From time to time, especially in the software and publishing business, you come across near absolute truths, one of which happens to be “Content always beats format”. The reason this is so easy to believe in is because it’s so easy to prove. A nice looking website which is never updated will always lose out to a relatively ugly website with its content updated often. That was easy and convincing enough, right?

More than a few times I’ve come across the wrong deductions from it, like my proof of its accuracy above. People tend to put too little emphasize in making their creations look nice, pursuing only the content or ”functionality” (if we’re talking about software applications). On more than many occations I’ve come across people that have made this really great application or web publication but fail to get any attention to it from having poor design advocating “first make it work, then make it beautiful”.

Much like a sad person won’t become any happier - long term - if he gets a lot money to spend, it’s really more pleasant to cry in a Rolls Royce than in your old Volkswagen, the same rule applies to web- and software applications. It won’t become a better application just by having it look pretty, but at the same time it certainly doesn’t hurt it to be presentable.

Having made an update to one of my projects of late - www.purposegames.com - it didn’t ad any new functionality (which it very much needs) but it’s become a better web app and web site from my update of its design. Also, it gives me peace of mind to start focusing on bringing some requested functionality to it, now that I’m happy with its presentation.

All in all, I think format doesn’t beat content, nor vice versa. Without one of these components a publication and/or application will fail with the broad public. Inevitably. You can quote me on that.

Whenever I have a cold - which nowadays isn’t that often - I find myself doing two things; first I curse modern medicine for not having found a cure to the simplest of deceases diseases one would think. Second, I pity myself and start dreaming of all the things I’ll do as soon as I’m well again.

So my days right now are filled with a lot of TV. It’s so boring also to not even have the strength or focus to develop something on one of my projects. SIDENOTE: Rowan Atkinson now on TV. He’s gone from being absolutely annoying as lead character in some TV-shows in the 80’s to now becoming a sidekick in made for TV movies such as the one on right now; maybe baby. Boring beyond belief.

A really cool thing though is Magnus Carlsen currently in runner-up position in Morelia-Linares. Chessbase has the latest on that of course. Go Magnus, Go!

Chess… Well, here’s a mystery for you. With the almighty internet being so big and wide with pages and sites on pretty much anything you’d think there’d be a chess site out there for those who are a little interested, such as myself. But no, there’s only ChessBase. Not that they’re bad or anything, it’s just so puny with one source only. I mean there must be at least 10,000,000 sites on gardening, one’d think there’d be at least a couple of sites on chess out there.

Sunday. Some time on my hands to update PurposeGames. With White Nights from 1985 on TV and the laptop on my knee what could possibly go wrong?

Some time around two in the afternoon, I get a feeling my throat is a bit soar. To top it off, I make an erroneous assumption about how many different games a player can possibly want to play.

Any design (software design) that isn’t robust enough to scale infinitly can of course be frowned upon. But most of you who are running web sites out there know that there’s quite a difference between textbook samples and real world applications. So sometime you have to be pragmatic.

Long story short, I had to disable parts of the player statistics detail page until I can figure out a more efficient way of calculating what place a user got for each different game he/she has played. Perhaps it sounds quite simple, and I had a simple enough solution but alas it didn’t scale as expected when players with > 250 different games played looked at their stats.

I’ll get some tea now, and think some more about the design of a query that will fit the bill.

By the way, my throat is even worse now. I’m definetly coming down with something. Boring.

I got a couple of questions via mail about if and how I implemented the meta stock file format for Trader’s Workbench. The answer is yes, and with a lot of work.

The real problem is the conversion of dates, which is stored in pre-IEEE (MS HomeBrew) format. This creates a need for a convert/revert from IEEE Float to MS Float. For a long time now, all plattforms uses the same definitions for Float but back when it started for MetaStock the Windows plattform obviously had its own format.

Anyway, long story short, I managed to create a C# version of a MetaStock format converter (basically to/from metastock/txt files). It’s slow, and it really eats resources if you have > 100 securities per MASTER-file but it works!

The format is esentially a Database without a database. It has an index-file (3 now adays, but only 1 needed if you run end-of-day) called the MASTER file, and it holds the definition for the .DAT-files that are represnetation for each security. A .DAT file is useless without the MASTER, since the .DAT-file is not aware of what security it represents. I see the use of a MASTER file, but I definetly would see the benefit of redundant storage of that information in the header of each .DAT file but that’s not the case.

There are about 10-20 trialware “MS2TXT”-apps out there and I don’t need them. I wrote my own!  *Smile*

With not more than 30 minutes after publishing, the article “A day for comeback in the markets”, it did a 180 and became “…turns down on the worries of global growth” in one of Sweden’s largest financial publications (the on-line edition).

Global Growth?? Really? Is that what we’re calling it today?

It’s never more obvious than in these kind of turbulent market days, that we all really need a way to rationalize what is happening to feel comfortable and safe. But “Worries over global growth”? That’s clutching at straws isn’t it? I think I could’ve found at least 10 better explanations than that one, but I’m guessing it’s a hectic day at the paper…

US Markets opens in 1 hour. OMX now at -1,2% from +1,7% earlier today.

UPDATE: Stockholm now at -2% and DJ and NSDQ open sharply down on the bell. Interesting times indeed. Find a bear fund sold OTC or stay in cash.