the corner office : tech blog

Brian Goetz: Stewardship: the Sobering Parts. Includes a bit about what's coming in Java 9. Value types, wahey!

Time to see what these lucrative trading regions were like. I set my controls for the heart of the Sinq Liaison region, so to speak, and encountered my first trade hub.

Years of on-and-off trading, but the first time I'd really noticed markets quite like this. Trade hub regional markets aren't your bog-standard buy-and-sell anywhere type affairs - instead there seem to be two separate markets going on in the order books - the trade hub venue itself, and then much wider spreads throughout the rest of the region.

All sorts of questions crop up. The main one, obviously, is can you make money? The traded volumes are huge but are they all in the hub, where the competition is likely to be much tighter, or is there scope to trade wider spreads in the rest of the region? What sorts of flows are there between the hub stations and other systems? Do haulers pick things up cheaply and transport them to the hub?

Next step is probably to start sampling the live order books, and see how things move. Order book queries, here we come.

As I mentioned, Eve Online now provides APIs for market data and a whole lot more. I thought I might whip up a little library and stick it on github. I started out with good intentions, getting my head around OAuth2 and getting simple queries going, and I thought I might have something useful to share.

Things soon descended into mad hackery, though. I wanted to cache queries, and played around with MapDB, which I really liked, feature-wise, but turned out to be too slow for any serious write rates (admittedly the queries I'm caching are rather huge). I've said nice things about H2 DB before, H2 now has a key store called MvStore which was a little faster for writes. But stlll slow.

Perhaps this code will still make it to github... but certainly not yet. In the meantime, I've gotten enough to drop some historical data into kdb, do a bit of low-grade faffing to figure out where the real trading money is, and realised the regions I've been hanging around in ain't all that. So once my current orders have run down, it'll be time to move on.

Over the Christmas break I was a little bored, and along came the This is Eve (Uncensored) trailer. Between the graphics and the rousing music and expletive-ridden yee-haws I thought 'hey, why not?' and signed up again.

It didn't take long before I got back to my trading ways. Things have changed - the last time I played I went for about a year being able to fund the monthly subs fee from in-game trading profits. Plex is a lot more expensive now, and profits a little scarcer.

The world has changed in other ways too. No more cache scraping for market data, all available through REST calls. Very nifty. Needless to say I'm spending more time hacking away on an API client and data shuffling than I am playing the game.

More to follow.

I rebuilt my VPS (it was long overdue). Not without pain - what should've been "I can't log in to my rebuilt server, could you please give me login details for a new build, or reset the password?" turned into an increasingly surreal support ticket ping-pong over 2 hours, at the end of which the sysadmin just reset my password.

I've been using my current provider for years, with no gripes, but while waiting for support ticket responses, I had nothing better to do so thought I'd check out the competition. Looks like I can get pretty decent, cheap hosting in the UK for less than I'm paying now. The only question is whether the hassle of setting everything up again would be worth it.

Speaking of which, my whole blogging set-up has gotten long in the tooth, too. I started writing this blogging app jeez, nearly a decade ago, when I was just getting started as a Java developer and wanted something I could point prospective employers to. It uses a DB back-end and JSPs and tags and whatnot and the admin part is a Struts-based beast whose config files no longer make sense to me.

And all of that is a real pain to set up and install and re-install and back up. And despite having about a million pet projects I'd rather be working on, I'm tempted to just rip the entire thing up, drop all the content into a simple bunch of text files which get turned into static html, and rsync that up to my server.

Or, of course, I could leave things ticking over for a few more years... the alternative hosting providers aren't *that* much cheaper...

Normally not the right way of doing things, but I have a small project where I want a provided library to live in source control with the project.

• StackOverflow: Maven: add a dependency to a jar by relative path

• A Maven-friendly Pattern for Storing Dependencies in Version Control (for multi-module where you want the jar available without repeating yourself)

One gotcha - I initially called my 'local' repo 'local', which Maven didn't like, with a gentle warning lost in the reams of maveny grumbling.

Update: after all of that, still no joy, since provided jar had classes in default package, and you can only use classes in the default package if your own code is in the default package too. Ah well.

Rüdiger Möller: the Internet is running in debug mode:

What most developers are not aware of, is how expensive encoding and decoding of textual messages really is compared to a well defined binary protocol.

It's a long story but the short version is that at some point whilst on night shift with Youngest, I started looking at online courses. There's plenty of online edumacation kicking about - MIT OpenCourseWare in particular is great, but in the new world of MOOCs it's no longer just a zillion hours of filmed lectures and pdfs on the side.

The three big guns are Udacity, Coursera and EdX. Thye're all pretty good in their own ways, though Coursera currently wins for having an Android app that lets you download lecture videos - ideal for the train commute.

More to come.

John Ratcliff: Everyone deserves a good origin story.

SBE (via)