US Fed blinks

For all the spin that the US Federal Reserve Bank (the Fed) Governor Dr. Bernanke was different to Mr Greenspan, when push comes to shove they both blinked.

Providing liquidity for banks borrowing from the Fed was not enough apparently to stave off further spikes in overnight/fed funds/interest rate which banks would lend money to each other and borrow from the Federal Reserve. For a reasonable explanation of the process read this article
from the weekend Sydney Morning Herald.
Unfortunately the missing or unstated part of this process of short term lending is the fact that the Fed and the Australian Reserve Bank assets keep ballooning over time.
When any central bank comes out with a interest rate statement, they need to defend that interest rate by injecting credit into the system or withdrawing from the system, depending on the supply or demand for that credit.

The other fun part of this week was the only slight mention of the slight unwinding of the Yen carry trade. Basically the Japanese Central bank has been throwing credit at anyone who wants it and Japanese investors have looked for overseas yielding assets in preference for holding Japanese assets yielding 0.25%-0.50%.
If you are a bank you would be stupid to source your credit from anywhere but Japan. Say you borrow $1 Billion USD equivalent from a Japanese Bank, you can turn around and buy USD denominated assets or even better NZ and AUS denominated assets. Pay interest on %0.5 and collect interest on %6.5-8.5%. So earn a tidy 6-8% p.a. on the borrowed money.

So why does US non-performing high risk loans cause the carry trade to get hammered. Potentially the purchasers of these CDO was mostly the yen carry trade money!
Why, the potential to make a little more margin on the yield pay! Making an extra $10 million for every extra 1% yield per $1 billion borrowed.

Now if this is correct you should see the USD appreciate against the YEN as investors borrow in Yen, sell the Yen and buy USD to buy US dollar assets. Similarly for AUD and NZD assets. The longer term trend reflecting where the investors doing the carry trade believe the highest yield margins exists.

A little interesting thing to come out of this was the media and interviewed analysts saying their was a "flight to quality" meaning a flight to government bonds. If the investors saw this as a longer term issue, they would be buying bonds across the board.
Not so. Look at this table, the short-term bond yields have dropped (as investors demand them and therefore increase the price) more than 70 basis points (0.7%) in a week. So the stampede is/was into short term bonds... wait until the Fed blinks and cut rates like every other time, and let the credit binge continue as before, now the early bond investors can sell their bonds and pocket the tidy 110 Basis point profit, and jump back into the sold down high yield assets.
It will be interesting to see how short term bonds go now. I would expect selling pressure to be intense.

Given nothing has changed in AUS and NZ. There will be money chasing yield again, possibly flowing out of US as they just cut the margin on the yield play from 0.5%.
Tomorrow will be a big up day for both NZ and AUD (and their respective bonds and markets).

Last thing, the CDOs have let bank and non-bank lenders to get loans off their books, by bundling the loans as yielding assets. So plenty of hedge and other fund managers have bought these "assets", possibly in the hedge funds case using borrowed money (from banks). So whilst the banks no longer have the risk of default from the borrowers eg. mortgage borrowers, the larger banks now have the risk of default from the hedge funds.

The idea that there is excessive savings (something the Fed governor wrote about some time ago) is spin at best, a plain lie at worst. It is not excessive savings, it is hot money in the form of credit sloshing around global markets looking not for alpha or beta but whatever asset can yield the most margin.

Not one politician in Australia mentioned that the 11.3% drop in a little over a week was good for Australian exporters, but then really, only people fixated on exports and trade deficits (bad of course) worry about a $AUD 12 Billion annual trade deficit when the GDP is $AUD 922 Billion! That 12 billion is 1.3% of the total GDP. Big woot!
If you use the 2004-2005 Company tax statistics, Australia has a AUD 1.4 to 1.6 Trillion (1000 Billion) economy backed by $AUD 4.4 Trillion in Assets!!
That AUD 12 Billion becomes 0.075% of that sized economy.

What the media and lobby groups play/prey on is that 12 Billion dollars is an extremely large
amount of money for 99% of the population, forgetting the fact that even AUD 1.6 trillion split evenly over the 707,455 companies who were taxed that is only AUD 2.2 million per company.
Of course nothing human is an even split or even a Gaussian bell curve, it is power law curves everywhere.

For all the press about capacity constraints, this has only come about as external demands for products from Australia has caused an capacity used within Australia to be bid away to external uses rather than internal uses.

Have Fun

Paul

Consumption fallacy

Not much technical stuff here, just my opinion, searchable, indexable, and hopefully readable until the sun burns out.

