You know those people who say things to the effect of, “One in two people has below average intelligence,” with a really smug look on their face? The satisfaction they seem to get from flaunting their fundamental misunderstanding of statistics makes it pretty clear which side of average their intelligence falls on.
You haven’t made it
I saw a guy driving a Porsche 911 Carrera S with roof racks. Now firstly, it looks pretty silly. Because there isn’t much roof length, the racks were comically close together. The curvature of the roof meant the rear rack needed to be taller than the front one to get them to roughly the same height, so they guy must have bought two pairs of roof racks and used one of each. But that didn’t completely solve the issue: the racks were still at strange angles, so the tops weren’t level, and they wouldn’t have been able to carry very much load.
On top of the visual and practical issues, the guy had another big problem. A Porsche is more of a status symbol than a car. By driving a Porsche you’re trying to tell the world, “Look at me, I’m a success — I’ve bought the car that you can only dream about.” But by putting roof racks on your Porsche, you’re saying, “I only just had enough money for this car.” That, of course, is an admission that you couldn’t really afford the Porsche. If you’d really arrived, you’d have another, more practical car to put the roof racks on.
Not how it works
Goldman Sachs and UBS both seem to have had algorithmic trading code stolen and/or leaked recently. I haven’t seen an official statement from UBS, but a PR person from Goldman said something to the effect of, “Since the algorithms integrate with a large, proprietary system, we aren’t worried about this.” I realise that this person has the job of reassuring jittery investors that everything’s OK, but the statement shows a chronic lack of understanding that anyone should be able to see through. Sure, I probably couldn’t just compile the code, drop the binary into my system and start trading. But that’s not the point — there are two, very significant things I can achieve just by studying the code.
Firstly, I could determine an algorithm’s behaviour and reproduce it. If Goldman’s algorithms are as good as they claim, the actual implementation detail should guarded closely. If anyone could clone them, Goldman would lose their competitive advantage in algorithmic trading.
Secondly, I could possible study an algorithm’s behaviour and find a way to identify it and game it. That way, if I reasonably suspect that a Goldman algorithm is trading a security, I could use my knowledge of its behaviour to my advantage. If enough people with enough capital can game your algorithms, it can have a big impact on performance.
But it doesn’t really matter what I think of the announcement. I just build systems — I’m not the one deciding where to send the money.
Illiteracy
The Age (the popular broadsheet newspaper in Melbourne) has sunk to the level of Slashdot. From Peter Martin’s article entitled “Choice considers Grocery Choice suit” published today:
First, a costumer enters a postcode, then selects the most convenient nearby shops and then enters the quantities, weights and brands of the products they want.
That isn’t a simple transposition typo — there are two letters between the transposed letters. It’s either a chronic misunderstanding of the language or an inability to type combined with an over-reliance on a spell-checker. What happened to proof-reading and copy editing? What happened to knowing how to spell? This is what you would expect from self-obsessed bloggers or tweeters, not professional journalists!
(There is a remote possibility that he chose a random occupation in order to flesh out the hypothetical shopper’s character, and just made a choice that unfortunately looks like a common error. However, this is no excuse — if this was the case, he should have chosen a more interesting profession, like pool cleaner for instance.)
Maybe next year
It still isn’t the year of Desktop Linux. People may be ready to move away from Windows, but Linux still isn’t ready for them. Let me tell you about my recent operating system experiences. It all started when my venerable Pentium III died. (Well it didn’t quite die outright, but the power supply became unreliable.) The primary reason for me keeping it alive was for ATO eTax. It’s kind of sad that I had a computer that I only really used once a year, but there you go. I used its death as an excuse to buy a new Mac Mini. It’s capable of running Windows for eTax, and it can run x64 Linux for SDLMAME, and OS X for random cool stuff. The new Mini has FireWire 800 (as opposed to 400 on the old one) and NVIDIA 9400M integrated graphics (as opposed to Intel on the old one), which addressed my primary complaints about its predecessor.
