Stock Market: Why shorting is wrong

Here is an article about how to short the stock-market. Shorting is selling stock you don't own, hoping the price will go down, and buying the stock at the lower price to cover your previous sells, hence making money. While within the law, it's just plain wrong.

Shorting allows day traders and the like to continue to make money while the market drops, but by doing so they are encouraging the market downwards hurting 'long' investors - aka your super fund.

Shorting should be banned permanently. The ongoing greed in the market is disgusting - step up the plate governments of the world! It's time for some regulation.

| 16 Feb 2009 | #

A hard week

Last week was pretty hard. All was going well until Thursday when things turned pear-shaped - I was completely out of my depth with the unexpected news.

It's times like these when you think about life, your loved ones, and what's most important to you. Priorities become very clear at times like these, and you find out how wonderful your friends are. I have been so blessed by the love and support I've received by good friends.

Thank you for supporting me and my family, and thank you for your kind words, thoughts and prayers.

| 15 Sep 2008 | #

Random Acts of Kindness

This morning a package arrived from Germany which contained the following:

It's a firewire/USB iPod dock connector (so no custom cable is required) + a case for my ear buds. Nice. The problem is that I don't know where it came from. There's no indication on the package, and I certainly didn't order it. So thank you to the Fairy-of-Random-Acts-Of-Kindness for giving me a nice surprise this Monday morning.

I'll have to Pay It Forward.

| 08 Oct 2007 | #

Clearcase labeling with spaces in filenames

Working with spaces in filenames is a right royal pain - should be a criminal offence, if you ask me! (if it wasn't for -0 on xargs and -print0 on find, it'd be a lot more painful, but I digress :-)

Clearcase has it's own slightly different set of tools which doesn't help matters either. So one problem you commonly face is "I want to apply a label across some specific set of files, but some of them have spaces in them." The standard tricks don't work, but fortunately there is a workaround. Here 'tis.

shadowfax:> cleartool find . -type f -version "some criteria" -exec 'cleartool mklabel MY_NEW_LABEL "$CLEARCASE_XPN"'

'XPN' gives us the extended pathname (as opposed to 'PN'), and the double quotes cover the space-in-filename issue. Just one of them dang things you blog about because you never know when you'll need it again later :-)

| 17 Jul 2007 | #

Juggling

• Chris Bliss
• 8,9,10 and 11 Balls
• Jason Garfield 2004
• WJF 2006 trailer

Just love the commentary :-)

| 18 Jun 2007 | #

You win some, you lose some

So despite this morning's good news, today is an even bigger black day than last time.

Very sad, but thanks for the memories - time to move on with life.

| 13 Jun 2007 | #

Australia's Do Not Call Register opens

Finally Australia's anti-telemarketer Do Not Call Register website opens.

Hopefully this will stop the flood of phone calls from telecommunications companies with call-centres in Mumbai asking me to switch carriers during dinner.

Attribution: Our ABC - even though they got the URL wrong :-)

| 03 May 2007 | #

Follow-up criticism?

So Davyd, I agree - I don't like where the Liberals are going with their Nuclear energy policy. But from what I see the ALP is no different. Will I find an equally strong condemnation of the ALP on your blog soon?

| 29 Apr 2007 | #

Following the meme...

As a result of sjh's prod - here are 5 things not generally known about me... Hmmm...

• I've found peace with God and hang out at this church every week;
• I worked as an Ada programmer for 8 years straight out of uni before going more mainstream with C/C++/C#/Python/Java etc;
• I've had several knee operations including fixing a snapped ACL;
• I once took 7/24 bowling leg-spin in a 2 day game;
• I have a plan to hike around Wilpena Pound in 3 days once my kids are old enough.

Other people I'd like to hear from: James Cormack, mbp, mikal, Erik and Michael Neuling. I'd like to hear from g, Glen Turner and Dan Shearer, but alas they don't blog!

| 11 Jan 2007 | #

A way to waste lots of time :-)

So, via Richard Jones I discovered Galcon - an awesome high paced galactic action-strategy game. You send swarms of ships from planet to planet to take over the galaxy.

