Personal

Won 4th prize in Community Credit October 2008 Contest

Szymon Kobalczyk — Sun, 02 Nov 2008 12:38:37 GMT

Yesterday I was pleasantly surprised by receiving email from David Silverlight that I had won 4th prize in Community Credit October 2008 Contest. The prize I won is the awesome Electronic Drum-Kit T-Shirt that you can hit with your finder to play drum sounds. I think it would totally rock combined with the Equalizer T-Shirt I got from my lovely wife some time ago.

The Community Credit awards are presented for community related activities that you submit during a month. For each activity you receive a certain amount of points. I knew about the contest for about a year, but I assumed it is only for uber-geeks and far above my reach. Only recently I was encouraged by Karl Shifflet and started adding my points. This award proves, I was totally wrong. The best part is that you are probably already doing the activities that could earn you credit like blogging, speaking, answering forum questions, and helping your user group. So why not give yourself some credit and win these cool prizes, huh?

Here is what I did last month:

From October 8th to 9th I was at the MTS 2008 Conference in Warsaw, where I did a session about “Building Line Of Business Applications in WPF” (you can find the slides here). I was also manning the user groups booth for few hours. That’s 12,000 points.

This month our group had very special guests: Tim Huckaby & Carl Franklin stopped for two days in Cracow on their way from SDC in Amsterdam to DevReach in Sophia. They made a fantastic performance for our group on October 10th. That’s 17,250 points for organizing this event and inviting top speakers.

We also had two regular UG meetings (on October 1st and October 29th). I’m usually in charge of scheduling speakers, making announcements and doing raffles (there are no points only for being the UG leader – you need to actually do something). That’s another 17,000 points total.

(During October 1st meeting we celebrated Marcin Celej’s MVP nomination)

Last Thursday (October 30th) I traveled to UG in Poznań to speak about “Composite Application Guidance for WPF” and other stuff (get the slides here). I really enjoyed this meeting, and I’m glad I finally got there despite the long travel (7 hours by train). From the feedback I reckon my friends liked it too. That’s 6,300 points.
I wasn’t very active online this month, but I published a code sample of using the Touchless SDK in WPF (and I will be contributing more to this project very soon). That’s 8,000 points.

I ended up with 60,550 total but October was pretty busy for me anyway. But even if I did only a half of the stuff above, it would secure me one of the prizes (the lowest winning score was 30,000 points). Congratulations to other current and past winners.

So don’t wait anymore: go check the cool prizes for this month and start adding your points now!

Speaking of community awards, I also like to mention the idea of the Most Valuable Member Awards invented by James Johnson from Inland Empire .NET UG. This program gives recognition to most active user group members, with the goal to increase member’s participation and involvement. I plan to introduce this to our .NET user group in Cracow, so if any sponsors are reading this and would like to help please contact me.

Now let’s see: Writing a blog posts is worth 500 points, plus 5000 for linking to Community Credit, that’s already 5,500 points closer to this month’s Handpresso Portable Espresso Maker :-)

Witaj Antoś! / Welcome Anthony!

Szymon Kobalczyk — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 11:49:54 GMT

[PL] Dzisiaj o 10:38 urodził się mój drugi synek Antoś. Duży chłopak z niego bo waży ponad 3,5 kg i ma 58 cm "wzrostu". Oboje mama i dzidziuś są zdrowi i czują się dobrze. Tatuś też jeszcze się trzyma i jest strasznie szczęśliwy :-)

[EN] Today at 10:38 (GMT+1) my second son Anthony was born. He is a big boy, weighting 3.5 kg and 58 cm "tall". Both mommy and baby feel well. Daddy is the happiest man in the world!

Updated 19/03/2008

New photos:

Updated 20/03/2008

First Contact... with older brother:

How I won the Lab49 WPF in Finance Innovation Contest?

Szymon Kobalczyk — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 20:39:06 GMT

Honestly, I still don't know how I did it. The LAB49 WPF in Finance Innovation Contest was announced back in December and I think I first read about it on Tim Sneath blog. With all the cool prizes I was very inclined to participate, but it quickly turned out that its available only to US citizens. However that changed in the first week of February, so I started considering it again, but still didn't had any clue what to do. You see the goal of this contest was to create a WPF application that visualizes a set of provided financial data in some interesting way. While the first part was easy (writing the app in WPF) the hardest part was to figure out what to do with the data. Only after "last call to action" email from Daniel Chait I decided its about time to start coding.

