links for 2006-12-27
December 27th, 2006 12:17am-
2007 New Years greetings and commentary on global financial outlook, set to Raindrops Keep Falling on my Head, possibly from investor Sam Zell.
Waiting
December 24th, 2006 10:16pm
links for 2006-12-20
December 20th, 2006 12:17am-
Pointers to a talk and comments on the evolution of eBay’s database from a traditional transaction based DB to a non-transactional approach to handle scaling.
links for 2006-12-18
December 18th, 2006 12:17am-
On liquidity risks from the growth of credit swaps and derivatives, vs interest rate policy, with an eye on subprime lending.
links for 2006-12-17
December 17th, 2006 12:17am-
A quick look at the performance of the SP500 close-to-open vs day session shows a risk premium for holding overnight, vs non-trending days.
No more fisheye? A better security camera lens
December 15th, 2006 8:16pm
A team at Honam University in Korea has developed a low cost wide angle lens that provides the wide field of view associated with fisheye lenses, but with much lower distortion. The image above is from a wide angle camera mounted on the ceiling of a university book store. Notice the relatively straight lines of the book shelves, in contrast to the curving distortion associated with a fisheye lens.
There are already various software solutions for remapping lens distortion from captured images, but this is a much more elegant approach performing the mapping in analog space before the image is sampled. There is still a blind spot at the center of the image, where the camera blocks the conical miror.
links for 2006-12-15
December 15th, 2006 12:17am-
BillG on the state of DRMed music - “People should just buy a cd and rip it. You are legal then.” That’s why I have a cabinet full of nearly unused CDs…
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Passing of an iconic, old-school Silicon Valley entrepreneur.
links for 2006-12-14
December 14th, 2006 12:17am-
On using Monthly-Weekly-Daily RSI7 for longer term entry and exit signals, SNDK example.
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On using RSI7 for longer term entry and exit signals, see followup post Dec 13 2006
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Followup by the authors of the report which indicated declining iTunes sales. Sample size was 2791 purchases by 181 users in 27 months. Many commentors…
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Forrester’s Side of the iTunes ‘Collapse’ Debate: If Anything, iPod Sales Are Slowing - SeekingAlphaMore on the purchase trends of iTunes and iPods. Average iTunes purchases per iPod might be increasing from 20 to 23, plus discussion on how to graph.
links for 2006-12-13
December 13th, 2006 12:17am-
Brett Steenbarger’s indicator checklist to get an early on the trading day.
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TV holiday classics, reinvented with family-inappropriate dialogue and music changes.
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An interesting program to enable limited sales of vested employee options (through Morgan Stanley).
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Article on the perspective of startup founders with past VC experience.
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Another look at iTunes/iPod data, argues that growth is slowing, but not dramatically. With graphs.
links for 2006-12-12
December 12th, 2006 12:17am-
Forrester looks at credit card use, sees declining iTunes sales growth. Personally, I buy CDs, just to get nice clean, DRM-free MP3 files.
No toys for you! (On being a skeptical charity donor)
December 11th, 2006 9:53pmI hate being skeptical about charitable solicitors, but I am.
This evening there was a solicitor with a table display of children’s toys on the sidewalk in front of the Long’s Pharmacy on Middlefield Road, next to a barrel marked for donation to Toys for Tots. In general, I like to make planned donations, and usually only make unplanned donations to people and causes that I know or are reasonably likely to be who they say they are. (Girl Scout cookies come to mind…)
For some reason, this evening I actually took the time to stop at this woman’s display and hear her pitch. The basic idea was that you buy one of her “pre-approved” toys and put them in the donation barrel at the end of the booth. The suggested items were around $20, and at the moment I didn’t recall hearing of Toys for Tots before (it turns out they’re legitimate, and well rated at Charity Navigator), so I asked if she had any credentials or anything else to vouch for her. She had a letter in a plastic sheet protector describing Toys for Tots, but said she didn’t have any ID and no one there would know who she was.
links for 2006-12-11
December 11th, 2006 12:17am-
Extended background on Amaranth, staff retention issues and how its multistrategy fund ended up concentrated in energy.
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I haven’t figured out how to read this, but it looks cool.
links for 2006-12-10
December 10th, 2006 12:17am-
What to do when you’re getting consistently good — more of the same, or try learning something new?
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New series of technical talks/microconferences sponsored/hosted at Yahoo. First up - discussion on prediction markets, led by James Surowiecki (Wisdom of Crowds).
links for 2006-12-09
December 9th, 2006 12:17am-
“the inflection point for FTTH deployment will come when a killer application arrives that requires large upstream bandwidth…P2P isn’t a business. It’s a catalyst.”
links for 2006-12-08
December 8th, 2006 12:17am-
Christian or “Christ-follower”? Videos in the style of the PC vs Mac commercials, from Community Christian Church. (via TUAW)
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Body shop workers take $440K Porsche out for a spin. Oops.
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An argument that the falling dollar is actually driven by EUR/JPY currency trade, implemented via EUR/USD and USD/JPY, to capture interest rate spread.
links for 2006-12-06
December 6th, 2006 12:17am-
In the reader comments: “The silos and redundancy there are ludicrous. Google has the “throw it and see what sticks” model, Yahoo has the “katamari damacy” grab everything model.”
links for 2006-12-05
December 5th, 2006 12:17am-
Nice graphic representation of the chance of various forms of personal demise.
links for 2006-12-01
December 1st, 2006 12:17am-
A posting on a web site encourages denial-of-service attacks on US financial services and banking sites. Vague, but generating some news coverage.
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Article on using the Nike iPod fitness trainer to track people. Actually, this could mostly be done just using an regular RFID tag, without the Nike/Apple stuff.
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Some background on threat readiness at US financial institutions, in light of today’s unspecified web threat.
A Random Selection of Other Fine Posts
- 06/16/2005: Gyeonggi Korean Cultural Night
- 08/31/2005: 21 Days = Average Critical Vunerability Half Life
- 07/23/2006: Blueberry Coffeecake
- 02/28/2007: A day later, a little bounce
- 02/04/2006: Reverse engineering a referer spam campaign