Oh my goodness. This is a very ubercool swarm-style arcade game written in python. Brings back fond memories of that 'ole xlib game with bases and pipelines. I'm not going to say how much time I spent playing this yesterday.

Update: The old xlib game is xbattle. Still being packaged and available on Debian/Ubuntu/wherever.

| 13 Dec 2006 | #

Stikkit opens

Another web2.0 startup goes public with their beta - stikkit.

This one looks interesting - postit notes, todo lists, web bookmarks, calendar, tagging all combined together. Another competitor to Google Tools and Services (free) and Apple's .Mac (non-free). There's also integration with North American cell^Wmobile carriers, allowing for SMS reminders; not to mention the ability to share stikkits with others as you see fit.

What I like about stikkit is the ease at tagging entries - I can say this entry is @work or @home, as well as @priority-one or @low-priority. Very simple concepts, but broad in power allowing you to use it however you think will work for you.

I signed-up this morning, and the biggest wow feature that struck me was having a private email address which automatically creates new stikkits for you. This is fantastic! Up until now I've been using a fragile home-built TODO email gateway, but now I'll move over and try this one out.

Overall, looks pretty cool. Looking forward to seeing how it pans out after a couple of weeks serious use.

| 08 Nov 2006 | #

Writely comes out of beta

Google's Writely comes out of it's secret beta today. I've been playing for a little while today (ahem, when I should have been doing other things ;) and I reakon they've done a good job. This is what the AJAX-enabled Web2 is supposed to be.

Quick feature review:

• Import Word docs
• Export out of Writely to HTML, RTF, Word, OOo, PDF
• Fully-featured word processor
• Online collaboration
• Publish to HTML, stored on their server
• Blog posting integration
• Revision history

So this post should have been done in Writely, but I'm not willing to hand-over username/passwords to a 3rd party app yet. That bit scares me a little. I'll need to hack some addition security in first.

| 21 Aug 2006 | #

Implantable RFIDs not fool-proof

Who wants to become Linux Australia's president for a day? :-) Engadget is reporting that implantable RFIDs are quite easy to clone, making it quite easy to steal someone's identify.

So Jon, the good news is that no-one will cut your arm off - instead they'll just scan you from afar ;-)

| 25 Jul 2006 | #

Flagr - local knowledge sink

Flagr - more Google Maps fun. Find places recommended by others.

Problem is, how do you stop abuse? How do you prevent a call centre full of monkeys polluting the system with over-priced, ecologically unsound, ethically challenged business franchises? How do you guarrantee that only local genuine knowledge gets into the system? And why is this looking like another Orkut wannabee?

| 07 Mar 2006 | #

Star Wars in 30 secs

Star Wars in 30 seconds from the Bunnies has just been released!

| 19 Dec 2005 | #

Riemann's Hypothesis

I'm most productive in the morning, so in my calendar I block out all time before midday for me to actual do technical work (as opposed to attending meetings / managing people).

This works generally well, except for people who think they're too important to honour previously made calendar commitments :-( Anyway, back to the story...

The key is to say in your calendar booking that you're doing something important. Something that your manager / other workers won't want to distract you from doing. As many people at work have at least some technical bent, I need task names that sound deeply technical - something that at least sounds worthwhile and something they are unlikely to know very much about. That way I can get back into the zone writing code undisturbed.

So my solution has been to use some theoretical computer terms combined with some mathematical problems. Afterall, who's going to argue with a calendar entry that says, "Verify distributed grid for solving Riemann's Hypothsis". Laugh all you like - that (recurring) calendar entry stood the test of time for the last 6 months.

That was, until today.

My manager googled and found this - http://www.coolissues.com/mathematics/Zeta/zeta.htm - "Now I've saved you 3 hours every week"

Damn you Google! I now need a new fake calendar entry for Tuesday mornings :-)

| 16 Dec 2005 | #

How to solve "resource shortage"

How do you solve the problem of not having enough "resources" to meet your project's deadline?

Outsourcing via Primate Programming Inc.

| 11 Nov 2005 | #

RSA-640 Factored

Schneir reports that RSA-640 has been factored.

Some links to follow up. Note that this isn't RSA-1024 by any means, but it continues to highlight that relying upon today's strong crypto may not guarrantee data security in 20 years time.

