Wow, 6mo since last post?!

Got laid off from my old job, but found a new one before the official word was even out. SW jobs in the US are in serious jeopardy due to this globalization. We'll ride this train until it derails.

Austin is a good place for tennis. There's the AustinTennisNet.org, and several other informal leagues, as well as the normal USTA leagues.

Have my C++ TDAPI program working, though it's not made me a better trader yet. So far, it just amplifies whatever I was doing before (more frequent trades, bigger gains AND losses).

As I write this, the DJIA is at 6626, down about 50% from a year ago. And we haven't seen the end of the writedowns, TARP/TALF/bailouts, etc. For a great laugh, check out comedyCentral, look for "jon stewart on santelli".

Stay safe, healthy & happy.

Have been lazy, programming-wise.
Touchy-feely says that written goals are firmer, so:

New public goal is: C++ to TDAPI (broker) interface code working.
Had played with the APIs & python before, but the C-streaming callbacks
sounded problematic (though 'ctypes' should make it not so hard).

Howdy! I'm a happy camper, since I just got the Wireless working (mostly) on my Vostro 1500 Laptop with Ubuntu 7.1. The laptop has the 'wireless-N' (next-gen) built-in A/B/G/N wireless card. I saw/tried many help/howtos from ubuntuforums, google search, etc, with not much help.

However - with a combination of stuff culled from the web, here's how I got it working:
1. Got the 4th driver listed from this page (gentoo linux forum)
... Repackaged Newer Dell Driver (just the files you need)
2. unpacked above into a directory in linux
3. sudo synaptic (or sudo apt-get install ) ndisgtk
4. sudo ndisgtk
5. (inside ndisgtk) install the new driver (bcmwl5.inf)
6. (inside ndisgtk) apply network encryption. I settled for WEP for now, but supposedly works all the way up to WPA2 (I'm doubtful)
7. tried static IP of 192.168.x.x, but DHCP worked, and that's easier anyway
8. sudo ifdown wlan0; sudo ifup wlan0
--- tada! working wireless, and I'm even getting my full 5Mb/s---

Hope this helps someone (let me know!). I probably spent about 12hours over the past few days getting this working.

Other stuff - obviously, I got the dual-boot working (vista, why!?) and Ubuntu. Now I could consider working on Lua again. Although at work, I'm again forced to use Perl, which looks how I feel when I'm coding in it ($_#%!)

I must admit it, I flirted with Lua for several months. It's pretty spiffy, nicer in some ways than python. However, I found that luaSocket had some issues running on Vista, that I did not want to delve into to fix. Why Vista? With a new laptop which supports DX10, it might be nice to run a dx10 game sometime (and for now, at least until M$oft kills vista, XP won't get DX10)

So, back to python; SPE as an IDE still works well, even though it was last updated long ago.


Nice things about Lua:

• very small compared to python
• everything is first class
• hash (associative array) for everything
• MIT license
• clean/readable/maintainable syntax (eat that, ruby/perl fans!)... though space is not significant like our beloved python
• lots of addons available (socket, web, sqlite, etc)
• somewhat of a de facto scripting language in many games nowadays (World of Warcraft being the biggest one I saw)

Happy Coding. Later.

PyCon 2007 Notes:

(something about pycon makes one want to blog. and more importantly, to code at home again!)

Day 2 (not counting the tutorial day) is done. Thoughts on stuff so far...


Morning Keynote: The Harvard guy working on OLPC(one laptop per child) - its processor is a 366MHz AMD Geode processor, LCD is a nifty HiRes-Mono/LoResColor. They
removed the crank since the mechanical stresses were going to be too hard on the case (joke was "yeah we can fix that, just make the case out of titanium"). They plan to be shipping(?) in August, still need help working on various items. Seems like a noble cause, hope they can pull it off & do something good for the world.

SWIG Session:
The MySQL guy made it sound easy. I may take a swig at it again; the
TA-Lib people had already swig'ed it for perl. However, I don't know if I want/need the ta-lib software now, since ameritrade (and fidelity, probably many brokers nowadays?) give you the equivalent strategy backtesting software/functionality for free.

DABO: (dabodev.com)
Ed Leafe spoke on it again; the feature set is increasing, and it supports
all the SQL DB's I'd think of using (still like SQLite best, as it's so simple and embeddable)
Will probably use this for the next (first!) two things I'll ship: profit/loss viewer, and the long-promised covered-call/spread profit picture-viewer.

Lunch: Lightning Talks:
Bazaar: Code repository, etc (thanks for the free shirt, guys)
Chaco: 2d data visualization is back/revitalized (will check it out vs matplotlib/etc)
ActiveState: nervous presenter, no slides.
Komodo: has new free version, maybe try it out (will take a lot to make me switch from Vim)
Microsoft: Is driving/supporting IronPython (python on .Net) just being nice, or somehow another evil plot? Between this and the charitable foundation activities, it's enough to throw a conspiracy theorist off balance.
David Beazley: training, see bignerdranch.com
Merchant Circle: python small-biz platform, hiring. Why does it seem like most of the nifty jobs are in California?
Zeomega (sp?) Dallas area, medical mgmt sw, hiring

PyWeek:
Two Argentines promoting the weeklong 'make a game in python' competition. Sounds fun, may do it next go around.
Tippett Studios: more rendering for special effects & animated movies. (was similar to the Sony presentation which I didn't mention before).

Day 2:

Keynote: Adele Goldberg
Effectiveness of Technology in Education - does it help? - she notes that the US public educational system sucks. Was there an uplifting, hopeful message at the end? I thought there'd be one. I think it was just an ad for her upcoming cloudcast course development software.

SQLAlchemy - (mark ramm)
Looks pretty nifty. Object mapping into SQL DBs. If only Dabo had it tied in.

Testing Tools:
Was good and informative. Maybe I can use mechanize/twill or something for screen scraping (option quotes)

Lunch Keynote (Guido on Py3k):
It's major changes, but not so much as Perl6. The 2to3 translator should take care of most of the simple changes - if you're not doing tricky things, like counting on current implementation quirks.

Using Python Eggs:
It's the new/standard way. "Like .jar files plus CPAN, plus more!" I'll have to do this, if I ever have something to ship.

Merchandise:
Python Polo shirts for $22, long sleeve denims for $25. Not a complete rip-off, gotta get some!
Still, if a vendor Really wanted to be remembered, they'd give away a polo shirt (vs the standard t-shirt), which has a much better chance of being worn at non-t-shirt friendly workplaces. Not looking the gift horse in the mouth, "I'm just sayin'."

Non-Pycon ramblings:
Geez, is anything more annoying than GM's carpet-bombing us with the President's Day car promotion commercials? At least in the DFW area, you can't watch the news or anything without seeing several of these with the pseudo-hip-hop beat version of 'Hail to the Chief'.
(while I've been writing this blog entry, it's played 4 times!)

Books:
Since none of my local libraries have book 3 of the Axis of Time series, I've had to order & pay for my own copy. However, (just like last time), my book order from walmart.com is way overdue. I guess you just get what you pay for in shipping. This was UPS->USPS. It was (per tracking) handed off from UPS to the Post Office about 5 days ago. Anyway, I picked up a copy of Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon. I hear you're not an official geek until you've read all of his stuff. Since Crypt... is ~981 pages, I have hope that my birmingham book will be in by the time I've finished this one.

Friends:
Heard from an old coworker, who now works out of California, for Wordpress, who has a baby. Congratulations, Ryan!

Do I have too many links above? Just trying to be helpful!

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...