Handy Mac Apps and More.

Joel Spolsky talk at Railsconf

2008-11-02T20:33:00.001-08:00

Click to play

Jason Fried 37 Signals Talk

2008-10-29T11:01:00.000-07:00

Click to play

Cocoa Forex

2008-10-20T17:28:00.000-07:00

Still been cracking away at the Objective-C equivalents of the Ruby code for Gain Capital's API. I am writing it as an actual app vs. individual Objective-C snippets. When it is a bit further along I will post the code & XCode project file as a zip for others to use.

Stay tuned.

Forex Code

2008-10-17T17:12:00.000-07:00

Soon I shall be developing and posting Objective-C code versions of the previous Ruby postings. Stay tuned...

Forex Article

2008-10-10T18:29:00.001-07:00

Usually most beginner traders after failing to make a profit in Forex start looking for a perfect system that could make them successful. They ask successful traders what FX trading system they use. In my opinion the system is not the most important thing to your success as a trader. The most important thing is your discipline and mindset.

Yet there are some things that need to be looked in a trading system to figure out if it is profitable or not. The most important thing is what the traders call "the edge" or mathematical expectation of a trading system. The system can have a positive edge or negative edge. If it is positive you will build up you account over long period of time if you keep executing your trades. If it is negative you will drain you account no matter how big profit you are making in a single trade.

How do you find out if your system has a positive expectation or negative? The only way to figure it out is to test it. Go all the way back in time on your charts and test it on the historical data. After that forward test trade it on a demo account. Execute at least 100 trades.

Let's say in your trading system you are taking profit at 30 pips and cut your loses at 15 pips. After testing you find out that 40 trades out of 100 hit the take profit level and the rest 60 stopped out in loss. Mathematical expectation for this system is 30*40/100-15*60/100=3 pips. In other words average profit of each trade is 3 pips. While it seems not a lot but with this edge you can consistently grow your account.

What if you find that your system loses 65 times out of 100 and wins 35 times. Then the expectation is 30*30/100-15*70=-1.5. The expectation is negative. Even if you are losing only pip and half per trade you will be consistently decreasing amount of money in your account.

This is one of the reasons why I strongly recommend practicing execution of your trading system. It will do two things for you. It will develop discipline to act upon your trading system signals. The second very important thing it will give you data to calculate the mathematical expectation of your system. If after long period of testing you find that expectation keeps being negative then switch the system.

It always surprises me when I see people trade a system and have no clue what is the mathematical expectation of their system. Even more surprisingly I see some people trade systems with negative expectations. You need to know the edge of your system and if it is positive you need to be disciplined to follow through your trading plan of executing it.

Albert Schmidt is a part-time currency trader. After quite a long time of struggle he learned to make consistent profit trading in Forex. Review a trading strategy he successfully uses in his trades.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Albert_Schmidt

Forex Ruby Code

2008-10-10T17:46:00.000-07:00

I hope to continue to create this open source ruby trading system. For those interested, as I continue this project all the code will be made publicly available as is permissible with regards to the trading platform it works with.

Thank you to all whom try my code and do with as you please. It is being released under GPL.

If you feel generous please donate so I can continue this project and others like it.

Thank you

Ruby Forex Code Part 5

2008-10-08T16:37:00.001-07:00

#--------------------------------------------------
# Retreive and format currency pairs
# Matt Hayford
# October 2008
#--------------------------------------------------

class RateData
require 'net/http'

attr_accessor :rates, :parsedrates

def getrate(key)
query = Hash.new
query['Key'] = key
url = URI.parse('http://api.efxnow.com/DEMOWebServices2.8/Service.asmx/GetRatesBlotter')
res = Net::HTTP.post_form(url, query)
@rates = /.*>.*\s*.*>(.*)<.*/.match(res.body)[1]
end

def parserate
parsedrates = @rates
@rates = parsedrates.gsub(/\\/, " ")
parsedrates = @rates
@rates = parsedrates.gsub(/\$/, "\n")
# do bunch of fancy parsing to remove delimiters and format info
# return @rates = @parsedrates
end

def returnrate
return @rates
end

end

Ruby Forex Code Part 4

2008-10-08T16:36:00.002-07:00

#--------------------------------------------------
# Retreive and format currency pairs
# Matt Hayford
# October 2008
#--------------------------------------------------

class RateBlotter
require 'net/http'

attr_accessor :rates, :parsedrates

def getrate(key)
query = Hash.new
query['Key'] = key
url = URI.parse('http://api.efxnow.com/DEMOWebServices2.8/Service.asmx/GetRatesBlotter')
res = Net::HTTP.post_form(url, query)
@rates = /.*>.*\s*.*>(.*)<.*/.match(res.body)[1]
end

def parserate
parsedrates = @rates
@rates = parsedrates.gsub(/\\/, " ")
parsedrates = @rates
@rates = parsedrates.gsub(/\$/, "\n")
# do bunch of fancy parsing to remove delimiters and format info
# return @rates = @parsedrates
end

def returnrate
return @rates
end

end

Ruby Forex Code Part 3

2008-10-08T16:36:00.001-07:00

#--------------------------------------------------
# Currency Pair Class
# Matt Hayford
# October 2008
#--------------------------------------------------

class Pair
attr_accessor :name, :bid, :ask, :high, :low

def initialize(name, bid, ask, high, low)
@name = name
@bid = bid
@ask = ask
@high = high
@low = low
end

def updateinfo(bid, ask, high, low)
@bid = bid
@ask = ask
@high = high
@low = low
end

def pairinfo
return @name, @bid, @ask, @high, @low
end

def nameinfo
return @name
end

def bidinfo
return @bid
end

def askinfo
return @ask
end

def highinfo
return @high
end

def lowinfo
return @low
end

end

Ruby Forex Code Part 2

2008-10-08T16:32:00.000-07:00

The following ruby code builds on the previous post. Allowing a user once receiving an authenticated key from the server to get rate quotes.

#--------------------------------------------------
# Retreive and format currency pairs
# Matt Hayford
# October 2008
#--------------------------------------------------

class Rate
require 'net/http'
attr_accessor :rates, :quote, :pairpointer

# retreive quote array from api.efxnow.com
def getrate(key)
query = Hash.new
query['Key'] = key
url = URI.parse('http://api.efxnow.com/DEMOWebServices2.8/Service.asmx/GetRates')
res = Net::HTTP.post_form(url, query)
@rates = /.*>.*\s*.*>(.*)<.*/.match(res.body)[1]
end

# format quote array, remove delimiter
def parserate
@rates = @rates.gsub(/\\/, " ")
@rates = @rates.split(/\$/)
end

# find pair index array element number
def getname(name)

a = @rates
n = @rates.length
n = n - 1

for i in 0..n
if a[i].index(name)
@pairpointer = i
end
end
end

# create array of quote removing space delimiters
def formater
i = @pairpointer
@quote = @rates[i].split(/ /)
@quote.delete_at(3)
@quote.delete_at(5)
@quote.delete_at(5)
end

# return formatted single quote array
def quote
return @quote
end

# return all rates array
def rate
return @rates
end

# return individual array element
def price(n)
case n
when 'pair' then return @quote[0]
when 'bid' then return @quote[1]
when 'ask' then return @quote[2]
when 'high' then return @quote[3]
when 'low' then return @quote[4]
end
end

end

Ruby Forex Code

2008-10-08T16:30:00.000-07:00

The following ruby code is designed to work with the forex system from Gain Capital/Forex.com

you will need to sign up for a demo API account.

The following code retrieves an authentication key from the server so that one may get rate quotes, place orders etc.

