Trials, Victor Laszlo Style

ecto didn't really work out for me. After trying to update a post a second time, I started getting an URL related error I didn't want to bother debugging, and uninstalled it.

Mike Salisbury, QA & Support Manager at Quantrix, sent me a nice email yesterday with a new trial key for the new updated version of Quantrix Modeler 1.2. Mike was gracious enough to help me out back in May with a similar although disparate problem after I posted to the Quantrix Modeler forum. This time, I didn't do that, but Mike found me anyway. Whatever I may think about their serial number and trial licensing scheme, I have to say that Mike goes out of his way to help people out -- thanks Mike.

Sadly, like I said the other day, I'm not sure I have much use for Quantrix Modeler now. I'm not doing the kinds of analytics I was doing at my previous job, and the only straight-up financial modeling I do is for my own personal finances. Not that having a more flexible tool for that than Excel and Quicken (and the occasional MATLAB graphs and Mathematica toys) would be a bad thing, just that I don't know if it would add so much more that it would be worth the cost. Outside of a purely financial context, I can see some potential uses for Quantrix, but again, mostly all for my own projects or one-off "what if" type ideas. Mike, if you're reading this, give me some ideas of what people are using Quantrix for outside of finance. I'll be sure to check the forum too.

In other news, Laszlo got open sourced on the 5th, which is way cool. I was really excited when I saw Laszlo demoed at Lightweight Languages 2, but due to it's commercial nature, I knew I wasn't going to be able to play with it or use it any time soon. Now that's changed, I'm looking forward to building some cool stuff with it, especially user interfaces for some web apps I already have in the personal projects pipeline.