Internet is becoming more and more polluted with junk-mail, people selling crap, and businesses which don't know their place on the net. They're all trying to make this wonderful place (i.e.: the net) in to hell (i.e.: real world). Internet should be viewed as a place of imagination, creativity, and most of all: fun. Internet is not some really advanced tool for searching for people to rip-off. It's about searching, and finding, things which are useful, helpful, and promote the sharing of ideas. This is what this site is striving to become.

California on brink of IOUs. I wonder if Federal gov will step in and save them.

- Alex; Thu Jul 2 07:50:15 EDT 2009
July 2nd at wikipedia...

Tax hikes and cutbacks: States crunched. Eh. NY has already sent End Of The World a letter, saying taxes are going up... -now- (that is, estimated taxes owed this June).

- Alex; Wed Jul 1 07:39:23 EDT 2009

Bernard Madoff sentenced to 150 years. Now if immortality suddenly arrives, he might just live to see freedom.

- Alex; Tue Jun 30 07:41:25 EDT 2009

Billy Mays, star pitchman, dead at 50. Hmm... there's a pattern... everyday some celebrity dies.

- Alex; Mon Jun 29 07:49:45 EDT 2009

'King of Pop' Michael Jackson is dead.

- Alex; Fri Jun 26 07:18:16 EDT 2009

Want to get something done --- talk to people in their right ear. I wonder if there's also a correlation for presenting stuff on the left vs right parts of the screen; like a wikipedia article is slightly shifted towards the right, appeals more to the left side of the brain (yey, truth!), vs cnn that has news stories all the way to the left (appeal to right side of brain)? (or placement of avertisement bars?).

- Alex; Thu Jun 25 07:22:53 EDT 2009

Had a revelation on subway yesterday mr0ning; apparently constants are polynomials, ie: y=2, or redunduntly y=2x^0, and so are lines, ie: y = Ax^1 + Bx^0, and... everyone already knows about parabolas: y = Ax^2 + Bx^1 + Cx^0. So in any case, on the subway I realized that my least squares line fitting applet is just a special case of a more general polynomial fitter... so here's: Least Squares Poly Applet :-)

Best of all, it's actually identical code to the line fitting case, except with tweaked inputs, and support for rendering polynomials instead of just lines. The ``fitting'' code is just: w = (X^T * X + aI)^-1 * X^T * y;

Try plotting a buncha points in a rough `line' outline, and see how different polynomials try to fit those. Also notice how interpolation (stuff in between your points) is much better fit than extrapolation (stuff outside your points).

In other news, finally learned to ride the RipStik thing. Can stay on it as long as I want to without falling.

- Alex; Tue Jun 23 07:51:28 EDT 2009

Got myself RipStik DLX, and went learning last night... with... results. After hugging the pavement about three times (which was much harder than I remember from childhood days), managed to ride for about 10 feet or so :-) This thing is much tougher than learning to ride a bike, or in-line skates, or... even a skateboard (which I don't remember having many problems with).

- Alex; Fri Jun 19 07:37:46 EDT 2009

Finished reading: The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. Pretty cool book with great illustrations of inference problems. I loved the `turkey problem': you're a turkey, that's cared for and fed every day... so you get comfortable and assume that's exactly how the world works---until one day before 3rd Thursday in November. There's nothing in your comfy past to predict the very relevant future. Similarly, you might conclude that you're immortal, as there were no days in the past in which you died.

- Alex; Sun Jun 14 20:38:50 EDT 2009

Recession likely to end in Sept. Yey. Though... What if it doesn't? Has anyone actually looked at the stock market lately? I have this crazy idea that the conservative BRK-A sort of reflects the market (more or less), and... well... its P/E is 56.45! Many companies are much wrose. Especially the ones who have been skyrocketting in the last few months. In other words, the lack of earnings isn't priced into the market yet; or rather, the lack of earnings doesn't appear to scare anyone, yet. Oh, yes, P/E is a lagging indicator---but does everyone think earnings will spike 5 times of what they were last quarter?

- Alex; Fri Jun 12 07:43:13 EDT 2009

China's not going to dump the dollar. Hmm... Way too many stories on -that- topic, makes me think they're about to dump the dollar, but don't wanna tell the world they're doing it.

