IT and finance blog

I was quite impressed by the spellchecking features of Konqueror - the KDE web browser. It highlights misspelled words as you type in web forms. Luckily, there is an extension for Firefox, which gives you similar functionality. SpellBound works for Windows and Linux builds of Firefox.

Abstract

Recently I had a discussion about hedge funds with a friend. We were mainly concerned with the question, why this type of investment was growing in popularity. The guy quoted from one of the latest letters by Warren Buffett, who said, that hedge funds provided little value for money. Since it took place in a pub on a Friday night, none was taking it really seriously. Non the less, the topic is quite interesting to me, since I used to work in a company, which developed software for hedge funds, and in general am quite keen to think about financial issues.

Here you will find articles, related to economics, business and finance

It looks like there is no Flash player ver. 8 for Linux. The only information, available on the Internet on this issue is a blog entry by some developer from Macromedia, who claimed in December last year that version 8.0 would be skipped and 8.5 released for all platforms. Nothing happened since then.

The problem with Flash 7 is that Google Analytics are not displayed properly with it - all t

I am quite disappointed with the knowledge demonstrated by wannabe C++ programmers today. Hardly anyone knows what #x and x##y preprocessor directives do, and only few can explain the danger in preprocessor macros with parameters. If the things keep going this way, in 5 years no one will know what extern "C" means.

For testing purposes a colleague of mine selected an LSE stock at random. The lucky winner was CRT.L - Chariot Plc, the new lottery runner, which failed miserably during the first public sale of its tickets. Having the luxury of Reuters feed on my workstation, I could easily check, that the new threat to Camelot started around 180 pence per share when they had their IPO in February, but today it

Working in financial sector in the UK definitely requires a strong liver, since visiting a pub is one of the most popular forms of socializing. It is made only worse by the fact, that quite often the drinks are sponsored by the company. When beer is free it is much harder to say no. And on the other hand you need to watch your tongue, since your boss might be sitting next to you and you don't w

Looks like Chicago Board Of Trade is starting to support Linux - today they were supposed to hold Linux Gateway Rollout Information Session, according to their mailing list.

Some of my articles are in Russian. There are two reasons basically. First, this is my mother tongue, and it's much easier for me to express myself in it. Second, I have been running a blog for years and wrote a few articles for it, so it seems like a waste not to publish them here. Eventually I hope to translate them into English (any volunteers? Your names will be mentioned with deepest exp

Installing my site on the hosting server was quite a pain, since a lot of features, especially special database permissions, were not available. However, with some googling and a lot of tweaking I made it to run.