Stock Market Notes:

A major point of my Python adventure, is to create application(s) which will help others (and myself) try various investment scenarios. There are a lot of ways to lose/make money in stocks & options, and I've tried many of them.

The app I'm going for, will (0.1 release) grab stock quotes, & present the various covered calls for a stock graphically. If anyone has other desired features or comments, post them & (if I think they're helpful), will fold them into the app. Initial release date, end of April (think I'll beat that easily, but you know how software estimates go)

Trading wise, I had a couple of rough months starting off this year, but March went pretty well. "Went" well, since if you trade options (in the US), your month ends on the 3rd Friday of the month. If someone has a favorite option/stock combination, mention it, & that can go into the app also.

Happy Coding, Happy Trading!

Linux Tools ramblings

Checked out codecon, they have some nifty stuff going on there.

One of the things was 'monotone', a Version Control System. I was trying to get that pkg installed (onto my Ubuntu system), but kept getting this error:
./monotone-0.25-linux-x86: /usr/lib/libstdc++.so.6: version `GLIBCXX_3.4.6' not found (required by ./monotone-0.25-linux-x86)

Googled, found that a couple of people had fixed that (or nearly identical) problem, in different ways, none of which worked for me.

But then I remembered, "Hey, This is Linux", so I downloaded the source, and rebuilt it (after getting all the Boost lib dependencies downloaded & built too). I like the idea that the whole repository is stored in a single SQLite file. (easy to backup)

Long story short (too late, sorry!), monotone looks cool; I'll comment later on how it works for me.

So my current toolkit:

• Boa-Constructor (only because it somehow helped wxGlade work)
• VCS: monotone (probably subversion for Sourceforge later)
• gui-builder : wxGlade for (cross-platform) GUI construction
• Edit/IDE: PIDA ("Pida Loves you"); hey, I'm a VIM guy
• testing: probably twill, pyUnit, unittest, I'll see...
• Language: Python, of course (tried Ruby, it's too Perlish!)

Any other tools you think I'd like better? (yes, I've tried emacs)

Happy coding. (both a suggestion and a statement ;)

Was so 'et up' with PyCon 2006, that I had to start my blog...

Thoughts:

• Steve Holden is a good presenter/instructor, and a nice guy. (wxPython tutorial, discussion with Bram Cohen)
• Grig & Titus had a _lot_ of material about testing & Agile development; it made me want to start writing test cases
• Bram seemed still geeky, still like the rest of us engineers & coders
• though I didn't feel like I learned a lot from the wxPython tutorial, and the short wxGlade talk, I must've; yesterday's foray into wxGlade (from Boa-Constructor) was actually quite productive, and I have hope that an 0.1 release (of my stock-option app) is not too far off
• for anyone in the Dallas area, with even a smidgeon of Python interest, coming to PyCon is a no-brainer
• the hotel was ok (though I didn't sleep there); the first couple of days, the big (ball) rooms were cold, & the small rooms were hot, but they had that fixed by Saturday; the only other problem was initially Not being able to get the wifi going early Thursday
  
• Selenium's only good for web-gui testing, so I'll have to get/do something else for my wxPython gui
• should lookup CodeCon, see what's been presented there
• Decimal sounds right for my stock/option pricing info
• a mini-epiphany occurred to me - I could do a mini-server for my app, and just have any browser do the user presentation; however, now I'm making progress on wxPython, & will finish that first at least
• education: need to teach my 8th grader Python this summer

ok, I need to stop blogging & get my buttonClicks attached to code. Welcoming comments on anything...