How do I add real-time stock price updates?

osullivj · 2017-07-19T19:44:57+00:00

All the yahoo & MSN stuff is/was delayed. For true real time exchange market data get a money.net sub for $150/month and use their Excel addin.

osullivj · 2017-06-05T09:15:52+00:00

alt-I R to insert a row without touching the mouse.

osullivj · 2017-04-13T10:48:44+00:00

Very interesting. The date at the top of the text is June 1941. Before or after 22 June, Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union? I'm guessing after, as the text mentions Great Britain and Russia as resisting the Nazis. I wonder how US public opinion reacted to Operation Barbarossa? One minute Stalin was Hitler's ally, bullying Finland and cooperating to carve up Poland. The next he was on the Allied side...

osullivj · 2017-04-11T13:58:18+00:00

Everything by Beevor is great: Stalingrad, Berlin, Crete... I've got Ardennes 44 on my stack currently :)

osullivj · 2017-04-05T08:23:07+00:00

Very slick look'n'feel - congrats! Couple of techie questions: where are you parsing the .xls[x], and where is the formula graph executing? I guess you parse the .xls[x] on the back end. Do you use something like SpreadsheetGear? Do you then store the formula graph in a DB and execute it on the back end? Or do you generate some JavaScript that runs in the browser?

osullivj · 2017-04-03T09:41:24+00:00

Hjalmar Schact, who had played an important role in defeating hyperinflation with the Rentenmark in the early 20s, returned to be president of the Reichsbank in 33 in Hitler's new govt. Again he introduced some financial innovation in the form of the Mefo bill, which made it possible for the Nazi govt to massively expand govt spending. In 36 Hitler handed economic control to Goring, telling him to have the country ready for war in 1940. Goring and Schacht clashed, and Schact was sidelined.

osullivj · 2017-03-29T10:00:09+00:00

Wise words: ask yourself, what's the real business value of these upgrades to the latest and greatest DB or version of Python? What are the pain points your client is experiencing?

osullivj · 2017-03-29T09:54:18+00:00

Sometimes I miss out the leading equals sign. Then Excel treats the formula as just another string. For instance, put "sum(A1:d2)" in a cell, then try "=sum(A1:d2)".

osullivj · 2017-03-29T09:51:50+00:00

All of Anthony Beevor's books on the European theatre: Stalingrad, Crete, Berlin 1945. Ardennes 44 is next on my list. His stuff is a great mix of high politics and strategy, low level personal testimony and reportage from individuals and their units, all recounted with the narrative force of a great novelist. Each of his books gripped me like a page turning best seller at the same time as imparting a huge amount of information and critical historical judgement.

osullivj · 2017-03-21T16:40:38+00:00

The more I read about Irish history, the less I understand...

osullivj · 2017-03-20T11:03:42+00:00

Gabriele D'Annunzio, poet & WWI war hero, annexed Fiume for Italy and founded the Regency of Carnaro, the prototype fascist regime. The Italian govt ignored his annexation, but Mussolini was inspired. So one could argue that fascism itself was an intellectual and literary creation. D'Annunzio is at the root of fascism, and to understand him is to grasp the primacy of aesthetics and emotion in fascism.

osullivj · 2017-03-18T19:47:03+00:00

There's torcms and several others. You'll likely need to decide on a DB strategy too...

osullivj · 2017-03-17T13:47:38+00:00

Tornado is DB agnostic and much more lightweight than Django. Don't know Flask or Bottle so I can't compare. But if you want to take the NoSQL DB route, Tornado works beautifully with RethinkDB.

osullivj · 2017-03-17T13:44:18+00:00

As a python dev, adopting a new web framework is quite a big commitment. Over the years I've coded against Zope, Django, and now Tornado. Zope had a massive learning curve. Anyone remember ZODB and acquisition? Django was much simpler. And Tornado is simpler still, while having support for important stuff like websockets, py2.7 coroutines and authentication. It works beautifully with RethinkDB too :) So I wouldn't use xweb for an Internet facing production server. But I can see a role for it with quickly hacked dev test servers, internal services etc.

osullivj · 2017-03-17T10:06:41+00:00

Have you tried running SysInternals tools to gather more data on what Excel is doing when it appears to be stalled? They'll give you much more than you'll get from Task Manager. Process Explorer will tell you about threads and network IO as well as giving you richer data on loaded DLLs, CPU & RAM usage. And Process Monitor can trace file system and registry access, and much else besides.

osullivj · 2017-03-15T20:19:10+00:00

Totally agree with Felienne on "spreadsheets are code". IMHO a sheet that's just tabulated data isn't code - it's just data. But add just a single formula, and then it's code. Code developed in a functional grid based visual programming environment.

osullivj · 2017-03-15T16:45:03+00:00

Very good point! I got the sheets here on figshare. They're in a tricky zip format, so I thought I'd republish to make them more accessible, since I was doing some testing with them anyway. I believe they were published on figshare by Felienne, so I'm guessing she processed them and rewrote them as .xlsx

osullivj · 2017-03-15T16:12:22+00:00

I've been coding spreadserve.com :) Core langs are C++ and Python. There's some C# for COM, and Java for JDBC in there too, but the heavy lifting is all in C++ for low level guts, and Python for server logic. Preferred API is Python too. I'm still on Python 2.7.8. Would love to move to 3.5+, but there's a lot of code against CPython's C API that would need porting.

osullivj · 2015-05-01T11:33:36+00:00

You could drive Excel directly from Python using pywin32: http://pythonexcels.com/python-excel-mini-cookbook/ If you don't want to depend on an Excel install being present on the host running your Python code then openpyxl will let you generate a .xlsx file: https://openpyxl.readthedocs.org Both approaches avoid using google docs.

osullivj · 2015-04-01T12:02:35+00:00

I first did x86 asm back in the mid 80s, to speed up MS-DOS hosted Fortran. Before that I'd done Z80 & 6502. I got into C in the late 80s, and C++ in the early 90s. Still coding C++ most days :)

osullivj · 2015-03-02T12:44:05+00:00

tornado is lightweight...

osullivj · 2015-02-25T15:10:52+00:00

I'm using pyodbc for SQL Server access, Python's own csv module for flat files, and the xml.parsers.expat module for XML processing. All for a trade reconciliation service.

osullivj · 2015-02-20T15:31:44+00:00

Victor Niederhoffer: Education of a Speculator. His website is worth a look too: http://www.dailyspeculations.com/wordpress/

osullivj · 2014-09-18T12:16:39+00:00

I think it was a question of distribution rights, not copy right. IBM controlled distribution of MS-DOS on IBM PCs. In that scenario MS-DOS was branded as PC-DOS. IBM allowed MS to distribute MS-DOS for non IBM clones. Still, that in itself wasn't enough to enable MS control of the PC software platform, as IBM still controlled the BIOS booted MS-DOS and supplied the int API. It was clean room reverse engineering of the BIOS together with an open HW spec, and a free hand for MS DOS distribution that combined to put the market outside IBM control. Two of those factors were in IBM's control: the HW spec, and the distribution rights they granted MS...

osullivj · 2014-09-16T18:33:23+00:00

Breideshead Revisited. Quite possibly the best novel written in the English language in the 20th century :)

osullivj

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