#--------------------------------------------------
# Retreive Key Authentication From GAPI Demo Server
# Matt Hayford
# October 2008
#--------------------------------------------------

class Key
require 'net/http'
attr_accessor :key

# retreive key from api.efxnow.com
def getkey(name, passwd)
query = Hash.new
query['UserId'] = name
query['PWD'] = passwd
query['Brand'] = 'GAPI'
url = URI.parse('http://api.efxnow.com/DEMOWebServices2.8/Service.asmx/GetRatesServerAuth')
res = Net::HTTP.post_form(url, query)
@key = /.*>.*\s*.*>(.*)<.*/.match(res.body)[1]
end

# return authenticated key
def key
return @key
end

end

Yahoo, Perl, Forex and Ruby

2008-10-06T16:41:00.000-07:00

Starting soon I will be posting code snippets and entire classes from projects I have worked on past and present.

Stikkit.com

2008-09-16T14:34:00.000-07:00

Another great ToDo web application.

Check it out.

Gubb.net Wonderful Todo Lists

2008-02-26T18:41:00.001-08:00

Check out Gubb.net great ToDo List webapp. Perfect for turning your GTD's to online use vs. offline.

Linus Torvalds a Windows guy?

2007-03-25T17:59:00.000-07:00

I posted a minute ago, and rather than edit the post from then, I felt this should go in its own post :)

Now, first of all I only found this 'funny' in a "heh" sense of the word. But after looking at it twice, I got confused; is it just me or does the guy at the computer look rather similar to Linus Torvalds, the Linux creator?
I think that's a bit ironic, and a bit of a bad decision on the part of the artist(s) behind the joke.

Enjoy the sad leftovers of the weekend; I'm desperately trying to.

iTunes is not the best music player!

2007-03-25T10:44:00.000-07:00

Overcommercialized media players suck. It's about that simple to me.
Real Player sucked, and still, although they've cleaned it up some, sucks. WinAmp was, up to around v2.83 seemingly "community", but the 3.0 release was sometime around the release and pick-up of iTunes, and the program went to hell, in a feverish, and pathetic attempt at preserving it's user base, by making a 5th-graders fushion-app, resulting in something as useless and unappealing as one would think when faced with the equation "iTunes+WinAmp =". Oh, and let's not forget the gloreous, and strangely popular, Windows Media Player. The dumbest and sorriest excuse for a 'media' app I've ever seen anyone actually use. And to the users of this idiot-app; No, it doesn't handle movies well. No, it doesn't handle Mp3's at all. No, the interface is not easy and modern; it's fugly and maneuvering through the retarded selection of features is much like figuring out the releasing company's EULA's; You just can't win.

But all of the above don't matter to most (all but Linux users *wave*), since iTunes has become hugely popular. And this is all fine and dandy, but let's not get carried away. Indeed, iTunes, in many ways, has taken on the challenge of handling large music libraries and the desire to download, rather than pay the extra $10 to feed the idiot behind the counter at your local CD dump. IMnsHO (In My not so Humble Opinion), this is fantastic, and praise to you Apple for continuing to make decent, and in this case, above average quality products for the people. But I get a twitch whenever I hear people say that iTunes is the best music player (deviating from the popular "media player", since iTunes only plays Music. No, the sucky Quicktime reference for movie playback doesn't count), since there are better solutions out there. iTunes has many useful features, but Apple seems a little slow in understanding the regular punters needs, such as myself. Here are a few examples;

1. Writing ID3 tags:
Why, oh why Apple, won't you let me change tracks, or at the very least flick through my library/playlists while writing tags? Why do I have to look at the already plenty invasive popup, showing me exactly what track is being (re-)tagged - rather than let me enjoy my music. It's not that hard; Make it a background process, not the first priority.

