Sunday, July 25, 2010

2010-07-25 Sunday - Paul Wilmott Introduces Quantitative Finance, 2nd Ed.

Enjoyed spending some time this afternoon coding #Java implementations of ideas from: Paul Wilmott introduces Quantitative Finance, 2nd Ed. - working on some ideas for an Open Source Quantitative Finance library.
















This is by far one of the best introductory books on the market.  Easily readable - concise - excellent examples - and good coverage of the material.  Buy this book first - then consider Wilmott's 3-volume edition that expands further on the material.


http://quantlib.org/ (C++)

http://www.jquantlib.org (Java)

JQuantLib is a free, open-source and comprehensive framework for quantitative finance, offering several mathematical and statistical tools needed for financial instrument valuation, calculation of VaR, portfolio valuation, etc. JQuantLib is written in Java and is based on QuantLib, which is written in C++. QuantLib is a de-facto reference implementation for C++ world. Following the steps of its predecessor, JQuantLib aims to become a reference implementation for Java world. JQuantLib does its best efforts to mimic as close as possible the API exposed by QuantLib, offering a smooth transition path for developers and organizations aiming to adopt Java for high performance, low latency applications.

Other recent books I've added to my reading stack:

















2010-07-25 Sunday - Start-up Equity & Vesting

I'm doing some research to provide guidance to a friend on structuring his start-up.  This blog posting is my catch-all of the links I'm reviewing for interesting ideas.]


(Reminder To Self: I need to come back and trim this a bit - and clean-up the formatting of the posting - and add some additional notes)


Vesting Calculator

http://fastignite.com/startup-tools/vesting-calculator



Equity

Putting Share Ownership in a Business Plan
http://www.entrepreneur.com/startingabusiness/businessplans/businessplancoachtimberry/article171940.html

 

How should we split ownership of our startup?
http://www.optoiq.com/index/photonics-technologies-applications/lfw-display/lfw-article-display/311598/articles/laser-focus-world/volume-43/issue-11/columns/business-forum/how-should-we-split-ownership-of-our-startup.html



Tips for Startup Companies
http://philip.greenspun.com/business/startup-tips/
 

 

Sharing Equity in a Startup or Established Entrepreneurial Venture
http://www.nceo.org/main/article.php/id/50/

 

Equity math for startups
http://paulbuchheit.blogspot.com/2007/03/equity-math-for-startups.html


What is the standard ownership percentage for an investor in a startup company?
http://www.linkedin.com/answers/startups-small-businesses/starting-up/STR_STP/269866-22385753

 

How to distribute ownership in startup?
http://www.youngentrepreneur.com/forum/f45-startups/how-to-distribute-ownership-in-startup-57524.html

 

Pre Money Valuation
http://www.venturechoice.com/articles/premoney-valuation.htm

 

Equity Distribution in Startups
http://www.angelscorner.com/articles/equity_distribution_in_startups.htm

How Equity Dilution Works
http://www.gaebler.com/How-Equity-Dilution-Works.htm

Calculating Ownership
http://www.sandhill.com/opinion/daily_blog.php?id=63&post=496

Equity for unfunded, pre-launch startup as Business Development lead?
http://answers.onstartups.com/questions/12436/equity-for-unfunded-pre-launch-startup-as-business-development-lead

Idea Entrepreneurs and the Startup Equity Advantage
http://www.techinnoventure.com/?p=357

What percentage of partnership would you recommend for a startup?
http://startups.com/questions/16438/what-percentage-of-partnership-would-you-recommend-for-a-startup

Founder Series Part III: How to Structure and Document Your Founder Agreement
http://www.dryanlaw.com/founder-series-part-iii-how-to-structure-and-document-your-founder-equity-split/

Startup Equity Allocation
http://charliecrystle.com/2010/01/11/startup-equity-allocation/

How much equity percentage of the company should startup owners give to their investors?
http://www.linkedin.com/answers/finance-accounting/financing/venture-capital-private-equity/FIN_CFN_VNC/602751-14591205