From one of these reports:

      The factorization of the latest RSA number to fall involved "lattice" sieving 
      done by J. Franke and T. Kleinjung using hardware at the Scientific Computing 
      Institute and the Pure Mathematics Institute at Bonn University, Max Planck   
      Institute of Mathematics in Bonn, and Experimental Mathematics Institute in 
      Essen. The factorization of RSA-640 was accomplished using a prime 
      factorization algorithm known as the general number field sieve. Sieving was 
      done on 80 2.2-GHz Opteron CPUs and took 3 months. The matrix step was 
      performed on a cluster of 80 2.2-GHz Opterons connected via a Gigabit network  
      and took about 1.5 months.

Not trivial compute power, but not out of the reach of people with lots of machines, or lots of money. Can you say university lab supervisor?

Practical Implications: Use RSA-2048 as a minimum for any new keys. Review the sensitivity of the data you are protecting with RSA-1024 and re-encrypt if you need longer term security.

| 11 Nov 2005 | #

Bulky Pocket Syndrome

I now have a Motorola V3 as my cellmobile phone. The thinness of the device was its biggest selling factor - my wife is happier since I now suffer less from bulky pocket syndrome. There's only my keys and palm pilot problem to solve now :-)

On the cool tech side, the V3 doesn't have some proprietry gumpf phone connector - it uses mini-USB for both battery charging and connectivity. Under Linux it appears as a USB modem - something to explore to see if its useful in the coming weeks. There's also bluetooth, but shadowfax (my laptop) doesn't, so that'll have to wait.

| 04 Nov 2005 | #

World Wide Weather

What happens when Google Maps is merged with The Weather Channel? You get Weather Bonk.

| 31 Oct 2005 | #

It's getting worse

Continuing on...

     f(x)=6x+3 walks into a bar, goes up to the barman and asks "Can I have a couple of sandwiches please?"

     The barman replies:  "Sorry mate, we don't cater for functions"

| 28 Oct 2005 | #

It's a Wonderful Life

It's a Wonderful Life

That's it in a nutshell.

| 20 Oct 2005 | #

All the best

Today the final set of people from the black day leave. Goodbye Trev, Scotty, Glen and Eunice! You were some of the best people to work with, both technically and as part of a team. All the best with Sarugo - securing your digital memories.

| 28 Sep 2005 | #

Some Advantages

There are some advantages to having your own server on-line.

| 23 Sep 2005 | #

Plug for booq

My mother-in-law just purchased a 14" iBook, and she wanted a Booq laptop sleeve to fit. Of course the 3 Australian distributors of the product don't sell this model in Australia, so it had to be a direct order to the US of A. Grumble.

So I ordered the sleeve from the USA direct from Booq (at exorbitant shipping cost), but they made an error in shipping by sending me the Vyper M (for 15" PowerBook) instead of the Vyper XM (for 14" iBook). Grumble grumble grumble. But they redeemed themselves by shipping me the right model as soon as I reported the error - no questions asked, no additional cost to me. Their response was the best I've had when purchasing something from overseas over the 'net and something going wrong.

Great customer service Booq! - and from the look on my mother-in-law's face, excellent product!

| 19 Sep 2005 | #

Bad Jokes

Following in the same vein as these bad jokes comes this:

     A neutron goes into a bar and asks the bartender, "How much for a beer?" 
     The bartender replies, "For you, no charge." 

| 18 Aug 2005 | #

Ignorance

More ignorance shown here:

And while you're at it, follow your literal interpretation of the Bible to teach young impressionable children that the Earth is flat and that we're at the centre of the solar system.

Without wanting to start a flame war, or some long heated discussion, I disagree with this opinion. You're welcome to have it, I just disagree with it. Being a Christian doesn't mean you have to put your brain away.

| 04 Aug 2005 | #

Random Update

So for the first time since arriving in Chicago I pulled out the bike and went for a 3 hour ride on Sunday. Felt really good except for the inevitable soreness on one's rear for not cycling for so long.