2. Search?
Yes, iTunes has glorious search capabilities.. Well, not quite. iTunes supports ID3v2 tags which are great and allow all kinds of useful (and some quite useless) information to be stored as metadata. But Apple won't let me search my library for most of these, which can be somewhat annoying if you hear a good song and two weeks later want to hear it again. It's gone from Recently Played, in my case it won't be in recently added anymore.. It's somewhat gone. And even if I tagged it with something suitable, like "Awesome jazz" in the comments - iTunes won't bother look at the comments for its searching.

3. Sidebar
What the hell is up with this? iTunes should not dictate my layout of this sidebar. I'm somewhat of a music lover, and I have *tons* of music, and therefor tons of playlists, and it really does make my eyes turn into flaming Apple logos. You can't move a playlist. FUN! The last made, and therefor probably most relevant playlist, is at the bottom, so I can have lots of fun exercizing my index-finger, scrolling the list - Oh the joy.

4. How I love queues
Why won't Apple or iTunes developers allow me to 'wing' my playlist? WinAmp did this more or less from the get go (although it wouldn't surprise me if they removed it, just to maximize the suckiness of 3.0+) and I consider it a must. But all apple will let me do, quickly anyway, is set a song to "play next in Party Shuffle"; an AI playlist that picks songs I like to party to at a 'whim' - Needless to say, I dislike this concept.

There; 4 iTunes petpeeves you can either help solve, nod at and throw me a comment, or lastly and more probable; toss digital bricks at my IP for bashing a product from the fruity "we wear jeans, dude" company.

The good news, and perhaps the only thing I have to offer you, dear reader (beyond a need for Anger Management), would be my list of *great* music players. These are Open Source and are clearly made for people, by people that want to listen to music.

My two top picks are Banshee and Rhythmbox. They have each their strengths, althugh I would agree to the notion that Rhythmbox is a bit old-school compared to Banshee. In any event; they do all of the above correctly, and more over; Rhythmbox has a neat function called Party-mode - the name pretty much says it all; it'll maximize the window, and whenever one of your beer chugging comrades makes a spastic handgesture and hits the keyboard/mouse, signifying that he wants to change the track, it will be enqueued rather than replace the current song. I, at least, found this useful.
Oh, and they both support media key shortcuts, iPod's, music sharing, last.fm and much more.

I should mention that I'm not really suggesting all mac users switch to Linux(GNOME), but merely reflecting upon some flaws/bugs in what is often called the worlds best media/music player. I hope this might reach some enlightened iTunes developer (clearly, not all of them are).

Well, I think that's enough whining about Apple for one night... That reminds me; I need to change tracks ... !

Tiger Terrorising my Tiny mac

2007-03-23T13:47:00.000-07:00

Ah, so here I am. Barely calmed from the 'incident' a few minutes ago. My Mini's been bugging the living #%!&# out of me. And the worst of it is - it's my own fault! If I would just get the led out and go buy the measely 1gb RAM stick it would take to make my fruity lunchbox behave like the stylish "I wuv you!" toy it was meant to - But such a stick costs $180 USD and upwards over here (and that's used, thank you very much) and I frankly have no intention of choking whatever sense of selfworth I have left into submission by making such an outrageous purchase. That said, perhaps I should've thought twice before eagerly installing the latest Tiger (10.4.9) on a G4 1.25ghz Mac Mini with just 512mb RAM. In retrospect, I just want to point and laugh at myself.

Anywho... Situation being what it is; My mediocre yet expensive Dell Latitude D620 is going bye-bye (nevermind why), my second PC running Linux is sitting in a corner (most likely whimpering at the lack of activity around it) and I've been too busy/lazy to pick it up thus far. Third PC is.. Nevermind, third PC is a piece of shit anyway and thus irrelevant. Conclusion; no alternatives.

So, at this point in time, I have no choice but to stick with this Mini. And with the way it had been behaving, it was a matter of time before either A. Someone on the streets got their skull bashe
d in by the impact of a white, square 2.9 lbs object - or B. Someone on the streets got their life altered from the trauma of seeing a white, long 190lbs, supposedly human, object killing innocent kittens and tossing sushi at people (you can call it food if you like, but with impact at 40mph, it still hurts like hell!)

