New Zealand's fourth most popular guitar-based digi-bongo acapella-rap-funk-comedy folk duo returns to HBO for a second season. Season 2 Online Premiere available here.
Brett: Are you living in your car, Murray?
Murray: No. Of course not. It's illegal. You can't do that. Apparently. Unless you move your vehicle every three hours. [Beeping] I've got to go.
Argument for unwinding all the credit default swaps and closing the market.
There are three possible defences for treating the CDS market as a going concern: its support for capital raising, its utility for price discovery and its role as a risk-management tool. All have melted like so many Lehman deal cubes in waste incinerators.
Consider capital raising. Writers of protection in the CDS market must now hold increasing amounts of cash as margin against the probability of default for the "reference entities" or borrowers they bet on. This has led to the sale of tens of billions, if not hundreds of billions, of dollars, euros and pounds worth of securities to raise that cash.
[...]
That leads to the value of such swaps for price discovery. Bad joke. Price discovery is a useful economic function; that is the rationale for commodities markets. But CDS are derivative instruments, whose price is "discovered" these days as a function of equity volatility, since buying equity puts is one way to dynamically hedge the illiquid legacy books.
[...]
Risk management with CDS was largely about what the bankers called "reg cap arb" (regulatory capital arbitrage), or making big spreads and bonuses by scamming the regulators whose employers, the taxpayers, now have the bill.
I just saw the concert film, Leonard Cohen: I'm Your Man. It's a great tribute to the songs of Leonard Cohen, Canadian poet and songwriter from Montreal. There are a half dozen songs that are well worth the film:
wikipedia:Five minutes, thirty-seven seconds in duration, Everybody Knows is known for its somber tone and repetition of the title at the beginning of most verses. Featuring phrases such as "Everybody wants a box of chocolates and a long-stemmed rose...", Everybody Knows has been variously described by critics as "bitterly pessimistic" yet funny, or, more strongly, a "bleak prophecy about the end of the world as we know it."
wikipedia: Hallelujah is a song by Canadian singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen originally released on his 1984 studio album Various Positions. A live recording of the song from 1988, containing additional lyrics, appears on the 1994 album, Cohen Live. While Suzanne is his most covered work to date, Hallelujah has experienced great popularity more recently and has now been recorded more than 170 times for release and has been featured in the soundtracks of numerous movies and television shows.
Other all-time favorite concert films:
So I wanted a new hardware firewall. The old SonicWall SOHO/10 works fine. It's very low maintenance. However, it has only four ports and runs at 10 mbps. I think it's the bottleneck in our network, and since I am getting another computer, I figured it was time to upgrade.
I looked at these hardware firewalls:
Inexplicably, I selected the one with the worst rating at Amazon.
Blogs specifically on LINQ:
These businesses have closed in my neighborhood since I moved to the Upper West Side:
I am forever substituting European characters for the HTML encoded equivalents. This link is so I can find it more easily.
Torkel Ödegaard of Coding Instinct details creating an external DSL for running Watin automation using Oslo / MGrammar.
Der Untergang (The Downfall: Hitler and the End of the Third Reich) recast as a financial crisis at an investment bank headed by Adolf Hitler. The reconstructed plot and dialogue, supported by subtitles, are brilliant and hilarious.
Of course, there is practically a cottage industry built on parodies of Der Untergang. Here is a one-off video also inspired by the current financial crisis.
No problem. I'll just refinance my adjustable rate mortgage and then I'll be fine.
Real estate only goes UP! My broker told me it only goes UP! I can't believe I am going to have to sell my house before I can flip it for a profit! That bimbo said I could always refinance before the rates went up!
More emphasis on the size of the sensor, less on the megapixel count.
Amazing photographs. Many seem to be high dynamic range photos.
The discipline of spartan programming means frugal use of variables:
Web design challenge using Microsoft tools. Four challenges, approximately every month. Website has training in tools: Expression Studio, SilverLight, ASP.NET, Visual Studio, WPF, and Live Platform.
ANTLR, ANother Tool for Language Recognition, is a language tool that provides a framework for constructing recognizers, interpreters, compilers, and translators from grammatical descriptions containing actions in a variety of target languages. ANTLR provides excellent support for tree construction, tree walking, translation, error recovery, and error reporting.
PDF book on Antlr is reported to be worthwhile.
"Oslo" is the code name for Microsoft's platform for model-driven applications. The goal of "Oslo" is to provide a 10x productivity gain by making model-driven applications mainstream with domain-specific models, a new language, and tools.
Pex enables Parameterized Unit Testing, an extension of Unit Testing that reduces test maintenance costs.
The Google Documents List Data API allows client applications to upload documents to Google Documents and list them in the form of Google Data API ("GData") feeds. Your client application can request a list of a user's documents, and query the content in an existing document.
Here are some of the things you can do with the Documents List Data API:
- Upload the word processing documents and spreadsheets on your computer to allow you to back them up or collaborate online when editing.
- Find all of your documents that contain specific keywords.
- Get a list of spreadsheets which can be accessed through the Google Spreadsheets Data API.
Also Summer of NHibernate screencast series
Simply put, Capistrano is a tool for automating tasks on one or more remote servers. It executes commands in parallel on all targeted machines, and provides a mechanism for rolling back changes across multiple machines. It is ideal for anyone doing any kind of system administration, either professionally or incidentally.
Recordings of the 2008 PDC events.
I want one.
I came across a presentation on NServiceBus. I really want to do some coding that uses a publish/subscribe framework like this, so this may be a good starting point.
NServiceBus is an open source communications framework that makes building enterprise .NET systems easier. By providing scalability critical features like publish/subscribe support, integrated long-running transactions/sagas, and deep extensibility NServiceBus provides a solid foundation for any distributed system.
Vijay Santhanam has a small blog with quality material that I really like. There are a couple of bits of code that I want to use in my own applications and frameworks, so I am writing them out here:
using System;
using System.Linq;
namespace System
{
public class ActionDisposable: IDisposable
{
Action action;
public ActionDisposable(Action action)
{
this.action = action;
}
public void Dispose()
{
action();
}
}
}namespace System.Threading
{
public static class ReaderWriteLockExtensions
{
struct Disposable : IDisposable
{
readonly Action action;
public Disposable(Action action)
{
this.action = action;
}
public void Dispose()
{
action();
}
}
public static IDisposable ReadLock(this ReaderWriterLockSlim l)
{
l.EnterReadLock();
return new Disposable(l.ExitReadLock);
}
public static IDisposable UpgradableReadLock(this ReaderWriterLockSlim l)
{
l.EnterUpgradeableReadLock();
return new Disposable(l.ExitUpgradeableReadLock);
}
public static IDisposable WriteLock(this ReaderWriterLockSlim l)
{
l.EnterWriteLock();
return new Disposable(l.ExitWriteLock);
}
}
}
var rwLock = new ReaderWriterLockSlim();
using (rwLock.ReadLock())
{
// do reading stuff
}jason Dolinger of Lab49 does an awesome 90-minute video of the transformation of a simple WPF application to use the Model-View-ViewModel pattern.
There are a few good sites for learning sudoku patterns:
Many patterns described in text, including very advanced methods. Has a solver that applies techniques in succession so that you can see a particular technique applied to an actual puzzle.
Many patterns described in text.
Update 2008-12-05: If I could just start to recognize these patterns, I'd be on my way to becoming a decent sudoku solver:
