Category Archives: Misc

Yahoo stock to RSS converter

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NO LONGER RUNNING!

Update June 2010: I haven’t used this for a while and as you probably have noticed it’s no longer working. It did it’s thing, while there was not such service, but now at least Google financial provides some of the same services. Anyway, the source is still here, if you want to run it…

Inspired by Xanadb’ RSS Stock Ticker (which in turn was inspired by the now defunct Yahoo Finance RSS), I decided to try to make my own. I wanted to add a few things, mainly the ability to calculate loss/win for each stock and a total loss/win for all stocks.

The data for the feed is gotten from finance.yahoo.com

and you need the stock symbols that they use to build up a URL string that you can feed to your RSS program. But here’s an example:

http://tc.dk/stock.php?symbols=msft:100:20+csco:200:20.9

This will give you two rss items with the current stock price of Microsoft (msft) and Cisco (csco). The total value of a 100 Microsoft stocks is calculated and the win/loss if you paid 20us$ for them is calculated. The same is done for 200 Cisco stocks brought at 20.90us$.
Here’s an example of how Thunderbird will show the data:
stock rss view
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Mike’s Madness

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I found these old (from around 1990) texts called Mike’s Madness. They are in my humble opinion some of the funnies things ever written. Crude and far from political correct, but lots of fun. If jokes about Australians, Italians, Germans, Star Trek, Apple Computersm, nazies, beer and about smoking to much pot is your thing, or you think that they may be, take a look a this.

Clarkes third law is Rubbish

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I’ve been thinking about Clarke’s third law – Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic -, lately and I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s wrong or at least badly worded. I propose this instead:

For any sufficiently high level of ignorance, technology will be indistinguishable from magic

(henceforth know at TC first law 😉

The thing is that Clarke viewed technology from the point of view of the educated man who takes an interest in technology (a.k.a. himself) and he kind of forgets that other kind of people exists, when he formulates his third law. But even so I think that it may be rubbish.

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When the counting is done

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Just want to congratulate our American brothers on their election. Not that I agree on your choice, but, hey, it’s not my country and it’s your choice.

But I’ve surfing around and reading here, and there and there seems to be general idea amongst the winners to blow their horn and claim that winning means, that they where right. And that the democrats where wrong. Sorry, fellows, but that’s not what it means. It means that a majority voted on your guy. It’s says nothing about being wrong or right, just something about popularity. What’s how democracy works. Right or wrong doesn’t enter the question.

You also have to look at the numbers and think really hard about them. Nearly half the country voted for the other guy! Bush W may have won, but nearly half the county put out a message saying “we want something else”. You can of course ignore them, but it makes for divided country and that’s never good.

Well, it’s good for the rest of the world, but if America wants to be strong, it should really try to unite. God knows, you got problems already …. Have you taken a look at your budget lately?

Back to work

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I’ve had the previous week off from work to enroll my kid, in a new kindergarten.
It went really well. He loves the people there and the fact that there’s a lot more space and light then in the old one. At the moment, there aren’t that many kid there (it’s a brand new institution), which could part of as the adult to kid ration is something like 1:1. He loves attention. Hopefully he will be able to keep up the good spirit, even as more kid arrive.
We had like 35 people over on Saturday for an open-house combined housewarming and birthday party (mine) this Saturday and that went really good as well. Toby loved a the attention and it was really nice to get to meet people that I haven’t seen for to long. We took the easy road and had Sushi and food brought from Hings, which does Sushi and really good Chinese food. A hundred pieces of Sushi looks rather impressive 🙂

Economic singularity

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I’ve been thinking a lot about the possibility of a economic singularity lately.

When we think about the acceleration if adaptation of new technologies and the price mechanics of it, there’s a clear trend.
Things get adapted into our everyday lives ever faster. It took at least a couple of decades before “everybody” had televisions. Nearly a decade before everybody had a CD-player. It took five years for the adaptation of DVD players. During the last couple of years everybody has gone on the net (which means that they have a computer).
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On how we read

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I found this interesting article on slashdot.org.

The crux of it is that people does not read by word shape, but by parallel character recognition which leads to recognition of the entire word. It’s not an easy read, but quite interesting.

It’s strange how memes like this can persist – apparently this has been know among reading psychologists for twenty years, but most people still think that we read by recognizing word shapes.

Moving

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I’ve had the week off from work, so that we could work on our new apartment (110m2, at Vesterbro, Copenhagen). It has been so hard, cleaning, painting and moving stuff there, but the new apartment is starting to look great.

The new apartment is only two years old, but the people that lived there where pigs. The “oiled ash” flooring wasn’t kept properly and it needs a really deep clearing. We started on that today, but didn’t finish. Other than that we are nearly there and just need to move.

We’ll going to the summerhouse tomorrow to spend the week-end. I’m really praying for at bit of fair weather. This is probably going to be the only “away from home” time we’ll get this summer.