bad analysis

today, i want to coin a term that will hopefully enter into the design lexicon: <i>roto toti</i>

despite its seeming romance language sound, it is an acronym for rough on the outside tough on the inside.

this school of design is epitomised perfectly by this car:

how awesome is that beast? this is my favourite flavour of design of all time. stuff that you can use, but is tough. its not polished, you don’t worry about scratching it, but mechanically or some other aspect its a bit wild, just not its exterior.

take bikes for example, roto toti is my friends steel mountain bike, with an old frame but awesome components, not your carbon fibre or aluminium or single speed cafe polished horse. this is what its all about, favelas…

October 23rd, 2008 | Category: Uncategorized | Leave a comment

inspired by the cool slant of blue gene, here is a workstation design i’m toying with:

please manufacturer come out with this, no little logos or weird asian design touches please.

August 29th, 2008 | Category: Uncategorized | Leave a comment

If you buy a single oil futures contract, every cent the oil price moves costs or gains you $10 US. That is each “pip” is $10. There exist mini-oil contracts, for example at www.igmarkets.com.au but these move $5 a pip, or cent, which is still rather a lot.

If you look for example at the nymex right now, crude is down 89 pips or points and brent crude is down 91 points. this costs you 90 (roughly) * $10 (for the full contract) which is $900. Thats rather a lot if you’re a small player and can wipe you out if you don’t know what you are doing. (Trust me, i’ve been wiped out by this because I didn’t go in with enough money.)

Continuing with igmarkets as your broker, you can get around having to deposit say $6000 US to your account to buy 1 contract by putting in a guaranteed stop. In trading there are stops and limits. A stop is an automated trade to stop you from losing money, that is if the market goes against you. A limit is an automated trade that takes your profit if the market goes with you. So at igmarkets, and probably other brokers, there are guaranteed stops. Lets continue our oil example; oil is $10 a pip, so if you want a guaranteed stop 100 points (or 100 cents which is $1) away from the current market price it will cost you $1000. Makes sense. Furthermore igmarkets will build in a charge of $40 for this “guarantee” to execute the stop, simply by offering you a price 4 pips off the actual market price.

Now this seems great, you can trade oil with much less money, say even $250 if you just put the stop at the right level. Theres two major reasons you don’t want to do this:

1. You will get smashed up against your limit so fast you won’t know what hit you.
2. You pay an enormous fee for this service, the $40.

These two dangers are so severe, that except in very specific circumstances where you know exactly what you are doing, you probably don’t want to use this at all, at least not as a way to reduce margin requirements. Used in this way, they are basically offering you a cheap way to lose your money, and if that sounds ironic, thats on purpose. (i guess with massive trades where you need an absolute stop, the $40 is worthwhile, because you don’t want the market to jump through an unguaranteed stop and cost you millions)

So you still want to trade oil?

There exist other contracts which are called ETC crude oil, which probably stands for Exchange Traded Contract or something vaguely similar. (Apologies for being vague, because igmarkets wont give me a contract specification for this - they don’t even know theyre own products!)

This contract basically moves like a normal share, 1 cent for ever 1 cent the share moves. This gives you the option to trade oil much more cheaply, and without the huge leverage. On igmarkets its under the ETC contracts section.

August 28th, 2008 | Category: Uncategorized | Leave a comment

1. why do i think this is a good trade? fundamental, technical?
2. why is the market wrong - underpriced overpriced? why will it “correct” now?
3. can i ride out the volatility? can i ride out the irrationality?
4. can i pay the brokerage/transaction fees and still make my profit? how many trades?
5. am i chasing quick buck? chasing losses? letting winners run? or other emotional misconceptions?
6. what is my exit point for wins? for losses? should i build in a margin of error?
7. when should i re-evaluate this trade?

