Inspired by some of the great people at 2600 Ottawa, I’ve decided to learn some more C. I had a very basic knowledge with my first foray into the language a few years ago, when I discovered the excellent Practical C Programming by Steve Oualline. At the last meeting, I was encouraged to pick up Kernighan and Ritchie’s (The) C Programming Language. So I did.
Now I hate doing basic programming examples. I rather get a grasp of the language and whatever unique features it has, and start programming right away. Thus, my new project: an automated stock market trader.
The basic design: the program looks at the stock market by pulling live quotes from Google. It logs the quotes. It then looks at the trends over the last hour, few hours, days, week, and month to formulate an opinion as to whether to buy/sell/short sell. The idea being that if it thinks that it can at least recapture the revenue for the cost of the trade, that it will act out.
The program will keep track of personal finances, will include a few finance protection schemes, and will display everything through ncurses on the screen. I’m imagining 6 split screen windows with text-based graphs showing the current state of the various stocks. Each window will also include the current value of the shares, and what the computer’s call is.
The program will also poll Google News to see if there’s any news on the stock item. If it detects news, and sees the value fall, it’ll be more aggressive in pulling out from the stock. The program would poll each stock every 5 minutes.
I had another cool idea, but Google kinda beat me to it. I’ll talk about it at the next 2600 meeting. As for Rice Tea, it’s going very well. If you look at the last few updates, you’ll see that the page count hasn’t changed much. What I’m doing is that I’m going over the book from start to end, editing it, so that it’s easier to read. I’ve sacrificed a bit of technical correctness in terms of the terminology used so that it’s easier for a wider audience to grasp.
I find that I’m really cutting down on the paragraph size. I never realized how wordy it was until I started editing the book. Same message, just alot less words to say it. And easier to understand.
Win-win!