On the day job front, spent a few days in limbo going back and forward on what was actually required to be built. Besides costing us the few days of no progress while these things were debated and discussed, it had the effect of demotivating the team substantially. We're now back at exactly the same requirement scope that we were a week and a half ago (which was documented and agreed back then :-(, but now we have less time to build it, and the team has started wishing for greener pastures. Good one. It will be a busy coming month meeting this deadline.

In other news the infrastructure holding my vanity site together failed again - my investigations are pointing at a hardware fault in some network kit. Will need to play the "swap hardware one item at a time until you find the fault" game. More fun.

That makes my life sound all negative, but it's not. There's lots of positives right now too - plenty of personal triumphs that still need to be blogged :-)

| 02 Aug 2005 | #

The Black day realised.

So the Black Day has come to fruition. Today is the official last day for so many.

Today is the end of an era - this group of people is one of the most talented I've had the pleasure of working with. Monday will be very quiet around here :-(

Many of those departing have things to go to, so the mood today is fortunately upbeat.

| 08 Jul 2005 | #

toby-gets-a-reprieve

Rene, you can now relax. Toby has been given 6 more months to live. New deadline is November 6, 2005.

| 01 Jul 2005 | #

Apple moving from PPC to x86

Wow.

Who would have thought that just as Apple gains momentum with their products, they take a huge risk and change processors?

Given the unavoidable teething problems in both hardware and software that'll come, I can see them struggling to makes sales for 12 months at least. I mean, who'd buy a Mac today? - no future in your hardware or software purchase. Who'd buy a 1st generation x86 Apple when they come out? And the 2nd generation stuff x86 couldn't be available until at least June 2007 - and that's 2 years away!

Apple make nice kit, and if they supported an open-source DRI-enabled graphics driver for xorg I would have bought a powerbook already. That's definately off the cards. Now the switch has been made, Apple will need to be become very price competitve - no-one's going to buy a similarly spec'd laptop for $AUD1500 more just because of an Apple logo. I guess that's a good thing for Mac OS X aficionados.

I hope Apple survives all this - they do nice hardware. I just hope they also realise they need to better support the future of computing.

BTW, this has new meaning now.

| 07 Jun 2005 | #

HTML Validation

This plugin allows you to do HTML validation inside Firefox.

This is very cool.

| 03 Jun 2005 | #

Why I will never travel to Indonesia

http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/200505/s1378650.htm

Locked suitcases are now a must for travelling, and maybe even video tapping the contents before you leave. Something has to be done to stop this sort of stupidity.

| 27 May 2005 | #

Rain

First rain at home since the end of March (and probably earlier). 10mm overnight and now spitting. We really are the dryest state in the dryest country.

| 27 May 2005 | #

Google Id

Some recent mismatches while looking for people - it appears Leon does the blues in addition to free software.

Rusty also does photography, Mikal has his fanboys in Illinois :-) but there's no mistaking AJ - has the whole front page of google to himself.

And in _my_ spare time, it appears I am a controversial catholic.

BTW, this all come about because a work colleague pointed out my newly improved google ranking, which which I'm very happy with right now.

| 24 May 2005 | #

incompetence

Incompetence is not a rare quality nowadays.

This is unfortunate.

| 13 May 2005 | #

Police State

Seems the USA is about to become a police state - mandated nation ID with RFID. All the benefits of being able to control your citizens, with no chance of improving security.

As reported by Schneier, Miguel and rml.

Any bets on how long before Australians are similarly hoodwinked by a similar attempt at improving "security"? (better known as controlling your citizens). I'm just glad this wasn't attached to the AUSFTA as a condition of treaty or other similar misconception.

| 10 May 2005 | #

A Good Football Weekend

It was a nice football weekend - Norwood beat Port in the SANFL, the Crows hold on and win, and Port are humiliated.

| 02 May 2005 | #

Drugs in the USA

Over in the USA they don't have Paracetemol, instead they have Acetaminophen. Strangely, the local pharmacy^Wdrug store had never even heard of paracetemol, even though they are the same drug.

| 13 Apr 2005 | #

work

Today started with a conference call and product demonstration at 3:30am to people in the USA.

yawn. Is it linux.conf.au week yet?

| 12 Apr 2005 | #