Sharing the Wealth in a Technology Startup: How Much Stock is Enough?
http://www.xconomy.com/san-diego/2009/03/02/sharing-the-wealth-in-a-technology-startup-how-much-stock-is-enough/


Startup 125: Term Sheet – Liquidation Preferences
http://www.ansanelli.com/blog/2009/05/27/startup-125-term-sheet-liquidation-preferences/


Startup Stock Options: Vesting Schedules & Acceleration
http://www.naffziger.net/blog/2007/04/05/startup-stock-options-vesting-schedules-acceleration/


Why Your Startup's Founders Stock Should Vest Over Time
http://startuplawyer.com/incorporation/why-your-startups-founders-stock-should-vest-over-time


Cofounder vesting schedule for young startup
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1175688

Carrot and Stick: The Psychology of Options Vesting Schedules
http://www.businessweek.com/smallbiz/0001/sa000120.htm






...more interesting results from this Google search term "guidelines on the distribution of founders' stock in a technology startup"


2010-07-25 Sunday - DevOps resource links to read later

I'm crunched for time today - but want to remember to come back and read these links:

 http://edmund.haselwanter.com/en/blog/2008/08/26/automated-environment-puppet-iclassify-and-capistrano/

http://www.agileweboperations.com/sprinkle-automated-infrastructure-for-the-rest-of-us/

http://subbu.posterous.com/poor-mans-automated-deployment-aka-ugly-capis

http://hivelogic.com/articles/deploying-expressionengine-github-capistrano

http://www.thebitguru.com/articles/9-Setting+up+Capistrano+on+Site5

http://www.slideshare.net/eljefe/automated-deployment-with-phing

http://www.rubyinside.com/capistrano-20-flexible-automated-deployment-system-541.html

http://code.google.com/p/bungeni-dspace/wiki/InstallingDspaceUsingCapistrano

2010-07-26 Sunday - Sequential Rule Engines?

I'm doing some research this weekend on the open source rule engine (OpenL Tablets) that appears to be used in a commercial product (see screenshots on the OpenL Tablets website).

I've previously spent some time exploring the JBoss Community Drools "Business Logic Integration Platform"- and found this blog posting by Mark Proctor that discusses sequential rule engines.

From the OpenL Tablets website, I found the following links to be interesting:

OpenL Tablets Engine Differentiators

 5.7.0 Release Notes 

Use Guides

 Downloads

OpenL Tablets plans to renew(?) their product

June 4, 2010 

OpenL Tablets team is working hard to release a new version of the product. It will be restructured and contain configurable Service Frontend out of the box. The release packaging will also be changed. Several different artifacts will be published at sf.net such as eclipse site, webstudio war, service frontend war and archive with engine jars only. The OpenL Tablets artifacts will be released in public maven repository as well.
The team is going to start moving project documentation to project public wiki. This will take some time and will end up with complete product documentation available at web.
Not all the changes will be done in this new release. The next one will also bring some major changes in rules projects and tools (we’re going to introduce maven based rules projects out of the box, however, do not guarantee to accomplish everything, the release is still being planned).

If you are looking for an open source rule engine, see this link:
http://java-source.net/open-source/rule-engines

These books may also be of some interest:


Thursday, July 22, 2010

2010-07-22 Thursday - Oracle OpenWorld / JavaOne 2010 - Registered!

I received confirmation this morning that I'm registered to attend Oracle OpenWorld / JavaOne 2010 in San Francisco (September 12-23, 2010) - as a Blogger :)

http://www.oracle.com/us/openworld/index.htm

Sunday, July 11, 2010

2010-07-11 Sunday - Score: Java -3, Python 1000

Doing some reading through some chapters this evening in Java Puzzlers...




...I decided to write the code to run the same scenarios under Python-3.1.

Interestingly, for the Java example in Puzzle 3, I obtained a different result than what is mentioned in the book (expected result: 5, actual result: -3) - perhaps due to my recent upgrade to the 64-bit version of Java's 1.6.0-u21 release.



Whereas the Python code returned the correct value...



