Michael J. Dillon

This is a test to see if my new setup is working.

When I started this blog, all of a few weeks ago, I thought I would follow my progression through some of the CS stuff I’m doing on the side. But that’s even more boring than what I type about when I’m just filling space. So, I think, from here in, I’ll just talk about whatever I’m reading. And not topics like the fact that I keep databases on various pieces of data that I pull off the internet, which may or may not go into a future project of mine.

As to my reading, its quite disjointed; I’m usually reading several things at once. Take right now, I’m in the middle of The Prince (up to ch 23), Security Analysis (up to ch 3), and a book on the history of cod (Ch 4).

I’m usually reading about three things at once, it keeps my sanity, as I actually read quite a bit of very dry stuff that is wildly interesting in small doses. Everything I read tends to fall into three very broad categories, financial history, the political development of the United States, and occasionally a novel. Right now everything on my plate is finance, including the cod book. (Cod was one of the first internationally traded agricultural commodities.) Though whatever I finish next will get replaced with the memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant.

Unless I change my mind…

Lets see if I can come up with an interesting post on any of the last few books I’ve read. It might be a way to keep this interesting. (At least to me.)

A few weeks back, my aunt wrote, published, and began selling her own book on Lost Mind Games. It’s a puzzle book, not a longwided description of the TV show itself. Actually it’s pretty good. (I’m not kidding, go buy it.)

The very idea that someone can do that all without a publishing house, then directly go to the public is a pretty neat thing. Probably book worthy, in and of itself, but I digress…

Anyway, it came time to write my review for amazon.com, and the following is what came forth:

A great way to pass the time,

March 25, 2008

By Alexander Hartdegen - See all my reviews

In a fortuitous coincidence, when the great powers of the world decided to embrace madness over reason, war over peace, and to send their great weapons against one another, I found myself deep underground in an almost completed government research facility.

I was only supposed to be there to make a delivery of equipment, but once I felt the ground began to shake as the great disaster unfolded on the surface, I knew I would find myself alone in that cavernous tomb for quite some time to come. The lab wasn’t supposed to fully staffed for at least three more months and the first crews weren’t going to report the until the next week. I was just the delivery guy.

As the days turned into weeks, and the weeks into years, I began to explore my surroundings. I found a vast array of scientific equipment, banks of computers, and volumes upon volumes on every scientific theory from electromagnetism to astrophysics.

Also, in a different room I stumbled upon a well worn and dog eared copy of this volume, LOST Mind Games. I used the quizzes and games to keep my sanity as I spent the ensuing decades studying and learning all that was written in the other tomes.

I began with math, and then to physics, and from there into relativity. It was at this point that I was able to develop a solution to the Grand Unified Theory of Everything.

If you are reading this message, then I was successful in trying to send two messages back across the barriers of space and time. The first was to the leaders of the great nations of the word, telling them of what would happen should they continue down their warlike ways. The other was much further back, to the early twenty first century, a review of the wonderful book which kept my sanity through the many decades.

Thank you Anne Dawson. If you are seeing this, then your book may very well have saved the world.

Once upon a time, many moons ago (if you look at the header, January), I was trying to flirt with a girl who worked at pageaday.com doing email support.

At this point in the year, namely the first week, anyone who bought a page-a-day calendar who didn’t have the technical ability to operate a toaster ran into a wee bit of difficulty getting the online component of their calendar to work.

The problems were normally password resets, or very simple, very mundane issues. Hundreds and hundreds of the same boring problems.

So I decided to liven things up a bit.

Dear Page-A-Day,

   At the beginning of this week, I noticed that my Page-A-Day "365 Days of
Duct Tape 2007" calendar had run out of pages. Since I purchased this on
February 16th of 2007, I was only able to properly enjoy 318 days of
witty adhesive commentary.
   It is marked clearly on the outside packaging that I should expect a full
365 days of duct tape commentary. Who do I need to speak to in order to
access pageaday.com for 47 days in 2008 so that I may actually enjoy all
of the tips, tricks, and jokes to which I am entitled?
   I am a very reasonable man, and I am willing to accept the fact that I
waited 3 days to bring this sticky situation to your attention. I don’t
feel that these days need to be replaced, merely the entire situation
patched.

