OLPC G1G1 coming to Europe Nov. 17

OLPC News: Breaking News: G1G1 coming to Europe Nov. 17

To buy or not to buy?

Can I convince my wife? That is the real question...

IDictionary options - performance test - SortedList vs. SortedDictionary vs. Dictionary vs. Hashtable

Long time no writing...

Well, just for reference, here is a nice benchmark about these types.

Dazed and Confused

Sometimes things just make you wonder if anything is worth it...

Sleep well Alex, I'll miss you...

Photo Tourism / Photosynth

Photo Tourism is a project from some brilliant guys at University of Washington and from Microsoft Research. Microsoft showcased some videos a while ago and finally some days ago released Photosynth.
In a word: incredible.

Finally the guys at CSI can say they use an incredible piece of software that really exists.

If you are a Windows guy, go to photosynth.com. If you use Linux, go here. If you are agnostic(Java), here.

Be patient... its worth it.

dateTime deserialization in .Net

The problem:
We created a webservice in .Net to implement a contract with a supplier. Among other things, we receive dateTimes. These dateTimes represent a point in time in another country (for instance, an accident occurred at 15:00 in Spain).

What happens:
when we receive the message, the deserialization engine converts the dateTime to a DateTime, assuming local time. So, we get 14:00. All information about the original timezone is lost.

The solution(s):

1. Change the WSDL to receive another parameter (timezone) -> NOT AN OPTION. We don't own the contract.
2. Add a new table and code on our side so we can compute the timezone ourselves, according to the original country.
3. Guess the correct timezone
4. Implement the webservice in another platform, like Java (deserializes dataTime to java.util.Calendar).

If you have other solutions, please give me a note...