London Financial Python Users' Group
I clearly need to post more stuff here so that it doesn't just turn into a blog announcing the LFPUG's meetings :-)
However, in the meantime, here are the details of the next one: it'll be on 11 March 2010, and is hosted this time by Man Investments Ltd at Sugar Quay, Lower Thames Street, London EC3R 6DU. As before, all are welcome, but for security reasons you need to register in advance; just drop an email to Didrik Pinte. (Update: old mailto link removed.)
Guest of honour this time around is Travis Oliphant, the creator of SciPy and the architect of NumPy. He'll be talking about NumPy memory maps and structured data-types, and Didrik will also give a talk about integrating C/C++ libraries using Cython. More suggestions for talks (or even better, offers to give talks!) are very welcome -- once again, just email Didrik, or post something in the LinkedIn group.
Next London Financial Python Users Group meeting
The next meeting of the London Financial Python Users Group will be on Feb 3, 2010 at 7pm, and is being kindly hosted by KBC Financial Products at their offices: 111 Old Broad Street, EC2N 1FP (just opposite Tower 42).
All are welcome, but for security reasons you need to register in advance; just drop an email to Didrik Pinte. (Update: old mailto link removed)
The topics planned for this meeting are:
- Improving NumPy performance with the Intel MKL - Didrik Pinte, Enthought
- Python to Excel bridges:
- "PyXLL, a user friendly Python-Excel bridge" - Tony Roberts
- Discussion on connecting Python and Excel (xlrd/xlwt, pyinex, win32com, pyxll, ...)
- Speeding up Python code using Cython - Didrik Pinte, Enthought
New laptop!
Back at the end of October, I asked whether when I bought a new laptop I should get one with a Core 2 Duo T9600 or a i7 720QM. They both cost the same, and there seemed to be pros and cons to each.
After weighing things up, and particularly with the advice of Greg Bray in the comments there, I'd pretty much decided on the i7, so on 2 November I was ready to buy. I went to the Dell shop... and discovered that they'd added GBP400 or so onto the price for both models in the spec that I wanted. Welcome to the pre-Christmas price rise.
So I waited until early January, and finally the price for the i7 returned to where it had been (though the T9700 was still expensive). And last Thursday, the new machine arrived. i7 720QM quad-core at 1.6GHz (up to 2.8GHz when only one core is active), 4Gb RAM, ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4670 with 1Gb RAM (which can do 432 GigaFLOPS[!]), Windows 7 Pro 64 bit, 256Gb SSD, and a 16" RGBLED screen (if I understand that correctly, the backlight is an array of LEDs in groups of 3, and it adjusts the backlight colour in a screen segment to match the colour in that part of the screen). All for the same price as the cheapest 15" MacBook Pro.
It's lovely. The build quality is excellent -- the only comparable machines I've tried have been the MacBook Pros and the Air, which are nice but slower and considerably more expensive. (To be fair to Apple, the MacBook Pros are better-made than this Dell. But it's a close thing, and I don't think it's worth the extra. YMMV.) The screen is the best I've seen since I saw high-end CRTs on SGI Workstations back in the 90s.
Size and weight-wise, it's comparable to a MacBook 17" -- smaller, but in the same category. So I wouldn't recommend you get one as a netbook -- but as a desktop replacement, it really looks like it's going to be perfect.
The only thing that sucks is the face recognition login widget, which has so far managed to recognise me once. Out of 30 tries. But hey, it can be uninstalled.
Joining TheyWorkForYou to Twitter
I'm putting together some spreadsheets that we're going to use to publicise Resolver One over the coming UK electoral campaign, and one set of data I needed was a list of Members of Parliaments' Twitter accounts indexed by an ID that I could use with TheyWorkForYou.com. I was delighted to discover Tweetminster, a site analysing MPs' tweets, and in particular their Twitter list of all UK MPs' accounts, but there was no link to TWFY.
So, given that no-one else seems to have done it, here's my own list:
- A Resolver One file listing Twitter accounts for TheyWorkForYou
person_ids - For those of you unlucky enough to not have a copy of Resolver One, here's a CSV file with exactly the same data.
Hope someone finds it useful. It's up-to-date as of this posting, and I'll endeavour to keep it up-to-date, at least for as long as we need it at work :-)
IT headhunters considered harmful
I got an interesting call from a headhunter today; he knew that we were likely to start hiring software developers at Resolver Systems soon (keep an eye on our jobs page or drop me a line if you're interested) because he had helped someone who'd chosen to leave us to find their new job.
As I said, it was interesting. I admire his honesty if not his morals; while most such people will merely hint about things, this chap came straight out with it: "we're actively trying to poach people who work for you, and we'll stop doing it if you stop trying to recruit people on the open market and use us instead".
New gadget: Nokia N900
I got an early Christmas present today! Robert was able to find a Nokia N900 at a very reasonable price, and Lola decided to get it for me as combined Christmas and birthday presents...
The is a fascinating device. Nokia bill it as a "mobile computer"; it has about the CPU power of a 10-15-year-old PC (say, a Pentium II), but also has a modern graphics processor, and it runs Maemo, Nokia's rebranded version of Debian Linux. Earlier this month, Robert showed me his one running his own port of Frotz, and demonstrated that it had a full version of Linux; I saw the video of it running WebGL later on the same evening, and fell in love :-)
One thing I've noticed, though, is that although you can get a full Debian install running, it takes a little work and there's no good step-by-step documentation. I'll post about that next.
A website for LFPUG
Didrik Pinte has put together a web page on the Python.org Wiki for the London Financial Python Users Group. Only a little content so far, but it will grow... if you're doing financial work in Python in London, do come along to the next meeting -- it will be 7pm next Monday (14 December) at MWB Regent Street, Liberty House 222 Regent Street, London W1B 5TR. You may have to put up with me talking for a while about a spreadsheet you already know everything about, but there will be interesting bits too ;-)
3D graphics in Resolver One using OpenGL and Tao, part III: Stock prices
I've done another 3D example in Resolver One. This one uses Yahoo! Finance to download the close prices over the last two years for every stock that's currently in the Dow Jones index, then charts them in a 3D window which you can pan and zoom using the mouse. Here's a video showing it in action (click the image to view):
Shiny new blog theme
I thought it was time for a change around here, so I've updated the theme with something prettier. What do you think?
New York Financial Users Group
A quick follow-up to my last post; the guys at Enthought are also starting a Financial Python Users Group for New York. If you're interested, the LinkedIn group is here.