GB at DKIB put together an absolutely fantastic Excel interface for our analytics. A lot of the functionality is probably industry standard at this point, but the quality of GB’s tools was absolutely fantastic, and there were aesthetic touches that really made it a pleasure to use. One tool that I hadn’t seen before but have [...]
Archive for the 'Geekistry' Category
Statistics and basketball
28Mar09I hate how people are trying to apply statistics to basketball, like it’s some voodoo that could potentially unlock all sorts of answers and reduce the sport to a science. It’s a ridiculous, depressing and self-defeating (for sports fans, anyway) thing to do. The pompous proponents of this mentality are correct in arguing that there [...]
Dean Kamen on Innovators
13Jan09Something worth hanging on to for rainy days: Kamen … said every entrepreneurial innovator he’s ever seen shares a few characteristics. “It’s not that they’re brilliant or well-educated,” Kamen said. “They work all the time. They don’t let failure demoralize or destroy them. They pick themselves up and keep going and eventually, every once in a while, [...]
That heading describes a problem I hope you never have to tackle. We’ve got a full-fledged exotics trading system (call it XX) built in Excel with all sorts of fancy bells and whistles. For some reason that escapes me, XX has never been split into a thin front-end sheet backed by an XLA containing all [...]
Wow Day
03Aug08I have 3 Wows to give out today. WhyNot.net: I was Googling to see if anyone else was curious about using active noise-cancelling techniques for turning down the volume (in some sense) on babies. There are serious technical challenges (such as that current noise-cancelling devices target a point sink), but it’s a cool idea and even [...]
I’ve been working with Excel a lot these past few months. At least half my time these days is spent writing and running spreadsheets and interpreting the results I get from them. In many cases, I run a lengthy batch of calculations overnight and then have Excel produce a pivot table and save the results [...]
Avanoo — I don’t get it
09Jun07These guys wrote this, a thinly veiled dig at Guy Kawasaki. It’s a great read, and got me curious as to what exactly it was that they were doing. Their idea can be summarised as Epinions with filtering: people ask questions, which are answered by other people, and then the answers can be sorted and [...]
Sardines in a tin
27Mar07Dang, I wish I’d had my camera with me today. I was in Canary Wharf for the thousandth day in a row, for (hopefully) my final interview, and I saw the most interesting thing at the Canary Wharf Docklands Light Railway (DLR) station. Canary Wharf itself is situated east of London proper, and the DLR and [...]
My Desktop
18Feb07For those curious what Vista looks like on an older laptop, without Aero…
Vista!
15Feb07Seems I’ve permanently broken Ubuntu. I’m not sure quite what happened — I was switching my partitions around so that /home would be off on its own, and the next thing I knew, half my documents were gone and Kubuntu wasn’t booting (‘kdestartupconfig’ has troubles, apparently). Anyway, I salvaged my Windows installation and tried starting [...]
Damn. I was reaching for my Polo (‘the mint with a…’) just now, and my copy of Numerical Computations slipped off the desk and crashed to the floor. And that got me thinking… The program I’m doing right now at LSE, the MSc in Applicable Mathematics, is pretty good. There’s clearly lots of optimisation theory and [...]
Grr…ClickTale
22Jan07Argh, I’m getting sick of this. I came across ClickTale today, an Israeli startup that provides really detailed web analytics for websites. They offer webmasters the opportunity to track every click and keystroke a user makes on a webpage, and they even compile those sessions into videos that you can watch to see how the [...]
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