Dave Hodson's Blog

Great Companies Great Charts

2004-08-02T21:24:00.000-07:00

While I was on vacation last week, I read a very interesting book on trading. The book, "Great Companies, Great Charts" by Andy Dunn was short but concise.

I don't agree with everything Andy had to say, but I really liked his points on knowing when to sell (i.e. before you buy, what will you sell stop be priced at?). A few XMas' ago, I spoke with the brother of my wife's Aunt. He was a big trader at Merrill for years. His comment on the market crash of 2000/2001 was "geez, doesn't anyone know when to sell?"

That thought always stuck with me, but I never came up with a good, emotion-free way of determining this critical piece of data.

Check it out if you get a chance.

MessageCast and MSN/Fox Sports

2004-07-23T09:59:00.000-07:00

The cat is out of the bag (finally) -- The announcement about the MessageCast/MSN/Fox Sports deal has hit the wire.

This project had a lot of interesting facets to it - consuming proprietary XML feeds, transforming them, matching the information to subscriptions and then all the way through to delivery (IM, cell and/or email)

One of these blogs, I'll write about the different technologies/solutions we looked at for consumption.

Blogger.com/Firefox/TabbrowserExtensions

2004-07-20T17:52:00.000-07:00

A note for the Blogger.com guys

Using Firefox (0.9.2) with Tabbrowser Extensions makes for a very frustrating experience on the Blogger.com site. The "Preview" button likes to wipe out any text I've entered, while creating a link or bold/italicizing something like to do the same.

I guess this is actually a bug report.

Amazon Plog?

2004-07-20T17:51:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, I hit the Amazon website, looking for a new phone charger for my car. Instead of the "normal" front-door, I was hit with something that said

Dave's Plog Beta (What is a Plog?), followed by an overwhelming amount of text.

Hmmm, maybe I missed the memo, but I don't remember hearing about Amazon's Plogs.

The What is a Plog? link tells me the following:

Your Amazon.com Plog is a diary of events that will enhance your shopping experience, helping you discover products that have just been released, track changes to your orders, and many other things. Just like a blog, your Plog is sorted in reverse chronological order. When we think we have something interesting or important to tell you, we'll post it to your Plog.

After reading it several times, I have to say I don't get it. Any ideas out there?

SUNW/Business Week

2004-07-17T15:52:00.000-07:00

Boy oh boy. If you haven't read the Business Week article on Sun, make sure to check it out.

I haven't been that big of a fan of SUNW for a while, ever since they
basically tossed their $2 billion acquisition of Cobalt Networks down
the drain. They just never seemed to understand the disruptive
technology known as Linux and how it would rock their world.

From the article, it sounds like McNealy finally understands that there
has been a fundamental shift, but it sure didn't seem like he
understood that he needs a 50% layoff tomorrow and that it should
include both himself and his new COO, Jonathan Schwartz.

My guess - they are going the way of DEC and SGI.

Bugzilla 2.18rc1 Released

2004-07-12T09:20:00.000-07:00

First major Bugzilla release (2.18RC1) in two years is out and available. Pretty extensive list of changes and new features

Looks like a lot of work has been done to address my pet peeve with Bugzilla -- lack of modperl support

Mozilla "nightmare"? Get real

2004-07-10T10:28:00.000-07:00

I guess this guy missed out on the IE debacle and now wants to make sure he is ahead of the pack with his Mozilla Nightmare story.

Not sure what others have found, but my real world usage has repeatedly shown the Mozilla is a much more solid and secure browser.

Bloglines Blurs the Lines

2004-07-09T16:19:00.000-07:00

Bloglines rolled out their "anniversary" update on July 7th. (I couldn't get the publisher piece to work until last night - looks like there were some initial issues that have been resolved)

I created a blog and took the publishing tools out for a spin. What I found was that the tools are not nearly as robust as other systems out there. However, I'm sure the folks at Bloglines would say this is just the initial release and that it will improve over time.

Assuming that this is the case and the publishing tools become stronger, Bloglines has made a very interesting move. They gone from a "pure" aggregator of content to a publisher of content in one fell swoop. This seems like a natural evolution, but I could not find any other aggregators with publishing functionality.

This positions Bloglines for some great potential growth, as they didn't really have much to offer Publishers previously.

Next question - when does Yahoo add the Publisher piece (since they are offering aggregation to some extent now) and/or when does Google (through Blogger.com) add aggregation to their publishing tools?

Open Positions at MessageCast

2004-07-08T15:41:00.000-07:00

We've opened two more technology positions at MessageCast. Descriptions for both are below:

1. Ops (P/T)
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/KITlist-Tech/message/17800

2. Lead Dev
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/KITlist-Tech/message/17805

Clover finally released

2004-07-07T14:14:00.000-07:00

Looks like the new Clover release is out (1.3). A great tool to help with your automation coverage (Full disclosure - I have no ties to this company whatsoever)

They added the feature I've been looking for since 1.2 came out -- <clover-check>, which allows you to more stringently force a build failure if the code coverage isn't up to snuff.

Not sure why they changed their name to "Cenqua" -- their email says

TheCortex.net is now Cenqua.com. Same great people, same top service, now with a Google-friendly name!

Multi-threaded testing with JUnit

2004-07-07T10:00:00.001-07:00

A good lesson learned from my run-in with SimpleDateFormat and threads was that JUnit itself does not test threading particularly well. Luckily there are a number of projects out there that add the missing pieces.

I checked out several, including GroboUtills and JUnitPerf. Docs for both were a bit sparse, but I ended up choosing JUnitPerf. The two articles (here and here) showed GroboUtils requiring the use of inner classes, which seemed more of a hassle than JUnitPerf.

Using JUnitPerf, I was able to bang out a good test suite quickly and voila! -- the threading issues with SimpleDateFormat became immediately apparent. As I already had the test cases written, it was easy enough to modify the use of SimpleDateFormat and retest (gotta love refactoring)

SimpleDateFormat isn't thread safe?

2004-07-06T16:38:00.000-07:00

You've probably heard the story before - you're using SimpleDateFormat to produce some human-readable output from a Calendar object. Your JUnit test cases all look great. The integration tests all look great.

Then, the code migrates to the QA environment. Strange scheduling things occur. Your QA guy starts asking the "gee, I don't want to come out and say it, but did you actually test any of this?" questions.

After a bit of poking around, there is little doubt in your mind that gremlins have taken control of the environment and are torturing you just for fun.

Sometime around 3am, you decide to pore over the Java docs...and there it is -- buried.

"Date formats are not synchronized. It is recommended to create separate format instances for each thread. If multiple threads access a format concurrently, it must be synchronized externally. "

A quick Google tells you the same thing, along with the sob stories of other poor souls like yourself.

So, without dragging this on ad nauseum, how is it that the java.text.Format packages are not thread-safe? There is an alternative in Commons, but geez, 5 hours of my life I won't get back anytime soon...