August 11th, 2008 | Category: Uncategorized | Leave a comment

i think its no longer useful to think of microsoft as one company. each individual division or team can create great software or steaming piles of rubbish.

some of their software is pretty amazing for example, XP is a significant achievement. It is amazingly stable, fast and feature rich. and given that microsoft has to support millions of machines and 20 odd years of bizarre hardware (people plug dot matrix printers into xp machines, and want to run db2 to print out their companies reports, trust me) i have to give them credit. its a really great OS.

hyper-v is pretty amazing as well. it is really fast and works really well for even crazy things, like passing through fibre channel scsi drives to a child OS and then running a third party block level SAN software on them which doesn’t even know its on a child operating system - great. This is how software should be written, and virtualization is going to be huge for microsoft. I think hyper-v really nails it.

but compare this to the nightmare which is exchange and active directory and windows domains. this is the IT devil incarnate. its like they sat down and said how can we come up with the most complicated interdependant way to share a couple of bits of data.

case in point, months of installing exchange servers and tearing ones hair out (mostly not microsofts fault, but the idiots who set up the domain before me) i finally installed exchange and a domain from scratch, in virtual machines on hyper-v. (thanks again hyper-v guys, you saved me hundreds of trips to the server room) and everything worked which was nice. (so if you do have to install exchange, stick to defaults!) the prerequisites are still a pain in the ass, which microsoft could just bundle into the exchange install. anyhoo, the whole point of the operation is to get a pocket pc to sync with a public calendar on the exchange server. so now after struggling with microsoft knowledge base about certificates for three days, i find a website that explains the process in five seconds, and without any of the complicated stuff microsoft raves on about in the knowledge base. (ok i know that stuff probably applies to massive enterprises, but wheres the stuff for the little guy?)

finally get the Pocket PC to sync to the exchange server, and you can’t even point it to a public calendar! what a waste of time.

ok, alternative free route time. already have lightning in thunderbird syncing with an ics calendar on my website (shout out to bluehost, guys rock) then install birdiesync on the mobile device and bam, instant sync to my lightning calendar which syncs to the ics file…i have calendar items anywhere. (not that i actually want this, but the company does. i never schedule anything =)

so it took about five minutes to get that working, and yes i did try the free route before, but because i really didn’t have a device to play with permanently (a must for all IT staff) i never managed to install birdie sync for some reason, but let me tell you it works, its simple, and it rocks.

July 18th, 2008 | Category: Uncategorized | Leave a comment

ok ok i get it. the skanky, yellowed beige, fishbowl CRT with a BSOD of death is meant to represent old technology. The PC has crashed; is that the reason why Mac OS can’t accesss it? no its just because apple spent more time designing gay-ass little icons than writing their connexion software. hey guys, some aussie yahoo solved this problem a decade ago, its called SAMBA.

but check out the mac icon, its crashed as well (no UI) it just doesn’t tell you whats going on:

also, taiwan called, they want their ghetto silver paint back to pimp some rides.

June 24th, 2008 | Category: Uncategorized | Leave a comment

unplug a usb device, plug it into a different port.

windows freaks out and reinstalls the device, sometimes automatically (in the case of a mouse) sometimes you have to go through the whole shebang of clicking next while windows finds the driver.

also sometimes plug in a new usb device, and maybe because of the cables being blocked by something else (like audio cables on the mac mini) or the plug was too big, you swap the mouse to another port. turn on your computer and you have no mouse, because its waiting to be installed after the new device.

June 23rd, 2008 | Category: Uncategorized | Leave a comment

might need to do some development work on the apple iphone. so i download the free sdk.

first, apple forces me to reregister a whole bunch of information; don’t force me to jump through your stupid registration just to download your sdk.

second, to watch the videos, they force you to download their rubbish itunes, instead of just posting the videos to the web. so you download itunes and here are the steps that fail:

1. you download the latest and suggested version
2. you run it, its 32bit and recommends 64bit for your os (no take me there now button)
3. you go back to apple and look for the 64bit xp version, it doesn’t exist
4. you install the 32 bit version, it takes ten minutes, starts and stops services and spews shit all over your drive and registry, to watch a fucking video
5. you open itunes, the browser can’t find it. they could solve this, when you install utorrent, you don’t even need to close or restart the browser and it works it out. you click launch application
6. you reclick through a bunch of shit to initialise itunes.
7. you click get movie -> nothing happens

so all that and all for nothing, probably i will have to reboot the machine before itunes fucking works.

(credit where credit is due: the drag and drop of the iphone sdk looked quite well done, but i need the video to work out how to add a method to a button, this should be more intuitive, but maybe its easy, i don’t know, without the video)

update:

you can say that again.

June 23rd, 2008 | Category: Uncategorized | Leave a comment

just had lunch, and shot home for a midday nap.

15 minutes and its like having a whole new day. instead of fluffing around trying not to fall asleep i’m back at work powering through.

good enough for churchill - good enough for you.

if you need advice on how to convince your boss check out: http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog

June 19th, 2008 | Category: Uncategorized | Leave a comment