Thursday, September 21, 2006

High finance

I've been reading this lately: Amazon.com: When Genius Failed: The Rise and Fall of Long-Term Capital Management: Books: Roger Lowenstein. As impressive as the actual story, is how Roger Lowenstein managed to put together the entire book in a year or two, and write such a compelling narrative about it, capturing both the technical (at least to me) and the emotional aspects of it.

Fascinating..this talk of spreads, swaps, repos, volatility, hedges, paired trades, options and bonds..To paraphrase Sienfeld, "..Bulls, Bears, people from Connecticut.."

There's more of this good stuff here.

UPDATE: Now, where have I heard this before? What is with September and volatility?

Wednesday, September 20, 2006

Authenticated and private feeds

Came across this: Authenticated and private feed, the other day. Building authentication, authorization and security into the feed reader is one way to go. But, this effort would have to be replicated across all the feed platforms out there.

A better way would be to leave these platforms to do one thing well, and push the aforementioned functionality into a web services intermediary, like SOA Software's Network Director, which supports HTTP Basic Auth and role-based subscriptions to feeds.

In addition, it also supports digital signatures (signing and verification) on feeds, and tag-based aggregation of these feeds. This is the ability to define a virtual ("aggregate") feed, which is a boolean expression on the tags (or labels) applied to the underlying ("concrete") feeds. For e.g., if the New York Times feed is tagged "nyt" and the Wall Street Journal feed is tagged "wsj", one could define a new aggregate feed called "news", defined as (nyt OR wsj).

Saturday, September 16, 2006

Thursday, September 14, 2006

Google Book Search: Celebrate Your Freedom to Read

Google Book Search: Celebrate Your Freedom to Read

Ah!.. illicit books. One gets the feeling that they can't be that bad for you. More like "free speech" than "free beer".

Some of the books on this list surprise me, probably because I'm unaware of the context under which they were banned. Race and war seem to be a couple of them, on a cursory glance.

Wednesday, September 13, 2006

Apache XMLBeans

Been playing with Apache's XMLBeans lately. It's a impressive tool. Beats having to traverse the schema document tree.

SchemaType and SchemaParticle are well thought out, and simple enough to use once you get the hang of them. XmlOptions, on the other hand, are a bit more mysterious, especially regarding how they deal with external schema references, and imported schemata.

Tuesday, September 12, 2006

Microsoft Open Specification Promise

This Microsoft Open Specification Promise looks very generous on first glance, but isn't this kind of the point of a specification, that a common interface has been decided upon, in order to encourage all the interested parties to talk a common vocabulary?

Harvard Ends Early Admission - New York Times

Harvard Ends Early Admission - New York Times

This is bound to make prep schools unhappy, If other Ivy League schools follow Harvard's lead, wonder if that'll make prep schools and other elite private schools less exclusive, given that building and maintaing a robust early admissions pipeline is one of the core competencies of such schools.