Digital Dave

Dreams and Goals

We all have them, and we all live them on a day-to-day basis. Some people put an extreme amount of effort, while some people glide by in life not caring what happens. Pushing yourself on a daily basis might be considered, by some, “being too serious.” But to those folks that do it on a daily basis, really do, enjoy what they are doing.

But the issue is the challenge; the challenge of doing what needs to be done in order to reach a milestone on your list. You really want to do something with your life.  You want to make a difference, I hope.  Life is too short to not try and leave your mark on the world.  You have as many chances in life to change your direction, but only 4 or 5 of them could potentially be the superstar decision. Making those decisions, however, is a mind twisting bonanza.  Did you set yourself up for failure due to one of the decisions you made in the past? Are you being confused with what you really want to? Are you unaware that the direction you are heading might not even be possible? Do you really understand who you are, and what strengths you can take advantage of?

Only time will tell where life will take us all seems to be a popular response.

But all that really matters is that you continue to life a happy life, doing what you want to do, and pushing yourself toward those goals – pushing through the rocky time to achieve something greater than yourself. Dwelling on the past is no way to push toward successful future. Learn. Grow. And live. No life is perfect, but you make your life exactly what you want it to be. The number one goal, that we all should have, is to never give up on yourself. You can make a difference.

Well, the research project is being a typical research project… It’s slow going.  Reason being is because my professor and I have to dig through current research studies to find something to replicate. Which, isn’t exactly fun because we’re trying to stay away from the incredibly complex studies (we don’t have a whole lot of time here).

I should also note that I have a twitter account, and that I’ve got myself hooked on it.  It is a lot more interesting than I thought it would be.  You can even grab twhirl that is powered by Adobe AIR to monitor your account on your desktop. My fiancee still gives me crap about using it (I think she still fails, or denies, to know that I’m a computer nerd…), but I consider it blogging on a micro level…  It seems like there are a lot of coders on it, which gives me a fun look into their daily work schedule.

This most recent ‘tweet’ came through: “figure out the least we can possibly do, then implement those basic features with as much attention to detail as we can.”  Sounds like the fun just got blown out of that project.

Twitter must be doing okay… They just spent $15 million aquiring Summize, which is basically a data crawler to sift through all of the tweets.

In other news, I’m tinkering with Python.  What’s college free-time without tinkering?  I surely need to get something out of this summer if I can’t even get this research project going.

Since I’m completely new to Python, I figured I’d create an adventure game with it out of the gates.  Python + XML = $$$.  Well, minus the $$$.  I’m just having fun with it. I enjoy tinkering with languages to see how they work.  I’ve already got a good learning foundation going with Python, and it has given me some painful moments… Like the IDE that comes packaged with it… That thing is junk.  I finally ended up using eclipse since I’m somewhat familiar with it.  I should note that I have 63 hours left before this self challenge is over (making this game).

Oh… And I have a friend moving out to California before me… That doesn’t sit well- I need to graduate.

Gotcha.

So these two clever guys (you might know ‘em), Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky, teamed up back in April for a new adventure.  They’ve got themselves a pretty clever idea to assist programmers out here, and the future programmers that come into the world, learn the different tools of our trade.

Even though I really enjoy going over to Borders to poke around at some books, there is no doubt that the programmer reliance on books has dwindled down to fairy dust.  I really just started programming in 2005, and even though I do collect a few books, I can’t remember a time that I actually found a solution to my problem in any of them.  Typically, I’ll jump into Google.  Or now that I actually have a developer ring, I will ask one of my buddies for their perception on the issue.

But you’ve got to admit that the sources for those answers are scattered all over the place.  Sure, Google might make you lucky, but realisticlly, it would be incredibly nice to have one user generated source for programmers.  Think, SearchForHelp->Digg(Wikipedia(ExpertsExchange)) returning a myrid of answers, but one that stands above them all with a bonafied user approval rating.  People come in to ask questions.  People who have been a reliable source to the website can provide their solution to their question.  And then other users can rate those answers, essentially moving them up the pedistal of uberness.

It actually sounds really nice and I am really hoping that this works out. It’s still under development, but I’ve been listening to their podcasts all day (Moving to #12 now, oomph!), while doing some reading on programming.  I highly recommend the podcasts.  They discuss some pretty interesting things revolving web technologies, careers, and programming.  They also answer questions at the end.  Plus, it’s just nice hearing programmers BS a bit.  I’m still in the academic world, so I don’t hear much of this unfortunately.