Because I started working late on this project, initially I wanted to create only a charting control capable of displaying the line and candlestick plot of stock prices. But after the contest deadline was extended I started thinking of a better way to visualize the stock prices for a given day – something that goes beyond a simple listbox or a datagrid. The next option I considered was to create a heatmap – i.e. use color gradients to denote the change in stock prices relative to the previous day. But in all samples I’ve seen these symbols were placed on a regular grid and the placement didn’t correspond in any particular way with the data. I started thinking about how to sort the symbols so that those that experienced similar data change would be close to each other, and those with different data change remain further apart. This finally led me to the idea of applying Craig Reynolds’ flocking algorithm to perform this clustering.

Here is a screenshot from my final entry called Stock Information Boids:

Also you can already download the source code for this application from my resource page at MSDN Code Gallery. Make sure to read the user guide that describes how the algorithm works and how to use the application.

Turns out that for some reason the judges liked my solution, because last week at the closing keynote of 2008 Microsoft Financial Services Developer Conference in New York, Daniel Chait announced that I won the grand prize in the contest!

The two finalist were Jacob Carpenter and Jobi K Joy, while the honorable mention went to Paul Hounshell. Congratulations guys, great work! You can download their very cool applications from here:

In following weeks I will try to share some details on my implementations (in particular about the Timeline and Flock controls). I was already told that Jobi K Joy and Jacob Carpenter plan to do the same, so make sure to subscribe to their blogs too.

I would like to thank the judges for selecting my entry. And last but not least, big kisses for my wife Joanna for letting me work on the project all nights and weekends considering her present condition (L)

I'm coming to DevReach 2007! Who else?

Szymon Kobalczyk — Fri, 28 Sep 2007 19:18:25 GMT

This weekend I'm flaying over to Bulgaria to attend the DevReach 2007 conference, "the Premier event for Microsoft developers on the Balkans". I've never been on any conference outside Poland, and I really look forward to see sessions from such great speakers like Carl Franklin, Richard Campbell, Stephen Forte, and last but not least my boss, Tim Huckaby. If you like to see some very cool projects that we are doing at InterKnowlogy then don't miss his keynote.

Who else is coming? If you'd like to chat just leave me a comment, so we could work out the best place to meat. Hope to see you all there!

I work on the Scripps project!

Szymon Kobalczyk — Tue, 13 Mar 2007 08:22:00 GMT

Usually I don't write about my current employer or work, but I think this time it deserves to make an exception. You read already it in the title: I work now on The Collective Molecular Environment (C-ME) for The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI).

If you are following the news on Windows Vista or WPF you have probably seen this application already (the screen on the right might remind it to you). The Scripps Research Institute is a biomedical research organization that is trying to find a cure for cancer and make cancer a managed disease. Scientist wanted a better way to organize and share the research information. To answer these needs InterKnowlogy developed application that uses .NET 3.0 Windows Presentation Foundation and Office 2007 SharePoint to visualize and annotate research results.

You can watch a short video about the project that Microsoft produced. This was also the only third-party application shown by Steve Ballmer during Windows Vista and Office 2007 lunch event (the demo it's just after 30 minutes in it). And for some technical details I recommend the video interview with Tim Huckaby and Dr. Peter Kuhn on Channel 9. There is much more on the project site.

In the beginning of February Stephen Forte posted a Call for Developers to participate in the Scripps project on his blog (big thanks for Tad for forwarding it to me):

"Do you believe that software can change the world? How about the opportunity to work on an application that promises to help accelerate a cure for cancer?"

(Later I've learned that this was a joined initiative of Stephen, Tim Huckaby, and Eileen Rumwell.)

After watching all this stuff and hearing all the buzz with this project I was really excited to join the team. I've sent my resume... and a week later I got response from Tim Huckaby that I was accepted. I just couldn't believe it!

Altogether four developers were selected from all around the world. I have the pleasure to work with Haaron (Mexico), Rania (Egypt) and Kandaiya G (India), as well as great people from InterKnowlogy (San Diego, California): Kevin, Russ, Dan and Tim.

So right now we are working on the next version of C-ME. The team is communicating remotely using IM, email and telephone (and we use TFS if anyone cares to ask). Each of us was assigned a specific task to build during this month. We are using cutting edge technologies like Windows Presentation Foundation and Microsoft Office SharePoint 2007. So it's a lot of new stuff to learn.

My first task is to add support for discussion annotations to the viewer application. The application already supports File, Note, Url and Screen Capture annotations and they are all stored in SharePoint site for given entity. The new type I'm adding will be using the Discussion Board lists in SharePoint but it renders the whole discussion desktop application using WPF (and bit of HTML).

Of course, I will keep you updated on our progress during this month.

(Actually you can read first post on accessing discussion lists from SharePoint already.)

Photoalbum from our vacations in Turkey

Szymon Kobalczyk — Sun, 06 Aug 2006 06:44:00 GMT

Here are some photos from my vacations in Turkey. So far it's great here althought we haven't been on any trips yet.

Enjoy!

