1. Simple way to sell or short the market
2. flexibility to trade alternative asset classes
3. maximize return using leverage
4. lower trading cost
5. protect your portfolio as it can be used to hedge
6. volatility equals opportunity
7. no need to do stock picking, the investor can trade index future for example
8. trade all season, no matter its bull, bear or sideway

Do you know that .NET Framework team spent  hundreds of hours in debating on topics as simple as naming conventions and naming style during the design stage?

Should you choose HorizontalAlignment or AlignmentHorizontal as the property name?

Do you know the DateTime.Now property should have been design as a method from the framework design guideline point of view?

Wonder why the Event is not ‘fired’, but it is ‘raised’?

Reading Framework Design Guideline is like having many designers from Microsoft such as: Krzysztof Cwalina, Brad Abrams, Chris Anderson, Erik Christensen, Jason Clark, Joe Duffy, Patrick Dussud, Anders Hejlsberg, Jim Miller, Michael Murray, Lance Olson, Eric Gunnerson, Dare Obasanjo, Steve Starck, Kit George sharing with you their design experience and best practice in Microsoft .NET Framework. They frankly shares the mistakes they made, debating on guidelines, and how they gradually improve the framework and libraries.

The book is organized with recommendations like Do, Do Not, Avoid, Consider. Not to mention, there are many annotations along with these guidelines, make you feel like these expert programmers and software architects are talking and sharing with you on the topics you are reading.

This book covers the fundamentals of framework design and the guidelines for:

• Naming Conventions, namespaces, assembly naming, member and parameter naming
• Type design such as Choosing between Class, Struct, Interface, Abstract Class, Static Class, and Enum
• Member design
• Designing for extensibility which consist of Unsealed classes, protected members, events and callbacks, virtual members and so on
• Exceptions design rules
• Usage guidelines for Arrays, Attributes, Collections, and so on
• Common design patterns applications

After reading Framework Design Guideline, you’ll understand a lot of rationale behind the .NET Framework design. It helps you more familiar with .NET and you can apply many best practices.

Start: 2009-09-20
Finish 2009-09-22

Figure 1: Read CSV file in Agilent VEE

The pseudo code shown in Figure 1 is:

• Open the file dialog, to let user select the CSV file to open
• The ‘from file’ container open the csv data file, with the setting: “Read text x token exclude: “\n” Array:*; it means to read the csv file, then split the content into 1D array, with the “\n” (new line) as seperator
• Remove the 1st row of the data, as the 1st row data is the heading/title
• Use the ForEach loop, to process each row.
• Use the FromString to split each row into columns, and collect the data into the container
• save the data into a variable

The problem with this code are:

• it create too many unnecessary containers, especially the ForEach loop. This is expensive solution in terms of performance.
• The programmer actually forgot to close the file in the FromFile container. This is a bad practice.

Agilent VEE is design with optimize processing in array. The above code can be simplified and optimized to what shown in Figure 2:

Figure 2: Optimized and simplified way of reading CSV data in Agilent VEE

The pseudo code for Figure 2 is:

• Open the file with FromFile container. Read the csv file content into 2 dimensions array, by splitting it with “\n” and “,” deliminators. Close the file afterward.
• Save the file into a Record variable.

With this solution, the optimized code perform much faster than original program. The 1st program takes 55.26ms for 10 rows of data. While the second approach use about 2.57ms, which is about 21.5 times of improvement. Also, it makes the code much cleaner and easier to read.

Refer to optimize_read_csv.zip file for detail. The UserFunction Analysis_ReadFromCSV shows the original implementation. I make the optimize method into a UserFunction: ReadCSV(FilePath, Number Of Column) which will return the csv data into a 2 dimension array.

The trade off for small laptop is it has small LCD screen. For Netbook, the screen is about 8-10 inch. While for laptop, it can goes as small as 12 inch. So, home users would buy another larger LCD monitor when they use it at home.With the laptop’s external connector, we can extend our display to dual display with both laptop’s LCD screen and external monitor as shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1: Extend laptop display with external monitor

It is very simple to configure:

1. Connect the laptop or Netbook’s VGA connector to the external monitor
2. Press Function (Fn) + Video Out (normally is F4) key on the laptop’s keyboard. Refer to Figure 2.
   

   Laptop's Video Out Function Key Location

   You can repeat this step for multiple times to toggle the settings.

3. Or you can use the Windows desktop display property (Right click Windows desktop | Property | Settings), then change the Display to second monitor, and check the “Extend my Windows desktop onto this monitor” option. Refer to Figure 3.
   

   Windows desktop dual display property setup

You can extend the display to TV with S-Video or LCD TV with the similar setup.

What is the application for dual display setting? Some users likes to use the extended display to watch video or monitor their stock trading software while they use the primary screen for their normal work. While some programmers use the dual monitor to ease their coding activity.

You might think these are easy questions, I have same thought also. I’m surprise when I watched the video clip below as many people cant really differentiate between browser and search engine. Some even confuse with the browser’s name.

In case you are looking for the answers:

• Browsers are software used to surf the internet, such as: Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome
• Search Engines are web services or tools designed to let the user search information on world wide web

The keys in this section are used to hash WordPress’s cookies values. In short, this is to prevent unauthorized access to our login information via cookies.  To make your blog more secure, you need to use complicated phrase to make it harder to decipher.

You dont have to crack your head to think of the complicated phrase. There is a generator at: http://api.wordpress.org/secret-key/1.1/.  Follow the link and you’ll get content as following, generated randomly:

define(’AUTH_KEY’,'KeX9*{<8uAW;dVy7MoJ&tCUXoz1(9Rcc|Y|-88LU|xrIm5HDf /~&hpuj)xG}DSi’);
define(’SECURE_AUTH_KEY’, ‘PN4`+=R+s.T^nC^B_3EkKHpUxM-J$yu==2p NC4z@FQ|g_@Z*vi63o,4Qy,:0ze|’);
define(’LOGGED_IN_KEY’,'LF~sQ+Q7)x-^?WDUuqiMn~N._{&F/(DpRE;Xz1ww-ajv|=zQ)xt[nz^cq{,C|`UI’)
define(’NONCE_KEY’,'r.&P~|BWz?RY-b:T<-`K5pbyni<~U8%r-%HL_ODc!W?nx!csC`af|pl+8+6%e<!o’);

Copy and paste the code from your browser to wp-config.php Key section. That’s all you need to do.

If you are serious about your blog security and internet business, or as a webmaster, you should do this. After all it takes less than 5 minutes to prevent your website from been hacked.