Bonnie Biafore: Online Investing Hack

Dr John Whitcomb: The Sink or Swimm Money Program

I returned both these books to the library ages ago. The online investing book was interesting, but I’m not into US stock, and the book was focused on that market, so I only skimmed parts of it a few times.

The sink or swim money program, I am a believer in the idea that children/young adults should learn to manage money, before they get big money access and make big costly mistakes with money. I know wasted money after getting my first year’s student loan on things that weren’t education.

But my kids are far too young for the budgeting idea of this book, but I’m sure I’ll use something like it’s ideas when they get to the high school age.

I haven’t posted much recently. I’ve been doing lots of different things at work. We have upgrade to the 2.0 .Net framework + tools. A lot of effort has been going into getting another release of our product ready with the new tools. Lots of different bugs to work on as effects of the changes are found. I have been doing bug fixes, manual testing, automated testing and bug fix verification.

Along the way I’ve been learning more about parts of those processes that I knew “worked” but not how they worked. So I’ve found it fun. In the gaps I’ve been reading lots of blogs from other NZ developers, but I’ve just not had time to play with anything blog worthy.

We went down to Wanaka over the long weekend for Matthew and Lisa’s wedding. Had a great time and enjoyed some great views while driving.

Well I’m quite excited about going to Connect tomorrow. Free software. Well at least legitimate version of software.

Should be educational.

So today we were talking at work about need some more certified developers because Microsoft have changed the requirements on the partner program.

So this evening I’ve been reading about the 70-536 Technology Specialist exams.

On one of the pages is talks of Take a Skills Assessment so I click through.

I completed the Developing Enterprise Windows®-based Applications with .NET: Rich Client–Visual C#® .NET test. 30 minutes later, I press the Score Assessment button.

Back to the main page, what about a results page??.

I could see results of one other person called vpak, who’s high score was 67%, but I didn’t see my score.

At this point I noticed the Passport Sign In icon, so clicked this. Once I got through the questions I got back to the main page to find no test result. Grrr.

I note that this has all been done with Firefox 1.5, so I promptly looked in the back button history, and went back to question #30. I can click the Score Assessment again, but nothing useful happens.

It’s just so painful spending that time to think each question over, and have the effort evaporate. Because it looks like a useful site, that could add value, and all it has done is waste my time.

So ten minutes later:

I started the test again, this time I got to question #3 where the question is the same as one I did last time, but last time it used a checkbox list, this time it uses some useless selector control where you move items from the right to the left to select them. The control rendered at such a skinny width, that it was REALLY hard to use. Add to rub salt in the wound the next button wouldn’t respond.

So I’ve now loaded IE 6.0 to see how it fares…

50 minutes after that:

Eek, 67% 20/30 – I’ve got some studying to-do.

I really got bored with the process, so was watching the TV while the pages loaded…

From James

Hilarious stuff, with whatever twee tune Barney was actually singing having been replaced by a typically foul-mouthed invective laden rap from the dearly departed 2Pac. What’s particularly good about it is the fact that the beats match up, and the guest MCs on the 2Pac track have their parts done by the kids and other puppets.

Feeling so busy now I’m resorting to re-posting just to get something up. But its still some funny stuff.

Noticed that Rod Dury had added Google Analytics to his site, and as this site still gets hits (according to Google Adsense) I thought I’d try find out who…

Over the weekend I spent quite a lot of time downloading patching and getting mod files and maps in the vein hope of playing Enemy Territory online.

We used to play this game every lunch time at ATR and I miss the action. After battling Punk Buster, and Servers that wanted custom pk3 files, that I didn’t have them (orcon.et.net.nz) on their http server, I finally got to run around the a few servers. Of course it was just me, and it was still choppy at times.

Matt emailed me the two missing files (sub 40K) and I finally got onto the Orcon server. Between the volume of updates killing me every two seconds, and ~300 ms pings it was impossible to even spawn and get out of the base. Then for fun after about two minutes Punk Buster would decide it knew best and kick me for one of a list of reasons.