Curious. One would think that an overflow exception could have been detected and thrown in the Java code by the JVM...

I also noted that the three source code analysis tools I ran against the Java code didn't identify the problem either (PMD, FindBugs, CheckStyle).


While this may seem like a trivial code example, there are real-world disasters that are directly related to this type of subtle bug:

 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ariane_5_Flight_501
"Flight 501, which took place on June 4, 1996, was the first, and unsuccessful, test flight of the European Ariane 5 expendable launch system. Due to an error in the software design (inadequate protection from integer overflow), the rocket veered off its flight path 37 seconds after launch and was destroyed by its automated self-destruct system when high aerodynamic forces caused the core of the vehicle to disintegrate."

Lecture 22: Software Disasters
Kenneth M. Anderson
Software Methods and Tools
CSCI 3308 - Fall Semester, 2004
http://www.cs.colorado.edu/~kena/classes/3308/f04/lectures/lecture22.pdf

2016-06-20 Update
Sun's Numerical Computation Guide may also be of interest to you:

2010-07-11 Sunday - Eclipse Helios Upgrade Experience

Ouch.

I've been a user of Eclipse for many years...and all previous experiences with new releases have been very good.

This most recent release (Eclipse 3.6 - Helios) has included a few bumps along the way - primarily due to the mis-adventures of 32-bit and 64-bit applications on a 64-bit OS (Windows 7).

First - I had to uninstall the 32-bit version of the Oracle/Sun Java SE JDK and install the 64-bit version (for which I chose the latest version: 1.6.0-u21)

Second, I discovered that the CollabNet binaries for Apache Subversion are only available in a 32-bit distribution for Windows.

Arggghhh.

[whispers in my mind begin to ask, "So, should you be thinking about making the leap to Git now?"]

Fortunately(?) - I found that the Slik SVN binaries are available in 64-bit....and installed the command-line tools. 

I also installed the Eclipse Subclipse plugin.

Observations:
- I can browse my existing Subversion respository
- I can create a new folder in the Subversion repository
- Trying to do a commit to an existing Subversion folder appears to hang within Eclipse/Subclipse...not sure why just yet...time to dig into the Eclipse logs and see if I can identify the root cause.

Note: I tried running the svnadmin upgrade and recover commands - but still no joy.

I also tried installing Subversive - but it appears to hang on install...


One bloggers's rant against Eclipse...

I'll post more updates as I work through the issues.

12:20pm...

Created a new repository folder to experiment with Subversive...




I imported one of my previous Eclipse projects to do some testing...

Curious...now I'm seeing this error: java.lang.OutOfMemoryError: PermGen space

See: http://www.eclipse.org/forums/index.php?t=msg&goto=546114&

See: http://wiki.eclipse.org/FAQ_How_do_I_increase_the_permgen_size_available_to_Eclipse%3F

Forcing the vmargs on the command line (as parameters to the Eclipse.exe) seems to have resolved the issue).  I'm currently using the following value:  -vmargs -XX:MaxPermSize=1024m

Also, it helps to actually read the documentation:
http://help.eclipse.org/helios/index.jsp?topic=/org.eclipse.platform.doc.user/tasks/running_eclipse.htm

2:15pm...

I've re-installed the Subclipse plugin - and it seems to be working now...

Whew!


2010-07-22 Update:
Apparently there is a known issue:
http://www.infoq.com/news/2010/07/eclipse-java-6u21;jsessionid=AFD82F08E186AEF90C51470744180292

2010-07-11 Sunday - Oracle database design and programming

I installed the latest release of Oracle 11gR2 yesterday on my primary development machine - as I am reading three new books I recently ordered from Amazon on Oracle database design, programming, and administration:





Friday, July 09, 2010

2010-07-09 Friday - 2010 Hack in the Box Security Conference (Amsterdam)

While doing some research on a particular area of security (PCI DSS logging requirements), I happened to come across the presentations that were given during the 2010 Hack in the Box Conference (HITBSecConf2010)

Twitter #HITB2010AMS


If you have similar interests in security topics, you might also be interested in these titles from Amazon:













































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