Chris Degiere and Associates

If you’re interested in the intersection between software automation, quantitative finance, and day trading — browse over to my commodity futures trading site called Trading Technicians.

My goal is to help individual investors trade like many professional funds do without the high barriers to entry and serious time commitments. I believe automated trading systems are the answer for diversification and trading for absolute returns in rising or falling markets.

My automated trading systems can be executed directly in many supported brokerage accounts for a small monthly fee. Feel free to contact me for a demo or free trial.

Globalization has made it impossible to ignore how your web application performs for an international audience. Tools like YSlow and PageSpeed will tell you why your pages are slow, but you don’t truly know the pain of your end user abroad until you’ve used the application first hand over a high latency low bandwidth network.

One easy way to try this sans the layovers and jet lag is to place a proxy server between your browser and web server that simulates stressed network conditions. DonsProxy is a great tool that does this and much more.

Download the GUI from the SourceForge page or checkout an example running from an ant build via my Reference Project Page at Google Code.

Here’s an excerpt from the ant build to start the proxy:

<target name="start-proxy" depends="build"
	description="Starts the proxy server that simulates a slow connection, then stop after 2 minutes">
<java fork="false" classname="com.moneybender.proxy.Proxy" failonerror="true"
	classpathref="master-classpath" maxmemory="1024m">
	<jvmarg line="-Dlisten.port=9090" />
	<jvmarg line="-Dtarget.host=localhost" />
	<jvmarg line="-Dtarget.port=8080" />
	<jvmarg line="-Dlatency.millis=300" />
	<jvmarg line="-Dpacket.loss.rate=100" />
	<jvmarg line="-Dbandwidth.throttle=40" />
</java>
 </target>

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Well it’s been a busy few months with the new baby and new work taking most all of my time. How to quickly recap? How about a peek at my Delicious links or my Twitter stream.

Noteworthy Links

• Ext JS – Blog
• Ext + Java + Spring + DWR – Ext JS Forums
• Firebug Console Object and API

Even More
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I’ve been working with Maven a lot lately. One of my current projects involved migrating a complex Ant build to Maven using multiple modules, a ton of dependencies, and integration with a private remote repository hosted at Unfuddle (See: Subversion Help – Books, Plugins, and Hosting).

This book: Maven: The Definitive Guide has been indispensable throughout. In addition to the hardcopy, the folks at Sonatype are also maintaining an HTML and PDF version here.

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Competitive research and traffic analysis is an important part of launching a new site or web app.

I did a quick study that uses source code search sites as the subject for comparison. Here I  highlight some key metrics from these two Firefox add-ons:

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