Technology
Entries related to technology.
Latest Empire Avenue Stuff
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Thu, 09/15/2011 - 21:17Yesterday, I shared a post on one of the discussion groups on Empire Avenue about my latest Empire Avenue programming and trading strategy. (Read more below the fold.)
#EAv API Reflections
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Mon, 09/05/2011 - 09:20Last week, I finally got around to doing a little Empire Ave programming. I know that the new API is supposed to be coming out any day, but it should be similar to the current API and will hopefully just add some of the functionality that I’ve been currently missing. I’ve been doing my Empire Ave programming in shell scripts, PHP and Excel, and have yet to put together all the pieces. Hopefully, I will add some applications to my website for others to use when I make a little more progress, and I hope people with share their ideas and experiences with Empire Ave programming.
Years ago, I worked as a technology executive on Wall Street before moving over to being a social media manager, so the idea of Empire Avenue, and especially creating applications for it, is very appealing. I figured a good starting point would be some simple portfolio analytics. So, I got my API key, and started testing. The first call I tried was portfolio/base. It didn’t really provide much for information, so I moved over to portfolio/get, which provides much more information. (The geeky stuff is below the fold).
#ff #EAv API @benrobbins @Mamacita @MrktgMommy_JWil @rough_edges @ejc @Merlandre
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Fri, 09/02/2011 - 13:55I’ve taken a little time to relax amidst the post hurricane Irene cleanup, do to a little recreational programming. It the sort of thing that I do when I’m stressed. My latest project has been to play with the Empire Avenue API. Using this, I’ve come up with a few people to suggest for Follow Friday.
@benrobbins owns 50 shares of (e)AHYNES1. His Empire Ave shares are trading at about 44 and he has strong earnings. He also has a strong KLOUT score. He describes himself as an “Entrepreneur, inbound marketer, [and] general web geek”.
I’m not sure who I originally came across @Mamacita. I want to say that it was through something like MyBlogLog or BlogCatalog several years ago. I bought a few of her Empire Ave shares when I first started. She also currently has strong earnings and a strong KLOUT score. She describes herself as a “Social Media Specialist, Writer, Speaker, Internet Watchdog, Absentminded Professor, Education Advocate/Critic, [and] Mommy”.
Next on my list is @MrktgMommy_JWil I think I probably found her on Empire Ave. She owns 10 shares of (e0AHYNES1. She has strong earnings, but her KLOUT score is only in the twenties. She describes herself as a “Blogger at MarketingMommy.com. Mother, Christian, book-lover, and hockey fan.”
@rough_edges is next on my list. He doesn’t have a lot of Twitter activity, but still has pretty good earnings. Not surprisingly, his KLOUT score is in the twenties. This is another person I probably found via Empire Ave. He owns 50 shares in (e)AHYNES1. He lacks a description on Twitter.
@ejc describes himself as a “Lead designer at Scopely. Full time Designer, Developer, Illustrator, Mac Nerd. Part time Writer, Actor, [and] Improviser.” He has strong earnings and a good KLOUT score. I only own a few shares in (e)EJC and he doesn’t own any in me. I’m not sure how I stumbled across him.
Ending off this week’s list is @Merlandre. He describes himself as a “retired HR director”. He owns 10 shares of (e)AHYNES1 has had good earnings, but his KLOUT score is only 30.
I’ve bought a few more shares in each of them, and will probably do some similar buying over the coming days. Later, I hope to write in more details about how I came up with the list, some of the caveats, issues with the #EAv API, and other ideas I have about programming with the #EAv API. Let me know your thoughts, especially if you have looked at the API.
Digital Nostalgia
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Thu, 08/18/2011 - 21:22This evening, I participated in a Tweetchat about online social networking. One of the first questions was about when people started networking online. I mentioned Usenet back in 1982 when I was working at Bell Labs. Yes, if you know where to look, you can find stuff I wrote back in 1982 still online. I believe I first used Minitel at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris in 1983 when I was hitchhiking around Europe.
