afraccess; the Fin Review’s Web 2.0 play? May 31, 2006
Posted by James Webster in : web, finance , 2 commentsBetween studying a Diploma of Financial Markets, being addicted to Michael Arrington’s TechCrunch, having a keen interest in investing and consulting at some of the world’s biggest investment banks I’m quite keen to see how ‘Web 2.0′ trends will affect the intersection of finance and technology. Google Finance recently launched to challenge the most popular incumbent, Yahoo! Finance. It came to my attention this morning that the Australian Financial Review have a project known as afraccess in the pipeline. As far as I can glean from the promotional video (despite its somewhat cheesy acting) it will be a comprehensive analysis, research and portfolio tracking tool. Its nothing that cannot already be found at a smaller scale at any number of online brokers but the scope of what they are promising is quite impressive. The tool will also include residential and commercial property analysis tools.
I look forward seeing it launch; hopefully with cross-platform support (it vaguely looks like Flash in the video) and at a relatively affordable price. I hope they also take a page out of Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein’s book and provide RSS feeds for prices (delayed I would gather), daily portfolio performance, market news, etc.
Meanwhile, Matt blogs about what makes a bank cool from a technology point of view. No mention of Rails though?!
Virtualization and dual-screen development May 21, 2006
Posted by James Webster in : virtualization, development , 1 comment so farSeth Livingston blogs about the value of
virutalization in development (via VMTN Blog). As Seth points out, it is possible to build up a development VM with all the common tools that have been agreed upon and develop solely within that environment. This is a great idea; especially when you also consider that some tools aren’t the greatest in sharing key bindings, template shortcuts, etc. The most recent version of IntelliJ in particular has this problem; there is no easy way to share Live Templates and additional key bindings via source control without further complications. I would love to be able to develop in a VM for this reason alone. But can my virtual development box also support dual monitors? Unfortunately dual-monitor support for guest OS’s appears to be missing from the VMware Workstation data-sheet.
Give all developers two monitors now! May 17, 2006
Posted by James Webster in : development , 3 commentsWould you rather develop like this…
…or like this?
You can go read this NYTimes article (login required) or you can take it from me. The productivity benefit from using an additional screen, paired with a modern IDE (IntelliJ is my weapon of choice), far outweighs the measly $couple o’ hundred that a 19″ panel costs these days. And with Matrox’s Dual Head 2 Go solution, adding a second video card isn’t necessary. This is especially handy in corporate environments where getting permission to open up a case can sometimes be like pulling teeth. Boss won’t buy you another monitor? Maybe its worthwhile exercising the initiative and getting one yourself; it would be a lousy boss who didn’t reimburse you once the benefits have been demonstrated.
I have worked with extreme programming teams in the past where all workstations were configured in this manner. If you have LCD panels that can be rotated 90 degrees, give it a go for the the monitor that is dedicated to showing the code; editing code in portrait mode makes much better use of the available screen real-estate. Since most teams establish a coding standard where the maximum allowable line width is around 80-120 characters this often results in wasted whitespace on the right-hand side of the monitor. Portrait mode will let you see more of the class/module/script/markup on screen at once, hopefully almost all of it if you are writing small cohesive classes.