Last night Michaela and I went to a wonderful seminar on Hot Tips on Growing Boys. I thought it was a really good presentation. Ian was a really good presenter, his wife Mary was not as confident, but still very enthusiastic for the material. Luckily Ian was the major presenter. We are really looking forward to going to the Hot Tips on Raising Girls tonight.

The weirdest bit was how much he reminded my of my father, Michaela even mentioned it. Wired, because I could note many difference, but it was just a feel of similarity.

Anyway, I’d recommend it for anybody with a boy, and felt I learnt insights, and had plenty of “ah that’s why” moments. Common sense really, but good to hear it now and then.

About six months ago at my leaving ATR drinks me and Martin had a long talk. We talked about lots of things, but something I said was useful (not sure which bit) and he said it was just like Leo and the frog story from Lethal Weapon 4. So he asked me to which the movie so I could understand what he meant.

Well I watched it last night. Man it was more violent than I remember the earlier ones been. That or I just haven’t seen them for a long time. Anyway it got to the frog story, and I now get what you meant Martin.

I would point out that I think Leo knew what the value of his story, otherwise it wouldn’t of had the desired effect, and if he didn’t know the value, why would he have told that story. Where as I as just trying to offer my perspective, and used lots of stories, so I’m not sure of the useful one.

Well the other day I went to a Optionetics “workshop” partly because I’m interested in the option markets, but mainly because they advertised on the radio in the morning.  On MoreFM, which I listen too because they babble so much rubbish, that I feel compelled to get out of bed to end the pain.  So I was thinking, anybody that advertising in that time slot has to have money to burn, and when they are talking about “getting rich quick (or the likes)” you quickly workout who’s money they are spending.

Argg, I had a longer post in progress, but I just got bored of writing it all.  This crowd are not worth the time to write about them.

The summary is, they used lots of positive statements like “unlimited growth possibility”.  They brushed over the basics really quick (this bit was ~1 hour), at the end they gave us the price. $4400 NZD.

They then proceeded to discus their guarantee, which I’ve cut’n’pasted from the web site.

<scam>

No-Risk and No-Obligation Double Guarantee

At Optionetics, we know that you want peace of mind when it comes to investing your hard-earned dollars. After all, controlling risk is a vital part of Optionetics’ trade strategy. And guaranteeing your satisfaction is an essential part of our commitment to you.

We stand by our pledge to provide you with high-profit, limited-risk trade strategy education - we always have and always will. That’s why we offer all Optionetics Seminar attendees a 100% Money-Back Guarantee!

• This guarantee is designed to protect you.
• It puts you under no obligation.
• It offers you no risk whatsoever.

We call this the Optionetics “No-Risk and No-Obligation Double Guarantee.”

Here’s how it works:

1. The No-Hassles Refund Policy.

   If, by noon of the first day of your scheduled seminar, or within fourteen days from the date of enrollment, whichever is first, you don’t see how easy it will be to make money, return our seminar course materials in resellable condition to one of our representatives at your scheduled seminar between the hours of 9:30 a.m. and 12:00 noon and you’ll receive every penny of your money back.

2. The 300% Performance Guarantee

   If you can’t make a 300% return on your tuition investment, you have a choice of receiving either a 100% refund of your tuition, or personal training for up to a year until you have the powerful trading campaign in your pocket. It’s your choice!
   To qualify for the 300% Performance Guarantee, simply open and close 36 Optionetics limited risk options trades within six months and send us your six-month broker statements within seven months of your date of purchase.
   If you have any further questions about these guarantees, please speak to one of our education counselors.
   The Optionetics “No-Risk and No-Obligation Double Guarantee” represents the full, exclusive and exhaustive extent of any and all guarantees to the student. Refunds under either guarantee are payable within 30 days from the date of authorization, return of materials and receipt by Optionetics of a written request for refund prior to the expiration of the guarantee period.

</scam>

So I’m glad to say the old guy next to me wasn’t interested, and nether was I.  But there where a few, the I feel bad for not dragging them out of there by the hand.

The other day I while reading Wikipedia I came across Warren E. Buffett’s entry. Somewhere I came across the link to the 2003 Annual Report for Berkshire Hathaway, so I started reading it, and ended up printing off the first 24 pages so I could finish the chairman’s letter later.

Well I’ve now finished it. I think that if more companies where run by Buffett’s then the world would be a better place. He has some real strong criticism about how things are done, ranging from Tax, to CEO pay levels. I really enjoyed reading it, and some time in the near future I’ll download the reset of the Annual Reports for rainy day reading.

Well I watch this movie/documentary this evening. In relationship to the Parable of the broken window Bush is the boy who break windows, and his friend make windows. While it would appear that most the cost will be bore by foreign citizens there definitely is cost to the people of America.

Well I’m spent some time today reading the Finanical Mathematics section of Wikipedia. This was inspired after going to the Optionetics® workshop last night (but I’ll blog about that later). So I’ve been reading a lot of option background guff, when I came across the Parable of the broken window which is a wonderful story, and it has a section showing how this applies to war and tariffs.

Well while I enjoyed my fathers day sleep-in this morning, I worked through why the example Sieve of Eratosthenes works. When for example the outer loop is at 4, you can start at 16 (4*4) due to the 2, 3 times of 4 been taken care of when the outer loop was 2 and 3. So now I’m feeling a bit silly for not seeing it at the time. But at least I can now use it, with confidence.

I also walked through how to solve the first part of the 550 point problem. Now I going to sit down and work through the string building part.