Of course it came with OS X installed, so the first thing I did was update it, tweak it to my liking and install tablet and printer drivers. That was all painless, and I had a fully functional Mac/X11/BSD system in no time. Buoyed by my success, I decided to install Windows XP. Boot Camp Assistant took a while to do the live repartitioning, but it worked, and I had a FAT32 partition to play with. The machine booted from the XP install CD, and I proceeded to format the partition as NTFS and install Windows. It took a long time, and I had to restart about ten times during the install, update and driver install process, but in the end I had a working Windows installation, too, and I could switch between OS X and XP on boot. That was enough for one night.
I’m cheering
I’m really glad Nick D’Arcy has been dumped by Swimming Australia. Athletes should be held to a high standard of behaviour, being in the public eye as they are. Other sporting bodies should take note. What I’m not impressed by are the idiotic media statements made by D’Arcy’s supporters. Here’s a sample of what his coach Brian Stehr had to say:
I’m still in shock. When do you stop punishing somebody. Fair enough he did the wrong thing, he did a silly thing, he knows that, everyone knows that, but this is getting ridiculous now.
They’ve stopped punishing him – he got a suspended sentence. He did more than a silly thing, he violently assaulted someone in a public place. He brought swimming into disrepute. Representing the country in a sport is a privilege, and Darcy’s shocking behaviour has resulted in him losing this privilege.
Here’s one from Nick D’Arcy’s father Justin D’Arcy:
It is now seemingly a matter of every other sporting body that’s subordinate to this (the Australian Olympic Committee) just lining up in a queue to punish him for precisely the same thing.
Are you completely blind? Your son violently assaulted someone in a public place. That kind of behaviour has consequences. He brought this on his own head. He’s only received a suspended sentence — a slap on the wrist. By his own stupidity, he’s given up the privilege of representing Australia in elite sport.
This sort of news for young people can be absolutely devastating.
Well, I never would have imagined… Come to think of it, maybe people would get upset about being punched in the face in a public place, too. Now who was it that did that? Oh, I remember: it was your stupid, violent, aggressive son!
It doesn’t matter whether you’re an elite cyclist, an elite swimmer, or someone else who’s given years of their lives to one of these major sporting bodies, there has to be some compassion at least in the way this news is delivered.
Compassion? They should make an example of him! They need to send out a message that this is not acceptable behaviour, and hopefully other athletes will take note.
Generated Copy Constructors Considered Evil
Sometimes I really hate C++. Not just dislike it, but really, really hate it. This week, one of the most horrible language “features” got me again: the generated copy constructor. I understand why they exist — they’re necessary to allow C structures to be passed by value no extra effort. However, their behaviour causes a world of pain that should never have been inflicted on developers.
Books
Who exactly thought this sign was a good idea? After careful consideration, I think it means a book will set you back $35, but you must pay with exactly one $5 note, one $10 note and one $20 note — other combinations will be rejected. Literacy really is on the decline.
Also, what’s with the horizontal text alignment?
Spam for Spam
My comment spam filter has picked up a couple of spam comments of a new breed recently: spam comments advertising comment spamming services. It’s a bit odd on a number of fronts. First of all, why waste resources you could be using to push out spam for your clients? Or has the economic downturn affected the spammers’ business, too? Secondly, the comments were collected by my spam filter. That means the only person who will see them is me. And because the comments were caught by the filter, I’d be pretty dubious as to their ability to get anything advertising my services past anyone else’s filters. All in all, it doesn’t seem to be good business.
Slurpee Crisis
It’s undeniable that this week has been hot in Melbourne. Temperatures were in the mid 40s (over 110°F for the Celsius challenged). You don’t want to go outside, and there are three bushfires burning in the state. On top of that, Melbourne’s infrastructure doesn’t seem to be built for summer. There were over 200 cancelled train services in the evening peak; traffic was terrible; there were problems with the electricity supply in the afternoon.
But as if that wasn’t bad enough, there was a severe Slurpee shortage in the CBD. By four o’clock, most of the 7‑Elevens only had empty machines or liquid on offer. I hope this crisis is resolved in a timely manner. If it isn’t, it could lead to discontent, civil disorder or even deadly riots.