TBTicker - or Taskbar Stockticker - started out like almost all other projects of mine. I found myself trying to figure out a way to make it easier to stay informed, preferably in an automated way. In 9 cases out of 10 I never actually use the solution I find for my problem since by then I’ve moved on to something else. But this is one of those rare exceptions.

This application has two modes. A full size mode and a mini mode. The full size mode is just a regular application, acting as a browser, and the mini mode sits in the taskbar of Microsoft Windows. That’s the mode I use the most since it takes no efforts to find out how my portfolio is doing.

I went for C# for the main application but there was really no way of making the taskbar - or bandobject as it is called - work like I wanted it to using C#. Firstly, the .NET CLR doesn’t load in time for the bandobject to load properly after restart. Second, the amount of P/Invoke calling native methods was so staggering that going with a natvie language was the only viable choice. So the bandobject supporting the minimode of the application is written using C++.

By the way, implementing a band object is one of the toughest programming challenges I’ve ever come across. There’s just no easy way of debugging it.

Camper shoes. Great shoes. Anyone who’s somewhat savvy on the footwear side knows that Camper has that cool “now”-thing going for them. If there’s anything called “Designer shoes” that’s them.

So it’s all the more mystery why they insist of having what may be the worst web presence seen of late. Granted, there’s nearly nothing harder than coming up with a sleek and cool website for clothes or clothe like products, while being informative. But theirs is so far off the chart I think a regular list with photos of the shoes to the left and price + combo boxes with size and a description to the right would have it beat hands down.

I think parts of the reason why amazon.com has stayed in business over web for as long as they have, is due to the fact that they haven’t yet gone overboard on “let’s create an app-like web for our products”. That approach doesn’t work yet, in part because the net isn’t robust to send home 1 meg per product yet and in the case of shoes or books you want to browse, and you don’t want to be sitting with a “loading…” sign in your face, then you go elsewhere.

Everything has a format it’s best suited for, and for retail on the web, that is lists, categorized, tagged, cross-product, “other ppl who bought this”, along with great pictures in reasonable size. Resist the temptation of 360 views, user interaction with an animated version of the product, and “the story of the product - in pictures”. We’re just not there yet.

Still, I recommend you visit your well sorted shoe store in actual reality and get yourself suited in a couple of Campers for the summer. You won’t regret that buy.

I stumbled across Seth Godin’s blog on the net and from there to his speech from 2003(!) which I almost dissed without bothering to watch it since it’s more than 20 web years since it was made. Classic mistake.

Watching it, it starts out like a regular “Now I’m gonna tell you all you’ve learned so far in life is wrong”-speeches that comes in 13 on the dozen at these type of conferences. But it didn’t take that path. I was very amused and amazed and above all reminded of some of the truths that I subscribe to. Also, he’s a good speaker.

If I ever get to the place where I’m looking for a marketer that talks and walks like me, I’ll be sure to use Seth Godin. There Seth, is the buzz about you spread by me, thus proving your point in the presentation!

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.

I’m a man of many interests. One of which happens to be trading in the markets, and lately mostly following the markets since I’ve been occupied elsewhere.

However, an interesting voice in the market buzz is Bob Prechter. Not to worry, I’m a non-believer. Prechter is known for his utopia-like outlook of the future where the Dow will hit 500 - yes 500 - in some 10 years or so. 

This week he’s presenting us with that very scenario in his bi-monthly newsletter, backing it up with figures and the regular Elliot Wave theories all laid out. What makes it interesting is not the figures themselves but with the tenacity and sincerity this guy writes his analysis.

I’ve read a good number of analysis papers in my days, and most of them are filled with ambiguous statements and conclusions left open to interpretation. With Prechter there’s none of that.

With Nasdaq taking a 3% hit as I’m writing this, you start to think… What if that guy is right?

It was time for a restructre of my space here on the web. Having had little or no time for web projects for a coupe of weeks I decided to update my project web i.e. this place. After 30 minutes of agony I went for a “less is more approach”. I like it right now.

The whole idea of using adsense on your blog is liked by few (probably the ones raking in the big dollars) and disliked by quite many. With this template I created for my blog tool, I even like the way I utilize the ads here, without becoming too intrusive.

Anyways, this is the first post. Let’s see what it looks like.

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