Twitter vs Slashdot

I was recently annoyed with the slashdot web site. I posted some commentary and a link to a new business' web site I came across and one of their editors market it as spam. I also recently observed that since I had been using twitter more regularly I only visit slashdot 2 to 3 time per week as apposed to multiple times every day.

I then googled for twitter effect on slashdot. The result was very interesting and as usual I got side tracked by the results. There are many references to "twitter effect" mainly centred around the impact on a web site when a link to it takes off on twitter similar to the digg effect or slashdot effect.

My guess is that many previous news/web link aggregation and dissemination sites have been replace by social networking sites like: Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.

I still frequent a few news sites and blogs directly, but I find that twitter is playing a larger role in me keeping on the pulse of what is going on right now. It makes me think of the impact the Internet had on newspapers as newspapers found themselves almost constantly out of date. Internet news sites are now more repositories of information than the source of news.

How has Twitter influenced your Internet interaction? Do you rely less on RSS feeds and previously popular websites?

How to Virtualize Your Workforce

I came across this great article from wikiHow on "How to Virtualize Your Workforce". It covers some obvious and not so obvious steps to make this a reality."

"The virtualized workforce (also referred to as teleworking or telecommuting) is a very hot topic but is sadly underused. Often, management is unaccustomed to managing remote employees, so there is a natural fear of reduced productivity. The movement into remote management can be disconcerting, but it has many significant rewards, both immediate and long-term. With the proper application of good management techniques, you will see an improvement in overall productivity, a decrease in attrition, a reduction in corporate expenses and a massive increase in skill set availability. Your company can demonstrate leadership by example, as well as benefiting employees, your local community, and even the environment."

Read the full article here

At-home mums (and dads), a latent workforce

Working around personal and family commitments and preferences has always been something I have often thought about. There is a large part of me that likes working the usual 9-5 in an office with others. I would say that I like the social interaction and the routine. For many others this is often just not an option for them.

I have different perspectives to this got from various experiences I have had over the years. For part of my teenage years, my mum did freelance book keeping from home for several clients which then later turned into a proper accounting practice. Soon after university I ran a computer bureau for a large accounting firm where all of the computer operators where woman and where I became aware of the juggling act women had to do when deciding to start a family.

After my wife and I had a few children this issue became real to me, until then it was something that affected others. We often have the opportunity cost discussion around my wide going back to work and how would we balance all the she things that she has to do and would like to do with making time available for work and the logistics of going out to work.

After finding myself a casualty of the credit crisis, I started a consulting company servicing the industry I have been working in for some time. Some of the services I offer are assisting business to make use of various outsourced technology solutions and building better operational processes to bring costs down and make it scalable. I delve into areas of cloud computing and other virtual computing concepts. This further leads of to implications like how do we define the concept of where and office is, what should constitute an office etc.

In the news and online there is a convergence of peoples live style choices and available technologies which will allow for remote and flexible work arrangements. What interests me is not how this complements the existing work from home, set you own hours make yourself rich business models. Rather how traditional bricks and mortar organisations can change to benefit themselves and their employees.

I am sure there are many studies centred on this and all sorts of data available. But what I see in the solutions I advise and what’s going on in companies around me is very exciting. I would love to get involved with a project that will invest in an infrastructure to enable people to working remote and across all time zones. This is more than what technology can allow; I see this agency of people all with different skills willing and able to do all manner of tasks on their terms.

If you are involved in making this happen right now, or are purely interested in the topic or have information to share, please leave a comment or get in touch.

Software licensing and support in the Cloud

"For the purpose of this discussion let us assume that cloud implies virtualisation."

I posted similar "questions" on other forums, unfortunately without much response.

For a moment lets ignore all the security issues and look at how software licensing and support agreements are impacted on by virtulisation and cloud deployments? I work in the Financial services arena and many software vendors do not officially or unofficially support and sanction the running of their software in virtualised environments.

They give many reasons for this. The main ones are unable to QA stability and performance under virtualised environments, underlying components not supported e.g. databases other software libraries etc,etc,etc. Bottom line it is going to cost them to much to support in the short term. But in the long term I think that they will loose customers.

I know there are performance considerations in virtualisation particularly with trading systems where often high data throughput and low latency systems are a prerequisite. I do however believe there are suitable solutions for this. People just need to think a little out of the box and put conventional wisdom aside.

I imagine that there are a fair number of people who face licensing and support issues around virtualisation, please share your thoughts and experiences by leaving a comment?

Update:

I have found these interesting and related links:

• Cloud Computing's Other Achilles' Heel: Software Licensing
• Clouds Looming for Software Server Vendors
• Is cloud computing a solution for software licensing woes?

New Quantitative Trading Platform

One of the coolest ideas I have seen in a little while. I know many people that are working on their own quantitative trading models, and they all have various problems.