This album is powered by BubbleShare - Add to my blog

Updated 9/8/2006: Just uploaded new photos. We've seen some antic ruins in Phaselis and planing more trips. Stay tuned!

Going for vacations

Szymon Kobalczyk — Tue, 01 Aug 2006 17:36:00 GMT

Next two weeks I will be spending in Kemer, Turkey enjoying great vacations with my family. Because we are going all three including our little boy we might don't get a chance to travel a lot and will spend more time in the hotel. But I hope to make few short trips. I've never been so far East before and I'm curious of this culture.

This also means that I will be offline for two weeks(at least thats the plan). Therefore please be patient if I won't answer your emails right away.

PS to Tim: I still don't have 'Where's Szymon' but I'm working on it :-)

Moleskine Life Hacks

Szymon Kobalczyk — Sat, 03 Jun 2006 16:37:00 GMT

After listening to recent HanselMinutes show on Life Hacks I've got myself a Moleskine Pocket Notebook today. If you never heard of this it's a small (9 x 14 cm), lightweight notebook that fits perfectly in your pocket so you can carry it around. It also features a foldable pocket in the back cover, a cloth ribbon attached to the spine to serve as a bookmark, and a woven elastic band attached to the back to keep the book closed when not in use.

To be honest I'm really bad at being organized. I tend to loose track of whats going in my life. I used to write things down on what piece of paper I had at hand, then I switched to Post-It-Notes. Eitherway this quickly got messy, so my desk was always covered with piles of paper I never went through. Now I'm trying to put some of this stuff in OneNote and I consder as a bit of improvement. But it works only when I'm working on computer.

I also like the term “sink to paper“ very much. More often I do better thinking when I'm not in front of the computer and I like to put the ideas on paper. I think it keeps me more focused this way.

Fortunately I found a store in Kraków that sells Moleskines (Ksiegarnia Znak, Slawkowska 1) so I bought a Squared Pocket Notebook for myself and a Pocket Travel Info Journal for my wife. Both look and feel really nice. Now I need to find one of these famous Fisher Space Pens.

Here are some Moleskine Life Hacks:

What's siting on my hard drive

Szymon Kobalczyk — Mon, 24 Apr 2006 01:48:00 GMT

I just got a new laptop, so I had to spent whole weekend reinstalling everything instead of doing something productive. Surprisingly it was more then a year and a half since I did that last time despite all the software I tend to keep together. Does that mean software got better in playing nice to one another these days?

In the process I've made a list of what I need to have installed, so in case you might be interested what I use in my day-to-day work, here it is:

MSN Messanger 8.0 Beta
Skype 2.0
Gadu-Gadu 7.1
TrueCrypt 4.21
GMail Notifier
Thunderbird
FireFox
Juice (iPodder)
TotalCommander 6.54
TortoiseSVN 1.3.3
Visual Studio 2005 Prof. (Full)
MSDN Library for VS 2005
MS Office 2003 Prof. PL
MS Visio 2003
Infragistics 6.1
TestDriven.NET 2.0
NUnit 2.2.7
NCover 1.5.2
FxCop 1.35
Reflector
CCTray 1.0.1
Paint.NET 2.6
Debugging Tools for Windows 6.6.03.5
AQtime 4
ContourCube .NET
DevExpress XtraEditors
Dundas Chart v5.0 for Windows Forms
Netrix HTML Editor 1.1 v2005
Guidance Automation Extensions
Guidance Automation Toolkit
ieSpell
MS SQL Management Studio Express
MSDE 2000
Enterprise Library January 2006
Composite UI App Block Dec 2005
Composite UI Hands on Labs
Smart Client Software Factory (BAT)
.NET PetShop 4.0
Combined Community Codec Pack
Google Earth
Windows Defender
Adobe Photoshop Album 3.0 SE
DAEMON Tools 4.03
MS Virtual PC

As you can see it is lots of stuff (and I'm pretty sure I've missed few more), but most of it is .NET related. Don't hesitate to ask if you are wondering why I'm using any particular tool or library and what I think of it.

What Podcasts you listen to?

Szymon Kobalczyk — Tue, 18 Apr 2006 15:43:00 GMT

I've finally bought myself an MP3 player. It's a Samsung YP-U1X. While it has only 512MB and no radio, its quite small, looks great (similar to IPod Shuffle but it has LCD with white backlight) and the sound quality is fantastic. I think its best choice for the money.

I've already listened to several episodes of ARCast and .NET Rocks! and I'm currently looking for some other podcast out there. It doesn't have to be .NET related really. So if you know anything interesting, funny or otherwise worth listening please drop me a note.

And when I'm at it: Tell me also what program you use to manage podcasts and upload them to your player.

Updated: I've finally found this great guide how to setup IPodder and WMP to synchronize podcasts with device.