Series of videos that explain various financial concepts (such as asset-backed securities, margin calls, CDO’s, etc) as well as aspects of the financial crisis (such as “fallout”, CDS problems, and the credit crisis) in simple terms
http://marketplace.publicradio.org/videos/whiteboard/
Worth a watch (hat tip: Raymond Chen)
Our Surface showed up this week and we had fun unpacking it and setting it up yesterday.
Now, on to the real fun - developing apps for it!
Marc Gravell plays some neat tricks to accelerate DataBinding code:
.NET provides flexible data-binding and runtime property access, but by default this is via reflection an is known to be relatively slow. This article uses the power of Reflection.Emit to provide a pre-compiled (and much accelerated) implementation for reflection properties, and demonstrates the use of TypeDescriptionProvider to dynamically apply this implementation to types.
Source & article here
Walking through Grand Central this morning I was surprised to see a bunch of enormous, larger-than-life sculptures that looked like little Google Maps pins. Then I noticed a massive wall-sized poster for Google Maps. Even at that early hour, then, I figured something was up with Google Maps!
Well it turns out I was right. Google Maps now includes New York area public transit options in its directions. The NYTimes has the details.
Here’s an example of directions from Lab49’s offices to UBS in Stamford, CT (link) :
I chose this route because it includes multiple modes of transport - walking, the NYC subway system, and the Metro-North train. Google did all that automagically, all I did was enter in the two addresses and click for directions. Try it yourself!
Few things Wall Streeters love more than a bit of gallows humor. In that vein:
At the Microsoft Expression Community Learning Center:
Just starting out with Expression? We’ve collected tutorials, starter kits, Quick Start Guides, videos, and other helpful resources to get you started quickly. Get answers from fellow users on the Discussion Forums, read our FAQs, or contact Support: it’s all here. For any questions or comments about the training content, please visit the Expression Discussion Forums.
(hat tip: Paul Mooney)
Seen here :
Skills Matter is pleased to announce London Agile Month, a month full of courses, free In-the-Brain Sessions and conferences featuring agile expert Venkat Subramaniam, pragmatic programmer Andy Hunt, Agile & Scrum experts Craig Larman, Martine DeVos, Tamara Sulaiman and Roman Pichler, Frank Cohen on Automated Testing, Gojko Adzic on TDD and Eric Evans on Domain Driven Design!
Link: London Agile Month on SkillsMatter
Cross-language implementation of the MVC meta-pattern - PureMVC. Supported languages:
Flush with cash (approx $5BN) and relatively unharmed by the credit crunch, ICICI (based in Mumbai) is looking to expand globally:
ICICI, which initially focused on serving people of Indian origin in India and abroad, already offers online saving accounts to non-Indian customers in those three countries and is keen to build a “global brand” as rising interest rates slowed growth of its consumer lending business at home. ICICI operates in 19 countries outside India, including the United States, and those markets account for about 25 percent of the bank’s assets, or $30 billion.
Read the full article here
According to a new report mentioned on the NYTimes’s "Bits" blog:
The New York metro area tops the country in the number of high-tech jobs, according to a national study by the AeA, a technology trade group.
…
Silicon Valley leads in semiconductor manufacturing, while Seattle is the software publishing capital. Computer system design is Washington, D.C.’s purview. And New York has the highest concentration of Internet services jobs.
I’m not completely sure what they mean by "internet services" jobs. For instance, craigslist has 2 sort-of-correct categories for what Lab49 does - "internet engineers" and "software/QA/DBA/etc". But basically I figure there are no semiconductor jobs and very little software publishing in NYC so these numbers seems to suggest that if you’re looking to be a developer, move to NYC. I agree!
They’ve published a helpful whitepaper titled “Understanding an OLAP Solution from Oracle” which explains the key differences between Hyperion Essbase (which Oracle recently acquired) and Oracle Database OLAP Option. The decision is broken down into five axes: the Purpose, Buyer, End Users, Front Ends, and Data Management.
Just got an email from my friend Peter Laudati at Microsoft telling me about a great sounding event in NYC this weekend - the ASP.NET MVC Firestarter. Peter blogs about it here:
At the ASP.NET MVC Firestarter, we’ll give you a quick tour of the framework, then peel back the layers and dive deeper into how it works. As part of that, we’ll spend time discussing the design and development practices that lead to the creation of the MVC framework. By the time you leave, you’ll have enough knowledge to get fired up and start building web applications with it.
Sign up for the event here. (Free lunch included).
From here:
Microsoft Corp. plans to demonstrate integration Friday between its new Silverlight browser plug-in technology for rich Internet applications and the Ruby on Rails Web framework.
New "Aleri Live OLAP" announced. I see they claim Excel pivot table integration and MDX support. Also Aleri/Activ seem to be targeting the Wombat/Coral8 duo.
Via "Bad Rain" :
The artistic representation of raindrop as presented by popular culture is that of a teardrop. Actually, real raindrops bear scant resemblance to this popular fantasy (except after they have ceased to be raindrops by splattering on a window, say) … Small raindrops (radius < 1 mm) are spherical; larger ones assume a shape more like that of a hamburger bun. When they get larger than a radius of about 4.5 mm they rapidly become distorted into a shape rather like a parachute with a tube of water around the base — and then they break up into smaller drops.
Makes total sense when you hear it but not something most people (me included) have ever thought about.
A couple good walkthroughs from MSDN:
Anyone working in the financial industry building applications should know about FinancialCalendar.com. In addition to providing a useful set of data, they understand that holidays are real-time data and treat it accordingly.
(Thanks to Marc Jacobs for the pointer)
According to Securities Industry News:
The New York Stock Exchange said Friday that it plans to introduce two types of reserve orders for electronic entry, pending regulatory approval, and will roll them out in two phases. Reserve, or iceberg, orders–a common feature on fully electronic equities platforms–allow investors seeking to move large blocks to publicly display only a small portion of the order.
Interesting to see how this affects ATS’s/dark pools etc.
From my article:
Over the past decade, data volumes have skyrocketed, new sources of liquidity have mushroomed, sell-side firms have created internal crossing networks, trading has become increasingly sophisticated and trading volumes in complex derivatives have spiked, collectively far outstripping the stock markets. For these reasons, the old, batch-based technology model no longer suffices.
To read the main article you must be a subscriber to Automated Trader. Or you can grab the PDF from Inside the Lab (PDF download)
From this piece. In addition to their customary symbolic $1 salary:
Each founder received a bonus of $1,723, for a total of $1,724.
Weird.
