Raymond P. Burkholder - Things I Do

"Sometimes it's much cheaper and easier to make people think that something works rather than actually make it work. After all, the result is, in all important aspects, the same." -- Douglas Adams Continue reading "Make It Seem To Work" »

What is better than eternal bliss? Nothing. But a slice of bread is better than nothing. So a slice of bread is better than eternal bliss.

A number of people took the time to email me their thoughts regarding my rant regarding source code for QuantDeveloper. Anton from SmartQuant responded, but unsurprisingly, I havn't heard anything from QuantHouse.

It seems that QuantHouse has purchased various rights and such to QuantDeveloper, and have renamed it to suit their suite. SmartQuant has also retained certain rights and such to QuantDeveloper, and have maintained the name. SmartQuant has indicated they are continuing development of QuantDeveloper and has hinted that some quite advanced features are in the pipeline. He also confirmed that, for existing developers who have subscribed to source code, source code is available for new releases.

Today I was introduced to The Cluetrain Manifesto: The End of Business as Usual through a NANOG posting in response to someone's quote: Continue reading "The Cluetrain Manifesto" »

Note to self, according to Cisco's document 10106, Quality of Service Options on GRE Tunnel Interfaces: when applying queuing to a tunnel interface, shaping must also be applied. The top level policy of a recommended hierarchical policy should be a shaping command, while the lower-level policies configure the queueing mechanisms.

Scaling Web has a number of open source libraries that may be of use:

• Template based B+ Tree: Implemented in C++, B+ Tree is template based, so it can be used with any types of data. Memory based B+ Tree is much faster than STL containers like map, hash_map.
• Embedded File System: Embedded File System (EFS) is a library that allows you to create virtual file system in a single file.
• Mork Parser in C++: MorkParser is an efficient C++ implementation of Mork database format reader. The Mork format is used in most Mozilla-based projects, including the Mozilla browser suite, SeaMonkey, Firefox and Thunderbird.
• Mime Email Parser in C++: C++ implementation of RFC 2045 - Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (MIME) standard.
• C++ IO Streams Library: IO Streams library provides different Java-like interface streams in C++.

StreamBase has a developers kit for using their Event Stream Processor and database. They have an article on Using the StreamBase opentick Adapter to Build Market Data Applications. The database itself could be a useful alternative to SmartQuant's historical data tables, but the downside is that compression may not be available. I've only skimmed the site. I'm hoping the code behind the referenced article shows enough that I could re-code it for an IQFeed or Genesis data stream. Continue reading "Trading Site of the Day -- StreamBase: Event,..." »

I had recieved a private message by someone requesting some background on what I had done for my Genetic Programming trials with QuantDeveloper.

I am releasing the example source code into the public domain. If you make changes and would like to see the changes recorded here, please let me know, and I'll update the files. Continue reading "Trade Optimization by Genetic Programming,..." »

I havn't had much time recently to keep my IQFeed libraries (for QuantHouse/SmartQuant's QuantDeveloper) updated, and I see there are a few users with some annoyances with the libraries. I've decided to empower them to solve the issues themselves. Continue reading "IQFeed Source Code Release" »

Dare Obasanjo wrote a nice blog entry summarizing some key ideas from Marc Andreessen and Clayton Christensen. In his entry entitled Stupid Things Big Companies Do, he had a great exerpt that confirmed that companies need to diversify their business models, offered up a key irony, and ended by providing a possible solution: Continue reading "New Ideas -- For The Market Place, not the..." »

I've written an earlier article about installing the Wt C++ Web Toolkit. I think it took longer to get all the bits and pieces properly arranged than it did me to cook up an example to check that it did what I thought it could do. Continue reading "Web 2.0 Site Development with Wt -- Dead Easy" »

On Kernel Trap, I see they are discussing the use and maintenance of flash file systems. It seems there are lots of interesting gotchas when using flash file systems intensively. I'm wondering if that might be why the Seagate 32G flash drive is taking a while to get going in the market place. Continue reading "Flash File Systems for Embedded Systems, and..." »

An OSSWAD, almost sounds like a forbidden word. Based upon Bob Zurek's column, there are Osswads, and then there are OSSWADs. Many developers of web sites 'out there' already use Open Source tools to get the job done. Apache, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Perl, and PHP are commonly used tools by Osswads. Continue reading "Open Source Site of the Day -- OSSWAD: Open..." »

I've looked at the C library for PostgreSQL and then wanted to see if there were any C++ wrappers for it. The most current appears to be libpqxx. On first blush, it looks very good. It if functional and robust. But... it has one draw back. The library insists on converting all binary stuff into text for passing back to the caller. For some applications, that can be a reasonable library simplifier.

But in this day and age of Templates and polymorphism, it seems to be a copout. Yes, if I had time, I'd probably try my hand at implementing some sort of 'variant' implementation to handle the various types of data that come back. Continue reading "libpqxx: A PosgreSQL C++ Wrapper Library" »

Marketing Technology Blog has a How To: Build An Image Map with CSS entry. Pretty simple and straightforward. Continue reading "Image Maps with CSS, Plus 20 CSS Tools, Plus..." »