Chris Donnan : Programming - Brooklyn Style

language oriented programming0
chrisdrop posted in programming on March 30th, 2008

The building/ spreading meme of ‘language oriented programming’.

Martin Fowler + Neal Ford

Steve Yegge’s entertaining rant (his dialect of English)

Essentially - Java (and those like it) are good at making the lowest level bits and pieces of software, but bad at making logical ’sentences’ of software.

All seems interesting….

Back to my non-stop work-athon - build done.

-Chris

Holy *&%$* !!!0
chrisdrop posted in Finance on March 17th, 2008

JP Chase buys Bear Stearns for $236 million. 2$/ Share!!!
Goldman Sachs to reveal $3bn hit Tuesday
The Federal Reserve, in an emergency weekend decision, cut the rate on direct loans to commercial banks and opened up borrowing at the rate to primary dealers in government securities.

There is a ton more to read out there. This is plain nuts, crazy stuff folks!!

=Chris=

Jim Rogers on the Economy0
chrisdrop posted in Finance on March 15th, 2008

Simply some of the sanest thing anyone has said about the current world economy.

Here on cnbc Jim Rogers talks about the current state of the US economy, how idiotic Bernanke has been in his efforts to ’save the us economy’, the commodity markets (agriculture in particular), China, inflation, the debasing of the USD and more.

The strongest point (to the Fed); stop trying to ’save the economy’. Free markets will do a better job. Let people, companies, etc. fail. Stop printing money - it does not work. It seems the current fiscal policy is like the Doritos advertisement campaign of a few years back “crunch all you want, we’ll make more!”. Similarly - Bernanke seems to be saying “Problem? NO problem! You need $? We’ll make more!”. This cannot work. It violates the most basic economic rule; the more of some thing there is - the less it is worth. The very creation of more makes each worth less!!

Anyhow - go listen for a few minutes; well said Mr. Rogers.

=Chris=

Microsoft Prism (think CAB for WPF)0
chrisdrop posted in programming, .net on March 13th, 2008

The 1st Reference Implementation app and other bits drop today. Here. I will be looking hard at all this immediately as it is directly relevant to my world. Good details here.

Fun;
Chris

PS - I have been doing random .net build things with rake this evening. I gotta say - it is pretty darn nice and thusfar - seems better in many ways than MSBuild. More to come there too, it is still day 1 of playing.

What is in Silverlight vs the standard .Net 3.5 framework?0
chrisdrop posted in c#, programming, .net, sliverlight on March 10th, 2008

I was going to take one small code example and try to put it in a browser with Silverlight this evening. I added some code, then I added a reference to System.ComponentModel. There was considerably less there. I then began comparing Silverlight’s assemblies with what you get in a normal .net app. Needless to say - there is no where near the same level of stuff. They have done well - it feels like developing a normal .net app with C#, or with Ruby which is great. BUT there is a TON missing compared to a normal .net 3.5 app.

Let us look for example @ just the System stuff:

Here is where Silverlight’s System assembly is:

Here is what is in there:

Here is what is in the .net 3.5 Framework’s system:

So -while it is a great effort to get this stuff running cross platform and in a browser - there is simply a lot of stuff missing that you would be accustomed to when just coding up in the .net 3.5 framework.

-Chris

Test Post from TextMate on my MacBook Air0
chrisdrop posted in programming on March 9th, 2008

This is a test post - from TextMate to Wordpress using the Blogging Bundle… I hope it works!

Dynamic Silverlight Bits Out0
chrisdrop posted in programming, wpf, mac, sliverlight on March 9th, 2008

You can now go and get the Dynamic Silverlight bits here. This will let you run Silverlight 2 applications based on IronRuby and IronPython in the browser. It feels like real WPF actually - you make xaml files, you make ruby files, you embed them in an silverlight applet in a webpage and you are good to go.

Not only this - but you can also build your Dynamic Silverlight apps with Mono on a Mac. the downloads have the things you need to do so.

XBAP based WPF applications will have the ‘full richness’ of WPF - but you will only run on Windows machines. I still need to sort out the security sandboxing models of XBAP applications and for Silverlight applications. How do you interact with local resources from a Silverlight app?? Can you?? How much client side state can you store in a Silverlight app - can I store 20 mb of static data in client memory?? Regarding XBAPS - can you do everything you can do in an installed WPF app via an XBAP app?? Questions, questions, questions.