• Actual knowledge and skill to do this effectively *duck*
• Access to quality market data
• Adequate technology to run the models and for back testing
• Lack of capital to trade on a large enough scale

Well.... now there is a solution Algodeal. They provide a platform for your to run and back test your models. If they like it they will give you capital to run them and share in the profits. what more can I say, now take a look for yourself.

Technology and Vendor lock-in: problem or not?

For many years this was a concept that I was not that phased about. Roughly 7 years ago I remember a client deciding on two technology vendors to supply them with trading system software. One of their primary reasons was that they did not want to be exposed to a single vendor. I started looking around at what various lock-ins people had: operating systems, databases, hardware, software and outsourcing suppliers.

So is this a problem and something to be avoided?

For many out there the changing of their technology or systems isn't anywhere near their radar. For these I would say even if they were exposed to some or other lock-in it is of no immediate consequence. I typed vendor lock-in into a popular search engine and and saw the topic had it's own entry in Wikipedia. This note is not an in-depth analysis on the topic but to offer high level commentary that will hopefully invoke thought and debate on the topic.

I offer technology related consulting and services to hedge funds and from this I recently started thinking more on the topic of lock-in. To me lock-in exists where there is a desire for change with an inability to do so due to uncontrollable factors. The reasons stopping change could be many: cost, time, ability and limited alternatives.

I will touch on platform lock-in (you can define what platform means to you), I will also look at the hedge fund world. More recently in my experience this is where I have seen real examples of lock-in through witnessing many funds evolve from start-ups to large complex businesses and also funds that have had to go through extreme and sudden change. In my opinion one of the largest contributing factors is the strong desire for hedge fund managers to outsource none core activities e.g. IT.

Firms from time to time find themselves in a position where they decide to bring IT back in-house or would like to switch vendors. They find themselves tied to long term contracts or find that business continuity risk due to cost and the complexity of switching. They feel trapped.

I would love to hear your thoughts to further this debate. Will utility/cloud have a computing offer solutions, more choice because of Software as a Service (SaaS), would this situation never risen had the fund managers access to technology advice from someone who understood their strategy and their business objectives?

One thing I would offer up here is that the landscape for hedge funds and businesses in general has changed a lot over the past two years. Traditional solutions and approaches are to restrictive, we are in a period of rapid change and long term uncertainty. Whatever we choose and whatever direction we take, our watchwords moving forward must be adaptable, flexible and scalable.

Larry Ellison on cloud computing

Today I watched a video of Larry Ellison's view on cloud computing...fantastic! It is both interesting and entertaining. So here it is for you to enjoy too.

Sybase 15.x and Ubuntu

I forgot to post this some time ago. I had been battling along with numerous others to get Sybase 15.0.x running on Ubuntu 8.40 and later. The main reason for this is that the GLibc support required for Sybase is not supported in the more recent Linux distributions. There are some workarounds and hacks to get there but the most stable solution is to use 7.10, which is not actively supported or RHEL 5. For me the 7.10 was not an option and to move away from Ubuntu was something I regretted whole heartedly.

Then solution came! Quite by accident I discovered Sybase had released 15.5.x, I downloaded the developer version and what do you know, perfect first time install on Ubuntu 8.4.

There may still be a few issues as I don't know whether Sybase 15.5.x is commercially supported on Ubuntu and I do know a number of commercial applications have not yet officially been test on Sybase 15.5.x.

But if you like me have a need to run Sybase on a recent version of Ubuntu, look no further. Sybase 15.5.x solved my problems.

If you know of or have heard of any official policy or statement regarding Sybase and Ubuntu I would love to know it.

Hedge funds face altered landscape

I read this article by Dan Hubscher in the Hedge Fund Review, about how hedge fund managers have had to adapt their business strategies. This has a direct impact on the level and sophistication requirements of their IT systems.

"If more plug and play technology were made available, especially on a hosted basis, more quant managers would turn to this method of technology, allowing them to concentrate on what they do best."

This sentence is what got me thinking. Technology over the past few years has got more moduler and these modules have got easier to integrate into a larger solutions. This has cause a feedback loop resulting in even more options at a faster rate driven by companies such as Google and Facebook, technologies around Open Source, Web 2.0 and Cloud Computing. There is a greater resurgance of innovation at present and smaller players have the ability to influence on a much larger scale.

The same is also true for Hedge Funds and their use of technology. What was previously considered too big, complex and expensive for smaller funds is now in easy reach.

read the full article

What is desktop virtualisation?

I listened to a very interesting and informative presentation from Fraser Kyne of Citrix systems. It was a relatively vendor neutral overview of desktop virtualisation technology and how it is evolving. You can get it here, http://bit.ly/c5COCT.

Like most things in technology you seldom if any find a solution that's one size fits all (except for Python!), the same is true here. It you are in the middle of or intend kicking off a virtualisation project, I would suggest you take a listen to this.