- Alex; Tue Jun 9 07:40:32 EDT 2009

Google and the Evolution of Search I: Human Evaluators. Wow. And all this time I thought it was a flock of trained pigeons!

- Alex; Mon Jun 8 07:53:16 EDT 2009

Ah, finally done with grading. Sure took a while this semester :-/

- Alex; Thu Jun 4 07:41:12 EDT 2009

Who the heck came up with FIX protocol? Oh, right. So far, I've been somewhat isolated from the ``true'' FIX4.2 by implementing my parser around various extensions (nyse vendor spec). Lately, however, I took up reading through the actual FIX4.2 spec, and... well... the protocol is ambiguous! Here's a stupid example: The protocol allows for repeating groups... (a few fields that repeat). The protocol requires that the first field is always ``required'' so it can be used as delimiter. But it does not require the -last- field to be required. So technically, you don't know when your group ends [you know when an intermediate group item ends---as the next one starts, but the very last one... you dunno], if say the same tag is valid for the child as well as the parent records (and they just happen to be the last record in the group). In other words, the parser isn't exactly ``simple'' since given a tag, you dunno which record to attach it to. Various extensions implemenet a separate "end group" tag (and a "delimiter tag") thingies, so this never came up in my world before... No wonder folks are talking about XML... the base FIX4.2 is partly b0rken! Also, unlike with extensions, there doesn't appear to be a way to parse FIX (ignoring tag names, just have a parse tree with tag=value) without actually refering to the protocol of exactly what each tag means---the data itself doesn't tell you when to begin a group, etc., that info comes from message definitions, which... well... is a rather large PDF file. [the extensions I've worked with to date are similar to XML in a sense that you can parse the file, ignoring what the tag names mean].

- Alex; Wed Jun 3 07:55:37 EDT 2009

How GM Lost Its Way, or, how the unions killed it :-/

Cheney: No link between Saddam Hussein, 9/11. I guess it's too late for an apology?

China sticks with dollar as currency reserve. Yey! What were their alternatives? None apparently. If they suddenly claim to not be interested in dollars, their stash of Treasuries goes up in smoke, and with that, their currency too. At least by backing the dollar, they can maintain some stability on their end, though I wouldn't be surprised them buying up other currencies without public announcements.

- Alex; Tue Jun 2 07:48:11 EDT 2009

Uh, oh: GM files for bankruptcy. I say it's about time! Though I don't like their recovery plan: government to own a rather large chunk of GM? What is this, China? Governments shouldn't own such things!

- Alex; Mon Jun 1 07:59:25 EDT 2009

Prompted by the Manhattanhenge story, went to 5th Ave, and 34th St to capture a few images: [small 100k img] [large 5mb img].

- Alex; Sun May 31 22:30:37 EDT 2009

Ok, here's how -more- information (or lack of complete information) can be bad: I was standing waiting for a subway for a -while-, and then suddenly the announcer `helpfully' says that there's a police investigation at the previous station, and all trains are going express (bypassing all the local stops). On that `knowledge', I went over to the opposite side of the platform to take the train in the other direction (to later backtrack via the express train). As soon as the train doors (opposite direction train) closed, guess what, the train in the right direction came (investigation ended?). And now the train I was on went -really- slow (probably due to a queue of trains that couldn't get through before [last stop is like 3 stops away]). In any case, that helpful announcement resulted in me wasting about 30 minutes going in the wrong direction on a slow train. If I remained ignorant, I wouldn't have wasted the 30 minutes. I found it kinda funny how increasing the knowledge can actually hurt your progress.

- Alex; Fri May 29 07:32:27 EDT 2009

Finished reading Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. This book is really enjoyable to read, and presents a pretty neat view of randomness and reality. I liked it so much that I've started to read the 2nd one... The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable.

- Alex; Thu May 28 07:43:47 EDT 2009

Economists: Recession to end in 2009. Yep. The way to end the recession is to print lots and lots of money, and hope for the best, apparently. Good thing these are the same economists who saw this coming from a mile away and took preventive action before it happened---so we know we can trust these folks.

- Alex; Wed May 27 07:43:26 EDT 2009

Went to DC for the weekend, mostly to roam around. Walked all around major attractions (air and space museum, etc.), and managed to see the Memorial Day parade.

- Alex; Tue May 26 07:43:22 EDT 2009