Leinweber’s Nerds

I had high hopes for David Leinweber’s Nerds on Wall St, but have been disappointed. It’s just a collection of trade press articles, with no deep insight offered anywhere. I suppose it highlights the fact that there still isn’t a definitive financial technology book, in the way there are classic sales and trading books like Liars Poker, Fooled by Randomness, Education of a Speculator or Trading and Exchanges.

I guess Leinweber has a lot of good industry contacts and influence: I can see no other explanation for the glowing testimonials cited here.

MicroMen

My first computer was a ZX81, so MicroMen on BBC4 was a powerful blast of nostalgia for the early 80s. Funny, sad and exhilarating – the Acorn hack against the clock to build the BBC prototype was fantastic, and the Clive Sinclair Mensa sequence is hysterical. I was an undergrad at Cambridge in the late eighties, so I was pleased to see them get loads of detail right: the Baron of Beef pub, the Computer lab. I used to see Sinclair jogging on the Madingley Road on the rare occasions I was out and about before midday…

I built my ZX81 from a kit. I later added all kinds of peripherals, including a real keyboard and 16K RAM pack. Another great point of detail in MicroMen was the reference to the dreaded RAM pack wobble that afflicted ZX81s. After the ZX81, I went on to a Camputers Lynx, also mentioned in MicroMen, and then an Atari 520 that I took to college in 86.

OpenGamma

I’m almost tempted to send my CV to Kirk – his OpenGamma startup sounds very exciting. I’ve got ticks in most of the boxes Kirk lists, except the pricing stuff, where I’m a bit short. If Kirk’s after a credit pricing coder, maybe he should talk to Noel.

Kirk’s coyness on his funding is intriguing too. Could it be Sean, Ken or FTV ?

Visual Studio 2005 property bolding

VS dev trivia: if entries in your C++ project property pages show up as bold it means they have been given explicit overrides in the .vcproj XML. This broke my build today as the overrides stopped inherited values from .rules and .vsprops files being pulled in.