general science/work related news.

If you have a Twitter account, please follow us at twitter.com/Scimatic

We've submitted a proposal lately that  involves bringing a popular Mac application to Windows.  When doing research for this proposal, I've finally figured out the claim "Macs just work".  My answer to this claim is that:

 The Operating System is the framework.

By this statement I mean that the engineers at Apple have put a lot of thought into what support developers require.  They make sure that this support is bundled with the Operating System and a nice touch, it is all free.

I switched to a MacBook Pro about a year ago.  A dirty little secret is that I do all my word processing in Windows.  I needed to purchase Office 2007  for a client project a while back and its price tag made the decision for me.
On the Mac I wanted an open source solution for quickly editing documents.  I know that Pages is great and Office for Mac can be ok at times but I already paid for Office 2007.