With MIX 08 Happening this past week, there is just a ton going on in the Microsoft community. I also had to download the iPhone SDK (even though I have not bought an iPhone yet) just to see what it was all about since that was the other bug techie dev news this week IPHONE SDK!

IVolatility.com commentary on the USD and the impact on commodities0
chrisdrop posted in Finance, trading on March 9th, 2008

IVolatility’s March Trading Digest had an interesting commentary on the impact that the dying USD should have on commodities.

Go read this article. I will sum up, and not reiterate the world - essentially their point in the beginning of the article is that the falling dollar will most likely drive up the cost of commods that are priced in USD (duh) - inflation. From a trading perspective - this means get long commods. As I mentioned yesterday, generally being short the USD, given the US fiscal policy (to ’save us’ from the impending economic issues) seems wise as well.

So - we have inflation adjusted treasuries, short the dollar in (via whatever instruments you choose), long volatility via the VIX futures or options, long commodities however you choose. All of this seems sound at the core. It seems that the US stock market will likely go down, but the rest of these decisions seem significantly more likely to be the way that it will go.

The next question - given the above theoretical portfolio - how do we diversify and take on some soft of hedge-ish positions so that if we are wrong, we are not screwed… How do we do this in such a way that we do not set ourselves up to spend all our earnings paying out the hedges…

More food for thought;
Chris

Erlang on OSX0
chrisdrop posted in programming, erlang on March 8th, 2008

Getting setup with Erlang on OSX was simple - ./configure, sudo make install, etc.

I tried the Eclipse Erlang plugin… not so hot - they are trying - but it is not really there yet.

I found a Textmate bundle for Erlang. make a text file, chmod so you can execute it, run it. You do not even have to restart Textmate and you have basic erlang code highlighting, etc. That and an open terminal do the trick.

With this - I have been able to have a basic working model. Code, compile, etc. It is amazing how much tooling I rely on day to day coding C# or Java. Visual Studio, Resharper, Intelli J - these tools REALLY do a TON. On one hand it is refreshing to get to just a text editor and a compiler again, but on the other hand - I am just not sure how productive you can possibly be compared to an environemt with TONS of tooling. Simple refactorings becomde ‘grep’ efforts in stead of a code construct aware proper refactoring…

More to come;
Chris

Robert Martin and Jim Coplien0
chrisdrop posted in programming, unit testing on March 8th, 2008

Robert Martin and Jim Coplien on Test Driven Development, architecture evolution, how much design up front

Coplien said that he thought - 1/2 hr up front modeling the basic top level structure for a 2 million line of code telecom system. The question of how much up front, vs how much is pure TDD is an interesting one. This is a hard balance to strike I think. When planning a global scale trading system for example - there must be some up front planning… How much??

Food for thought.

-Chris

Intrade Prediction Markets0
chrisdrop posted in trading on March 8th, 2008

Intrade Prediction Markets- This is just amazing. You can actually get long Obama, Short McCain, Long Recession, etc. Prediction Markets are amazing.

The US economy, Obama’s Free Trade Credentials0
chrisdrop posted in Finance on March 8th, 2008

The current US economy is in some trouble. Are we in a recession? I think yes. What are the issues? The dollar will continue to weaken given the current fiscal policy. When the fed lowers rates again - which it almost certainly will, we will see the dollar soften more.

Buy some TIPS - Treasury Inflation Protected Securities
Short the USD vs the JPY (japan)
Short USD vs CNY - (china)
Long VIX (buy volatility)

This is my basic view as to the best set of steps to take to position financially for the coming months. That said - I would still think that holding as much cash as possible would be the best move of all. Despite the fact that the USD will come under pressure, having some of those USD in the bank will help if things get rougher on the home front.

Credit will become increasingly expensive. The heads at Goldman and elsewhere on the street believe we are just seeing the 1/3 point in our road down the credit crunch highway. This means that credit conditions will continue to tighten - making $ expensive.

People holding pure consumer debt MUST get rid of it. The US Government MUST stop spending all of our money on a foreign war that we should not be in.

There is an interesting read over @ FT.com on Clinton vs Obama wrt free trade. I hope to see more of this type of talk as opposed to continued arguing, slandering, etc that seems to have come to the forefront of politics forever.

-Chris