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Friday, November 30 2007
You know that you have a good design when it gets easier and easier, and takes less and less code, to add new functionality.
Tags: software development
Friday, November 23 2007
A couple of days ago I bought a “Logitech Quickcam Deluxe for Laptops”. Last night I plugged it into my Ubuntu Gutsy laptop. It worked straight away. I installed the Skype beta – it found the camera. So I had fun making a video call to Hannah in Melbourne, wandering around the house with the wireless lappy. And it all Just Works.
I became so accustomed over the years to every new device needing hours of twiddling with Linux that even though that’s rarely necessary now, it still surprises and pleases me.
Tags: ubuntu ~ webcam ~ skype ~ it just worksWednesday, November 21 2007
The other day I got Joel Greenblatt’s The Little Book That Beats the Market out from the public library. (What money-minded person would buy books that are in the library?)
It’s a light, cute read, but it offers suggestions that accord very well with what I understand of value investing. At the end you are presented with a “Magic Formula” for ranking stocks that is supposed to be likely to do better than the market, and again I should think it would, since it basically selects companies that get the best return on their capital that are currently priced cheapest in the market.
I thought it would be an interesting exercise to write a stock screener for New Zealand and Australia that uses this formula. This would be of some value, because no one seems to be offering such a service here. So I’m going to use Python to do it.
The formula requires you to know various figures about each company. Some are published by Yahoo and other websites, and the others can be derived from published data.
So what I need to do is:
This is clearly going to involve some sort of HTML parsing, so I think my first major technical decision is going to be what to use.
Tags: money ~ investing ~ python ~ magic formulaYour victory dance is a sign of failure
Friday, November 02 2007
Every now and then, having wrestled with some particularly annoying problem and won, I do a victory dance, in the manner of Snoopy.
Having figured out a trivial but time-consuming problem with Alfresco configuration files, I was in mid-cavort when colleague Christine pointed out that in a better world, there would be no victory dance, because things would Just Work.
This is true. If your software makes me do a victory dance, it’s bad.
Tags: software ~ usabilityRendered at 2010-03-14 07:06:47