Category: Life

Unfortunately, I’m grounded in Ottawa for a little while. My boss isn’t quite sure what to do with me, because I’m kind of useless outside the field. I was trained to be a field processor. So for the last few days, I’ve been testing some software.

This morning, out of the blue, I was asked to develop some software. In C. It’s an amazing coincidence (see last post), and given what it’s for I’m really looking forward to it. I have about a 2 month timeline to accomplish this, which given the parameters, seems doable.

I signed up with a degree in Physical Geography. I was debating going into computer science. Now I have a job that:

• Let’s me travel around the world.
• Has the title of “field geophysicist.”
• Allows me to combine it with my hacking passion.

w00t!

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!

I’m back from Argentina! It was a great trip. The food there is wonderful, the women are frickin’ beautiful, and the beer is both fine and cheap.

Yep. I’m done writing Rice Tea. All that’s left now is to edit, edit, edit. The book needs much polishing, especially towards its conclusion.

Download the Latest Revision.

Progress really slowed down on Rice Tea. The main factor was the starting of the new job. For my first weeks there, I’d just come home from work and collapse. On some days, I went to bed at 7PM. I could not do any university work or writing.

Then I had two days where they had nothing for me to do at work. So I wrote. And wrote. In fact, I wrote twenty pages. As a point of comparison, I had only managed to write two pages since I had started my new job.

I’ve now reached the 100 page milestone. Don’t count on returning to summer-level production. Perhaps in three weeks, after my job here is done, and university is complete (forever!), I’ll have the time I need.

The next update on this blog pertaining to Rice Tea will be to tell you that it’s done. Keep up to date on the book’s own website, ricetea.ca!