Listen to the system

One of the mantras I chant to myself when debugging is “listen to the system”. My hope is to remind myself to read the error messages, and examine the symptoms,  without preconceptions. Often, when debugging, there is a eureka moment, when we figure the root cause of the problem. At that point we realise that we’ve ignored error messages that didn’t fit with our early guesses at the nature of the problem.

I imagine it must be similar for traders – they need to listen to the market, and try to keep an open mind as to causes and consequences as they observe price action.

Python 2.5.1

The standard Python 2.5.1 binaries in the Windows download are built with Visual C++ 7.1, which means that the python25.dll supplied references msvcr71.dll. If you’re linking python25.lib and building with Visual C++ 8, you’ll get a core dump.

Fortunately the source tarball has a VC8 project file that build right out of the box. So it was really no trouble to generate a python25.dll that uses msvcr80.dll. Kudos to the Pythonistas for having a well sorted build…

Bloomberg is dead ?

Paul Graham declares that Microsoft is dead. I look forward to the day we can say the same of Bloomberg.