So the moral (which I knew already, but hate) if you want to play games, get broadband. Which if we weren’t moving in the next few months, I’d be signing up for in a jiffy. IFF I was a Telecom customer as Telstra cable modem does not have a data cap like the ADSL offerings of Telecom, and I’m not keen on paying a monthly rental for a cable modem when I have an collecting dust ADSL modem under my desk.

Well I’ve been plodding slowing away at my port of CotAB to C#.Net code. I had been quite idle on the project about 1 month ago. In the last week I’ve been working on reducing the number of warnings and errors down.

This was to try get it closer to a compliable state, and I was bored with straight translation.

Tonight I spent a bit of time going back over the file archives, to get an idea of how progress has been over this phase of the development process. Using this I made an Excel graph of Lines of Assembly left to translate (or delete as the case may be), and compiler Errors and Warnings.

There is still lots today once the code is all translated. A large amount of the errors are related with variable size issues. Like .

byte a = 0;

byte b = a + 1;

the a + 1 gets converted into a int which cannot implicitly be cast to byte. The other major error cause is the signed of variables as by default BYTE have been byte type, and WORD have been short. So there is a lot of digging through the assembly to workout how things are been used.

All of this been made worse, by my daydreaming of building a program to do all this silly stuff. Sort of like Clippy but for file alterations. “Oh I see you have changed the same patterned (insert regex here) block 3 times, would you like me to search through you project and we can review the result together.”

Then later.. “There where also other blocks that could have matched if the pattern was more general like this…”. And maybe in complete dream land, after fluffing around with nested and combined if logic it could say. “I see some higher level logic here, would you like me to show the proof”.

And of cause, I’d not have to pay the world for this program in any of the forms of money, my time or others time (ie wait for it).

One of my goals after Brent’s DNUG talk was to port my old QuickBasic Line Curve (not sure what other people call them) to C# code. So this evening that’s what I’ve been doing.

My first big thanks is to the Visual Studio team, because VS2005 can open and understand old QuickBasic .BAS files. I’m sure it actually basic of VB.Net, but it colour codes correctly and every thing. This made cut-n-pasting the code so much easier. Previously I’d opened QB and screen scraped it out 19 lines at a time.

An odd side effect of this was that when I had a .BAS file open, and did a Solution Build, the .BAS file would be compiled and it’s errors highlighted, even though it is not in any of my projects. So I keep closing and opening the file. Only with the power of hindsight do I even think of the remotely clever idea I opening it file in a second instance of VS.

So I got the code drawing the pretty graph. In the original I had it animated to appear to scroll, giving a pseudo 3D effect. Which I’d always wanted to use in a game. So I rigged up the MouseWheel event. For quite some time I couldn’t get it to work. I finally wired up MouseClick and then the mouse wheel event would fire after the first click. It appears to be a focus related issue, so I made my panel get Focus() when ever the MouseEnter event fires.

It is working pretty neat I think. The only current bug is the scrolling is done by drawing the four sub-polygon in each polygon, but you can see a tear between polygons as the outer points are not common. This will be my next task to fix.

After that I want to be able to drag the three control points of the graph around. I have some ideas that should be cool for focus of the drag points. So I’m looking forward to battling with those.

Updated 17 Dec 2005: You can download the code from here
Updated 18 Mar 2018: You can also down from my github Old School Graphics project

I absolutely loved this book. I found it made me think about things in ways I had not before.

I liked the first of the 2050 questions of “How many minutes of work will a loaf of bread cost?” made me think that currently it takes 2.4 minutes (white bread) to 6 minutes (for a nice loaf). Wow I can’t even eat it that fast, let alone a whole loaf would make me sick.

I’ll quote his closing paragraph because I liked it so much:

The remarkable thing about economics is that once you’ve been exposed to the big ideas, they begin to show up everywhere. The sad irony of Encon 101 is that students too often suffer through dull, esoteric lectures while economics is going on all around them. Economics offers insight into wealth, poverty, gender relations, the environment, discriminations, politics – just to name a few of the things we’ve touched upon. How could that possible not be interesting?