I had also visited bulletin board systems in the 1970s, but they weren’t particularly connected. Later, when Fidonet came along I was on that for a bit. I can’t recall if I ever accessed Minitel or Arpanet via Fidonet. Latter, I had accounts on ATTMail, SprintNet, and Compuserve. I also believe I did a little bit on GEnie in the late seventies, but I pretty much used it to access some programs that I translated to run on calculators, and never really used it for networking. Also in the seventies, I had been on Battelle’s computer network, and used to play Star Trek there. For other games, in the evenings at Bell Labs, I used to play Rogue on their computers. At times I’ve had versions of these programs that ran on my PCs.
One of the challenges back in the day was to send emails across multiple networks. My connection to Usenet back in 1982 was via UUCP, and addresses were of the form machine1!machine2!...!user Of course, these days, everyone knows the SMTP email addresses, user@machine However, the user part could be an address on a different email address if the host machine was a gateway, so I regularly sent email through a machine called ucbvax. It took several UUCP connections for me to get to ucbvax, so my email address was something like machine1!machine2!machine3!machine4!machine5!myid@ucbvax I don’t remember if the .berkely.edu was in use at the time. For me to send an email, it would go to machine4!machine3!machine2!machine1!ucbvax!user@othermachine.
There were also ways of connecting to Decnet, which used two colons to separate a userid from a machine name, bitnet, and of course X.400. X.400 addresses were long an complicated /C=US/ADMD=Att/PRMD=attmail/ou1=somethine/ou2=somethingelse I think Sprint used semicolons instead of slashes. Many of the networks had gateways, and if you knew the gateways you could email many different places.
One place I used to email to was FTPMAIL. You could send FTP commands via email to a machine that would grab a file and send it to you in small pieces that you put together and decoded to get your file. Another person on the mailing list mentioned XNS, but I never used that. Someone else mentioned PROFS. PROFS ran over RSCS which is what Bitnet used, so I never was on PROFS, but I had access to it via Bitnet and various RSCS programs I wrote.
Then, there were the speed issues. The first device I used had a 110 bps connection. Bps is bits per second. Now, people talk about megabits, or in somecases gigabits per second. I later used a 300 bps modem, a 1200 bps modem, a 2400 bps modem, a 9600 bps modem, a 14,400 bps modem and then moved over to ISDN which would allow 56K.
Enough for the early digital nostalgia. Maybe this will stir memories for other digital aborigines out there.
Charlie, Adam, and Axel
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Tue, 08/09/2011 - 06:35Many years ago, I worked at Bell Labs. Specifically, I worked on the Trunks Integrated Record Keeping System (TIRKS), It was probably around release 17.1 when I was working there. With a large complicated system that had been through many releases, there were volumes of documentation, and in the days before everything was linked together in hypertext, it could be hard to find the information that you needed.
Yet there was one person, Charlie, who had been around for perhaps as long as TIRKS had been around. If you ever needed to know something, your best bet was to find Charlie and ask him. Now this was nearly thirty years ago, so my memories may be not exact, but I remember Charlie as an aging, kindly old curmudgeon. Ever since those days, I’ve always thought the best documentation to any system was Charlie. Such a system had processed all the documentation and had an advanced natural language processing system that picked up so much nuance, that it would know what you were looking for, even when you didn’t yet know it.
Recently, I wrote about Social Fortress and XeeMe. Soon afterwards, I received an email from Adam Ghetti, one of the co-founders of Social Fortress. He went into considerable detail about how Social Fortress currently works and talked about coming enhancements. With that, he asked for suggestions about the forth coming enhancements. Adam struck me as the 21st century instance of Charlie. Beyond the quick access to information about the product, there was a component of marketing and community building. My opinion about Social Fortress became much greater as a result of the interaction.
Over on XeeMe, Axel Schultze, their CEO sent me a message on Twitter about my blog post. It simply said, “Thanks for mentioning #XeeMe Aldon. The key is probably under the hood when you start with Flights etc.” Much less detailed than Adam’s response, but still reflecting that 21st century version of Charlie, providing pointers to documentation mixed with some marketing and community building. I haven’t started looking closely at Flights yet, but I will look more closely at XeeMe, and particularly Flights as a response of Axel’s response. Like my opinion of Social Fortress, the interaction improved my opinion about XeeMe.
I suspect that Charlie has been retired for ages, but the spirit of Charlie continues on in people like Adam and Axel and it makes technology more enjoyable.
