Personal
I'm no longer blogging on this blog. Please find me here.
I've been busy lately and most of my friends in town think I'm a knucklehead. This is mostly because I'm carrying a crazy schedule. A small sample:
- I'm doing some F# stuff, both for public consumption and otherwise.
- I'm co-organizing WBUG, the Wisconsin BizTalk Users group with Nevin Goldstein of Fountainhead Consulting.
- I'm working on a piece of software for IronWake that we hope will become our flagship product (finally; more on this later; links to follow).
- I'm doing a bunch of behind the scenes hosting of a few different community efforts and other initiatives.
- I'm working on a research project that I believe will have an impact on the way search and browsing is done on the web (hopefully, I'll join Scott and make the web suck less).
But this post is about something else, too. I'm moving jjbresearch.org and a few other sites to a new hosting provider. I've been with Oochie for almost one year. They have been good to me and I highly recommend them. But I need bandwidth for these upcoming projects and given my needs, I can buy massive amounts from godaddy.com, m6.net and others. If you are looking for a good hosting provider, especially one that is responsive and trustworthy, I recommend Oochie. Scott has treated me well.
So now that I have said all of that, this blog is getting yanked down within the next 30 days. I'll be opening a new blog on the new jjbresearch.org (running CS2.0). My intention is to start from scratch, i.e. not include all of my old posts (no upgrade, clean install). I've spread a lot of propaganda in one short year. I hope to do more on the new site. I hope to do a redirect, but no guarantees. This old blog and its contents will be archived and go bye-bye.
Oh yeah and by the way, the labrary is not moving. Referred to as "The Cell" (and you know who you are), that room will likely notice no changes and nothing never.
I just found out that Euclid's Fourteenth Book has been dicovered. I am so gled that the folks who authentiated this item spent well over a year to determine that it is genuine and chose today to announce the discovery. That is was found in Ireland puzzles me, but I guess that Euclid made the rounds by see in those days.
---
If you can't get the message out of this one, you are hopeless. ((and if you are supposed to be good at this sort of thing, consider this a taunt))
The other day, I mentioned that the Labrary went quiet. All servers and workstations were shutdown, or as one of my friends would say, optionsScalper=shutdown. Without my toys, I am nothing. I am defined solely by the CPU time across these machines. NOT.
Well, suffice it to say, that later that evening, optionsScalper=up. Everything restarted and I have a few more development boxes and other stuff running. Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.
BTW, the Labrary, now without the presence of a few dual Xeon rackmount servers, is significantly quieter and no longer running has a room temperature 88+ degrees F (31+ C). Note that in the cold Wisconsin winter, opening the Labrary window provided for virtually no relief in temperatures in the presence of those servers.
Back at it . . .
I'm finally back to having some free time for myself. Last weekend (yesterday and the day before yesterday) were fun days, but I was connected to my computers for most of the time. I had a choice to disconnect or do some other connected work and I chose the latter. I'm actually glad that I did, because now my docket is clear.
I recently moved to a new place and put much of my stuff in storage in the basement until I could find time to bring it out. I can now start unpacking that stuff and put it to work. Chad (the sensor man) gave me a NEC MultiSync XE21 monitor to use (actually to keep, he doesn't want it anymore). I had hesitated to bring out the "big guns", i.e. my larger flat panels, but now is the time. I'm also bringing up a few more servers, so if you hear a humming in my neighborhood, just ignore it and assume that there is considerable data munching behind these doors. I'd recommend you keep a safe perimeter of 50 yards or more so that you don't lose a limb with all of the activity. Seriously, I've spent the last four months on three machines and feel completely useless. It will be nice to get more of this stuff back in action. I need to get back to running some serious projects and have been itching to do so.
The Labrary is about to get "lit up" with dual 24" Samsung 243T's on workstation one and a single HP f2304 on workstation two. Of course, workstation one is the machine with dual pan-and-tilt cameras, dual Saitek joysticks, a Nostromo SpeedPad N52 and various other USB devices that will overload that monster.
My internet machine has one 13" Amdek amber monitor for my viewing pleasure.
After this silly shuffle, perhaps I can get back to yelling at the world a bit and even talking about something more interesting.
Since Jason Haley always links everyone else, and his blog (and site) got a great new facelift, I thought that I'd link him for once as an "Interesting Find". My only comments are 1) The view of the shoreline reminds me of how great the Boston area harbor and surrounding areas are and 2) I'd never look that good in a tux.
The new place looks great . . .
I've completed my presentation for Wisconsin INETA on F#. I was able to leave the room with very few bumps and bruises. Seriously, what a great time it was. I haven't spoken in public in some time and I had a lot of fun. The crowd was fantastic and I'll say this: Everyone in the room "got" it. F# is a fun language and has a number of great uses. I touched on one very simple application using F#. Lists, Tuples, Type Inferencing, etc. were discussed.
You can find the presentation PowerPoint here. Please note that the code for this presentation will follow at a later date. The demonstration was to show "how" to construct a Sharpe Ratio and I hope have a post up a working example (that runs against publicly available data) in the near future. Given the time constraints (2 hours), it would be impossible to cover all of the material, so I wanted to make certain that people were left with a bit of understanding of both F# and Quantitative Finance (in a non quant-professional setting, i.e. for .NET developers).
More importantly, and don't tell anyone you saw these, but rumor has it that there are pictures of me in action here (with the first one here; as this stack will obviously have other eventual photos). Thanks Matt. Given The Liz's observations that I ought to "hit the gym more", I find no evidence of that in these photos. Ironic that in Matt's Flickr stack, I follow photos of "Tuscan-Style Garlic-Rosemary Roast Pork Loin".