Thank You,
Mike Dillon

Now. I dutifully waited for this girl to send me a message noticing my attempt at humor. This was not to happen. Instead I received the following reply:

Please call Rachael @ 1-800-722-7202 in customer service.  Thank you.

Which would have been all well and good, however Rachel was the wrong girl.

Obviously I didn’t want to actually make that call, but I did have the deep desire to turn the insane in my reply all the way up to 11. There was only one way to answer:

Dear Rachel,

   Unfortunately, I enhanced my phone with a duct tape shell in mid April
of last year. The doctors say that if I am attached to the idea of growing
hair on the side of my head, I need to discontinue my use of it. I hope
you understand that I am unable to call you because of this.
   In a fortuitous coincidence, I recently discovered that my neighbor
purchased this year's calendar after bonding with some of my creations
over the last few months. He has promised to slip me the day-old pages as
the year unrolls.
   In my eyes, all is well. I hope you have a Happy New Year.

All the best,
Mike Dillon

I’ve been trying to toy with the QuantLib library for the last few weeks, but didn’t get a chance to do it seriously until very recently. I would put an object together, call a few functions, that kind of stuff. I never got quite to the point where anything worked enough to check the output of anything. I actually spent more time putting together a database of all the outstanding Treasury obligations than I did toying with the actual functionality of that library.

That’s largely because at each step along the way I ran into issues. Getting QuantLib set up meant that I needed to get the Boost library working properly. Getting the new version of Boost working properly meant that I actually had to understand what was going on in Cygwin. Cygwin being the UNIX-in-Windows-environment that I’m using as my development platform.

It’s like an onion. You want to do one little thing, and you spend three times as long just getting ready to start.

As for that database, I do know just how boring that sounds. But that was just a quantifiable set of data that I could use to test that my instillation of MySQL was working properly. You know, after I got MySQL server installed on my 5 year old laptop, figured out how to used the gui administration tools, defined a database, designed the table to put the data into and spent an hour on the TreasuryDirect site downloading the list of active securities.

The part I haven’t mentioned is that in order to access the MySQL data in my C++ programs, I need the MySQL C library built, and then need to get the MySQL++ wrapper library working on top of it. Which is does. Now. Finally.

So long story short, I’ve been a bit of a computer nerd in the last few weeks. At one point I thought this would take me a day, two at most. This was in early April. I really just finished last Friday.

Ah well. The data is here, my programming environment is ready, and I actually have the first example program working.

That’ll be my next post.

The basic idea here is to dust off my old CS skillset, and add a bit to it.

Now what does that mean?

Once upon a time, in elementary school, I discovered the BASIC language. Middle school it was C, x86 assembly and I began to poke around the wilds that are the internet. Highschool? C++/Java/VB/etc. at which point I entered college and become a Computer Science major.

Anyway, long story short, once I became gainfully employed at a financal firm, that all stopped. At work, when I was doing anything programatical, it was in Perl. Also, working in finance, my free time went away.

Now, almost three years later, I’ve missed the whole web 2.0 thing, just like I missed the dot-com bit back in the 90’s. The first time it was my due to my age, now its just my fault.

But beyond that, C++ has been my primary language for over a decade, but I’ve managed to miss the Rise Of The Boost Library. Heck, I can barely remember the STL anymore.

But even then? What about things I had never worked with before? Like doing anything with a database beyond quering data, playing with Ruby on Rails, or for that matter blogging.

This isn’t so much a single project, but as it is a collection of things I’m using to learn whatever it is that strikes my fancy.

Mike Dillon (Hi!), a twenty five year old middle office guy who spends his days, and well, some weeknights, working at an asset manager in New York City.

This blog is about what I do when I’m dorking around outside of work.