So I did yet another search for some optimization of OSX, and found this howto. Now, most of the tips on there are just standard stuff that, hopefully, anyone with the guts to run OS 10.4 on a G4, has already tried/utilized.
But as it turns out, using TinkerTool ( website ) really has boosted my performance quite a bit. At least enough to stop the heart-pounding sound in my ears.

So, I hope this long rant and short advice can help anyone out there with an old Mini, determination to run latest release of OSX, and high blood pressure from having the first two.

Happy weekend to all - Mine's started great.

Postscript: I really hope I haven't been scared by this lousy experience to the extent where I go on a rampage this summer, from seeing one of those multi-colored beach balls somewhere..!

Spaces/Virtual Desktops

2007-03-22T20:56:00.000-07:00

Alright, so.. I haven't been the most active admin on here up to now, but I'll make it up to you lot.. I promise.
For a first post, this seems relatively useful. I happen to use Linux, besides Mac OS X, and one thing I've missed from time to time has been Virtual Desktops - Especially after I started using Beryl's Cube, so I went searching and found: You Control:Desktops ( http://www.yousoftware.com/desktops/desktops.php ).

It works well, and any Linux user, or otherwise, who's ever used Virtual Spaces will feel right at home.
It's much like xdesktop, or beryl's Cube if you will, with cube animation (Quartz & OpenGL) and more.

Sadly, it costs money ( $29,95 ) but you can trial it first and make up your mind... You can probably get a serial somewhere if you're truly desperate to own it without buying.

That's all I have for now, but I'll probably think up more to post soon.

"Have you talked to your Mac today?"

Don't worry folks more to come soon...

2007-03-17T21:21:00.001-07:00

In the coming days even more great stuff will be put up. Just you wait and see.

Mac Nightmares. Part 1

2007-02-27T15:42:00.000-08:00

A few weeks back I went to reboot my mac mini after having done a system update. Prior to that I had purchased and attached to the system a 1TB external firewire/usb hard drive, as I use the system primarily as an HTPC. Boy was that not cool. I had not used the superdrive for a little while after attaching the new drive. Upon reboot went to try and burn a audio cd for my car. That didn't work at all. I have an external usb dvd/cd burner. Plugged that in. Also no go. So I called tech support. They had me reset the pram. All went well. Tested the superdrive while just having reset the pram. All was well in burning land. Mind you I sometimes have the system attached via a kvm to the rest of my computers. This setup was using a ps2 keyboard and mouse attached to the mini via a ps/2 -> usb converter. More on this later in the next installment.

Blender - 3D modeling, animation, and rendering program

2007-02-22T16:28:00.000-08:00

Blender is a very feature rich and at this point mature and stable 3D program that also happens to be free. You can find Blender here: Click Me

BackPack Information Organizer

2007-02-16T17:48:00.000-08:00

From the same people that brought you BaseCamp, BackPack is a great informational organization tool that is web based. There are both free and paid versions of the service.

Basecamphq.com Project Management System

2007-02-15T21:23:00.001-08:00

The following Basecamphq.com is not exactly a program. Basecamp is a web based project management system. They offer both free and paid services. It's very easy to use, and easy to setup.

Mnemosyne Password Generator

2007-02-13T14:05:00.001-08:00

This is a very handy freeware application for OS X. Using a passphrase and a username it will generate a random password. You can then regenerate the password so long as you remember the passphrase you can recreate the password for any username you've used in the past. Mnemosyne

WriteRoom Text Editor

2007-02-04T17:23:00.000-08:00

A tool I find quite helpful when trying to compose text documents without all of the visual distraction many other programs can have is WriteRoom. The program provides you with an otherwise blank canvas with which you can write your masterpiece on. The program though not free, is quite inexpensive, and can truly help the creative process. www.hogbaysoftware.com/product/writeroom