----
Contact me here with further questions.
If you have no time for fun lately, make some time. I'm on a few thingies with projects that finally allow me to breathe. Which explains this next tidbit. Try this link:
spray paint graffiti on optionsScalper's blog
Upon inspection of that above URL, you likely can figure out how to aim that graffiti at any other mortal enemies.
Back to work . . .
While this is more of a personal note, it is nontheless important to me. I hope that when I look back at this post, I'll remember how I felt today.
I am fortunate to have a considerable number of friends and colleagues. This had better be a lot of fun . . .
In a recent post, Teh Reducer, listed me in the top 62 blogs of all time. After serious analysis, careful consideration and grueling hours, I determined that I was ranked number 51. I gave "juice" to everyone below me by linking them and basically left everyone in the top 50 to pound sand. Apparently, I mistook Teh Reducer's ranking system. Upon further review, I told the wrong people to pound sand, and now it appears that it is I that will have difficulty walking around the house for a day or two.
The Liz and I were sitting down for an informal dinner tonight. "Hey Dad. I've gotten an A+ in Accelerated English". No, those aren't the magic words, but good girl.
As we discuss her latest reading, "To Kill a Mockingbird", she provides to me a framework for the story and the characters involved. "There's Scout and Dill and Jem. Scout is the storyteller and the book is narrated from her point of view. In the scene where . . ." Those are good words, but not quite magic.
After dinner, we are on our way upstairs and she turns to me and says, "Awww. I wish I would have brought that book home. I really feel like reading it". Those are magic words to my ears. An A+ is good, but when she expressed a sincere appreciation for the book and wanted to engage in reading, I knew she had experienced reading as I and many others have. This is the first time that I've heard her express genuine interest in a book that was compelling to her beyond the boundaries of school. She has always been a good reader, but this is something that I hope will be with her the rest of her life and not just something that happened in the pursuit of an A+ back in 10th Grade English. ((Scalper has a moment; one which doesn't involve calculus in any manner)).
. . . the top 62 Tech Blogs OF ALL TIME, according to technology guru The Reducer. After recent health problems, Teh Reducer has decided to cut back on activities related to stress and trim back the old blogroll.
Knowing that he is on the road to recovery and relaxation, I checked the list (zip file an opml file) and found teh usaul suspektz: the lower cased one, DoubleI, Scott Allen, Jason Haley and .NET Monkey (wait a sec, these guys reduce stress?). Funny, I know that this group has something else in common. Did somebody say Let's Play a Round of Steganography (I'll provide the hidden text in plain sight, you try to find it, ummmmhmmmmm, 'k; I'll try to keep it down to one misspelling per post (in the stegotext, not the plaintext))?
Additionally, I noticed that in ordering in the opml file (which like totally matters as to who is important), I'm number 51. Man, if only I could have made the top 50. There are a few below me that obviously matter less than me. I won't bother to link the upper 50 because they already get enough juice. I also won't list any Non-Tech and Sites in that opml, so that the suspense will be so overwhelming that you'll have to look (don't look, it's ok, there's nothing in there; don't give it another thought).
((of course, The Armed Geometer, forgetfoo.com, Haacked and Smart Software (formerly .NET Undocumented) made the list, too.))
With many things that require my attention, it is always nice to have friends like Marty, especially when I consider that he introduced me to F#. But now, he's provided information that will improve my February Wisconsin INETA presentation on F#. (warning, I didn't never not write those comments there). Gerry (fellow Wisconsin INETA presenter) concurs.
the lower cased one (author of the infamous mceDivX360) is loose in the Redmond area and as usual is up to trouble. Apparently the new laws are working and he's forgotten what's important. Besides, the neighbors may even like the new sign.
Well, life has been a bit easier lately. The Liz is behaving herself. She makes it easy to be a Dad. She had a four day weekend off from school which she spent almost exclusively in her room. She's been sick and would probably would rather be out with friends. But she is focused on what matters. When she is focused, it frees up my time to be focused. Good girl and I love you for it Liz.
On that note, I'm presenting at the Wisconsin INETA meeting. The official presentation announcement was just posted. My presentation is on February 21st, 2006 and is titled publicly as:
An Introduction to F#
The official working title is:
F# - An Introduction under the Application of Quantitative Finance
I didn't want that posted on the INETA web site for fear that no one would show up. Seriously, this will be a fun session. This is my first presentation at Wisconsin INETA, my first public speaking on F# (see my blogroll for useful F# links) and my first public presentation in about six years. I'm not nervous, just excited. I tend to talk very quickly, so the usual comments that I hear from my friends and colleagues is "You are going to have to talk slower." That is not possible. Of course, I'm presenting during the same month as Don Haleyione, the Godfather of Interesting Finds, just in a different city. Those Beantown guys are going to get a dose of Debris and practical dissassembly. Nice.
((marketing hat on; warning, imprecise language in use))
If you are interested in investing in stocks, I'll be covering a few simple techniques to measure characteristics of those stocks. We'll build a few applications that use publicly available data from the major sources like finance.yahoo.com and others. I hope that anyone in attendance will get a flavor of F# and it's capabilities within the .NET framework as well as a perspective for some of the basic ideas used in quantitative finance (finance by the numbers). The target audience is the .NET developer and not the capital markets professional, so the ideas in finance are straightforward and simple to implement.
The part about this that has me excited is the use of F# to do this work. I've been using F# now since last summer (again, thanks to Marty for the pointer). Because F# is based on ML and OCaml, it was not unfamiliar to me, i.e. I had some competence in the language, but needed to improve my skills. That is still true now, but I've at least had the opportunity to build some real world stuff in F#. To me, F# represents the first core competence platform under .N