Chris from the .Net user group mailing list often post on his blog political posts. Fair enough that’s the beauty of the web, and he even qualifies it nicely, his blog’s at “syringe.net.nz” with the tag line “Irregular injection of opinion”. So in his posts he takes what I think is a pretty hard line against the welfare system. The problem, which is mime, is I just feel so baited by his words. He’s posted some flame bait and some good points.

Anyway, he posted his power point slide from his TechEd talk, and low and behold its on smart clients, and the Composite UI Application Block. So I’m watching the slides with no voice over, wishing I could have attended the original talk. Then it occurred to me that if I had been at TechEd there would have been a high chance that I wouldn’t have attended a talk from Chris because I felt so out of touch with his apparent political stance. This is really the most silly of things.

So I started thinking how Chris could have such a strongly angled view of the welfare system (related to family/child support). I must agree there are problems, but I get the feeling he thinks it should all be scraped, so that he get more of his dollar back. But what occurred to me today when I realised that I had an issue with Chris, was maybe he’s just not experienced some things that I have, maybe he sees things as a cost to him, verse him helping other because he’s lucky. I’m not trying to saying he is where he is at due to luck and not due to a lot of hard work, but more of a maybe he hasn’t been delt some really bad hands.

More on this the angle of experiences and bad luck, a friend of mine came over from the UK to work ~3 years ago. In that time he has flown back three times due to his father getting sick and then dying and recently his mother been sick and staying until she passed away. All’n’all I think he’s been over in the UK for almost 5 months not working, and watching his family die. I’ve not experience of this. But it really makes me appreciate my parents. It’s one of the experiences you’ve had or you haven’t. Having talking over our lives with this friend I can’t help think this guy’s been hit with the bad luck stick.

So back to political things. I think a large part of the difference of opinion is also experiences. I’ve been in situations (child, and young adult) where the welfare system has been a heaven send. When my wife and I where younger and I wasn’t earning as well as I am now, we where entailed to support for our children’s preschool fees and the likes, my point is for most services we volunteered to stop receiving government support before we were required, due the hoops and constraints it put on you. But I’m thankful they where there. I thank those that helped me (via tax). So now I’m paying more taxes, I don’t see it as buying my neighbour an Xbox for there kids. Hell I’d like an Xbox first. But I’m saving my money so I’ll be better off later. And that’s maybe an area I dislike about the welfare system is that I’m paying for others to smoke, drink, gamble. Sure I buy ~2 lotto’s a year and drink some wine, but it’s not the weekly norm.

So in some sense people are just thinking of them selves. And that’s where I tie this altogether, the overwhelming feeling I original got from Chris was his sense of self. And that’s what the political parties are playing to. I’m still undecided as to which direction to chose. I’d be more interested in underlying polices than tax cuts, what are the sub points that are important to each party, what is not important. Stop with the pandering to the masses with tax.

So I apologise to Chris for been offended by his political stance, it is after all just opinion.

Kevin (one of our senior developers) has returned from TechEd. The first demo he did was showing how ClickOnce works. He spent the afternoon getting our current .Net 1.1 application running in .Net 2.0 Beta 2, then configured ClickOnce and showed it working. It just worked. I love the client based roll-back support and forced upgrades features. So while I was thinking this is great, I was also thinking its about time. This is what people need to smite the ASP.Net everywhere mentality. Now deploying real apps via HTTP will be as easy as “configure and click” for the developer, and easier for customers to use.

The other topic Kevin was quite keen about was SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS). This should make life easier for us, or if not easier to do, allow us to step up to a new level of service (product stability and administratively) better than we are presently doing it. I’ve found this seven part series on SSIS (1 2 3 4 5 6 7) that I’m working my way through. Seems like a nice system.

Kevin’s got some other topics he wants to investigate to see if they will add real value to our development process. So I look forward to more reading and demo’s in the next few weeks.

Well yesterday I took 2 hours off work in the middle of the day to compete. The end result was a “why did I bother”.

The first problem was a really simple prime number search problem. You had to search a range of numbers, and for those numbers that were primes, modulo the prime with a given number. Return the lowest remainder with the highest frequency. Well I wrote the fancy Sieve of Eratosthenes and stuffed it up. Another coder in my room noticed my mistake and found an example case that it failed. At lest it took him three attempts to find it, so he got no gain of points from it.

After some investigation there appears to be a couple of ways of doing the inner loop in the sieve. (Using the same variable naming as in the linked example)

The most obvious is

for( int k = i*2; k <= n; k+= i )

and how the above example code does it, which is faster

for( int k = i*i; k <= n; k+=i )

Which computes from the square up, but when tested they give the same results (tested up to 100,000,000). But my mistake was the loop termination ended at k < n and I initlised the inner loop as int k = i; thus it looked like this.

for( int k = i; k < n; k+=i )

So now at Greig‘s recommendation I’ve written it up the correct way, and I’ll keep it handy for future competitions. Of note is that I wrote my incorrect code faster than
Mark‘s correct code, in a time of 11:21 vs. 14:44. But that’s not much of a victory.

The second problem was about binary trees and was worth 550 points. I really did not know how to solve it, and after reading the post match write-up I still do not understand it, so I’ll have to try the example code, and see how it works. So in the competition I tried implementing a permutations based solution (as this looked like what was happening) but I couldn’t get it to work in time. I even went and found a C++ example, but couldn’t get it to work ether.

To add insult to injury, I challenged another person’s 550 point solution in the challenge phase, and failed.

Final competition result, a score of -25. This put me in 298th equal out of 308 instead of 215th equal if I’d not challenged. So now I’m back in Division II with a ranking score of 1009.