Check it all out at http://blog.stackoverflow.com

They. Are. A. Doozy.  I’m sure you know.

As I spent time in the Marine Corps, I watched so many young individuals leave the military with absolutely no idea where they were going in their life.  Most of them came into the military as an escape from their past;  drugs, gangs, a poor educational system, poor family support.  But, most of the time, they knew they wanted to get out of the military soon after they enlisted, and they knew that they could find shelter (sometimes) with mom and/or pop.  But what happened to them after that?  Your guess is as good as mine.  It’s been incredibly tough keeping in touch with those brothers that left the military.  But the time leading up to them getting out, they all had one thing in common – A raised eyebrow and a built-up concern from heading out into the “Real World.”

I was pretty lucky.  I was never concerned about leaving the Marines because I knew exactly where I was going – school.  I pushed hard to get the Marine Corps to release me early to send me to school, and I was awarded the opportunity.  I finished with that portion of my life, and I knew I needed another challenge.

Now, as my four years at the university dwindle and I approach my final semester, I can easily pronounce that I am definitely concerned with the thought of finally entering the work force as a college graduate.   There are so many factors that are placed on my shoulders that make my mind race around the unknown.

The killer question is, “Do I know enough?”

I’ve already starting the process of applying to companies.  I, personally, can’t wait to find out what opportunities I do end up getting.  Whatever happens, it’ll definitely be an life altering transition.

As long as the young can get to a computer regularly, they have it really easy when it comes to learning things.

I grew up in a single parent home.  My mom needed to work a whole lot to sustain ourselves.  I really didn’t have the luxury of having education emphasized before, and during school.  I couldn’t rely on my other family members due to the lack of education around us. And to give you an idea of how rocky of a start I had, I could only recognize the letters a, b, c, d, e and the numbers 1 – 5 by the age of 6 1/2.

There is no doubt that I’ve come a long way because of my motivation, but I could not imagine if I had the internet that we have today when I was growing up.  Today, if you are struggling with math, science, etc., you can easily find somebody on YouTube to help you (among many more written articles).

If you’re curious, the same guy could teach you algebra, geometry, trigonometry, linear algebra, and even physics (among other things).

Maybe you enjoy seeing somebody behind the camera, and love the white board they draw on…

We also have educational institutions, like MIT, providing a wealth of free knowledge.

And of course, games. With the growth of the web, they are easier to access, and way easier to make. http://www.purposegames.com comes to mind.

This is just a small fraction of the “Education should be Free” movement. It’s easier now, and it’ll get easier.

Which is nice for me. I constantly look up things that I didn’t emphasize on while I was young. And I don’t use the word constantly lightly. I’m all over the internet reading things every day. I love it.

You might be happy to know that I am putting up an installer for Breakout Returns on the website.  I’ve been meaning to do this since, well, since I made it… But for some reason I just never got around to doing it.  Okay, I didn’t feel like fiddling with installers at the time.  The beast used to be around 23MB, but I spent the last hour knocking it down to 11.3MB.

It has been up on GameDev.NET and has had about 740 plays.

Download Breakout Returns

Well the ball has started rolling on this finance project.

I’m working with a finance professor here at Kansas State to do some research on momentum trading.  If you are not finance savvy, the method of trading resembles exactly what the word means.  It’s all about chasing returns.  This is probably one of the most confusing aspects of finance, believe it or not.   Does it really exist?  That’s the million dollar question.  Some of these research papers break out some long winded equations.  Others bring it down to more of an investor behavior.   And none of these papers are confident in their findings…

Anyway, that’s the boring stuff.

My role, beyond understanding the method of trading a little, is to write an application to help my professor study this stuff.  I still don’t have the exact details, but what I can say is that I get to deal with a massive amount of data.   We’re looking at daily, and monthly, data over the past 7 years to analyze.   Not, bad… Right?  Yeah, well, this is dealing with the over 4,000 companies.  So we’re looking at around 8,000,000 entries for the daily returns, and around 700,000 for the monthly returns.   Each of these entries will have around 5-10 things associated with them (stock price, ticker name,  daily return, volume traded, etc).

Obviously, the kudos points really come from developing a program to analyze this data fast and memory efficient.

I still haven’t decided on what language I’m going to write this in.  I need to find some comparisons on file reading, among other things, with java, c#, and C++.

I have a meeting with the professor next week so hopefully I’ll get to write some more detailed information.  Until then I’m writing a bunch of test/performance code to get an idea of what might work the best in terms of speed.