I don't know how many times I have read articles which maintain the fallacy that

1. The consumer and consumption are the largest part of any modern economy.
2. That most people in a developed society/economy exist to consume.
3. Without continued consumption the economy is going to crash and burn.
   

The whole idea forgets the fundamental fact that both parties have to produce something that can be exchanged!

Rather than using goods or barter, in modern economies that requires the use of money, which is the means of exchange i.e. two parties, one labeled the consumer are exchanging goods or services.
Read that again. Two parties are exchanging goods or services in any transaction.

Without the use of force, all transactions or trades (exchanges) are normally mutually beneficial to both parties, and vice versa, the exchange would NOT occur if this was not true.

So production always proceeds consumption. I provide DBA services, and receive money which I use to consume pizza. Money acts the tool to save me bartering fractional DBA services to the pizza man. Similarly money acts as a tool for the pizza man when he uses it buying salami.

Look at it from a different perspective.

Would you rather be the person who produces and sells 10 widgets for $1 each versus the person who produces and sells 10 million widgets for $1 each.
Who has the better purchasing power?
Who has the better consuming power?
Who is the most productive?
Green alternative answer: Who is the most corporately responsible, ethical and carbon neutral?

The only way a party can consume without producing is to

1. Use counterfeit money.
2. Broadly... live dependent on others. That includes the Government. Taxes are one form of an exchange using force i.e. pay tax or go to jail.

This is also the reason why economies which are awful are mostly due to those two point.
Wondering why dictatorships, socialist and communist societies suck? here's why
Welcome to lowest common denominator, why produce more or better when the products of your effort and skill are distributed without your consultation.

Before I don the flame retardant suit made from 100% asbestos, not being able to produce is a valid reason to be dependent on others. The easiest example of that is children.

So why have children? what service do children provide?

I can think of a couple of reasons:

1. Old age care, you are looking after them now and they will look after you then. This is in the face of the fact of government pensions and old age care. But again it takes more than 80 years to change deep ingrained cultural heritage.
   
2. You get to go to the toy shop and buy whatever toy you like!
3. Play lego again.
4. Experience the joys and sorrow of parenthood, so you can bore your children in your old age with their childhood memories (see point 1).
   

This is why there is (was) a stigma attached to being on welfare. If you are capable of producing anything, that is better than nothing. Anything is better than nothing.

Have Fun

Paul

What I am up to

I have started a bunch of topic specific blogs on two main subject areas.

Installing database software on Amazon EC2 at dbadojo.com
and
Virtual Machine Datamines at vmdatamine.com

The funny thing was I had owned the domains for both for a while and noticed that I could use blogger as the host, whilst have the domain something which didn't include a free blogger site, which apparently is bad form in the blogging world (and analytic world).

Google Analytics is on them all, and unlike this poor old blog with it many pearls of wisdom, insightful comments, they were an immediate hit. Who cares about economics and climate change skeptics eh?

Other news:
Pythian Australia has grown to two DBAs and we now also have two Australian based clients.

Onto the real meat of this blog: My opinion

I saw some interesting comments from NSW Minister Costa on climate change, by God I agree with the man!

Yes, I am a heretic, global warming is caused by the sun.
Solar activity is way up and other planets polar icecaps are melting and some want us to think that our technology and lifestyle is causing this problem.
Scare tactics are not fun, especially when you gain to profit from them, not only in dollars but other benefits like fame (Australian of the Year) and the old rumor of a run by Al Gore for the most powerful man on the planet (US president).
My rejection by the way doesn't stop me disliking pollution and land degradation. That is a different issue. It is mainly based on a rejecting pseudo science, cherry picking climates periods and rubbery analysis (pick the data to fit the theory), an Assault on Reason in all regards.

Al Gore's book is a perfect example of hijacking words and presenting ideas which in fact Defy Reason, spit in the face of Reason, trample reason into the ground as the herd of scientific consensus replaces scientific experiment. Perfect Orwellian.
Even time I think of the scare campaigners I think of the witches of MacBeth standing over their cauldron. Promising Macbeth the throne, not revealing the evil which is required to get there.
So we will have our romantic promised land, our garden of eden, and mother "Gaia" earth will be free (of humans and their dread technology of course).

Have a read of this article from a fellow skeptic at CoyoteBlog

Have Fun

Paul

Continuous improvement

Toyota are famous for continuous improvement and lean manufacturing. The process never ending. Thanks to Spooky action for the link.

Writing a short blog about this article is useful in a couple of ways

1. It means I have this link saved on an external server. So when I reread this stuff in the future I can go and reread that article, revisit the sites which are linked.
2. Reinforces the article just read, writing (or typing in this case) and expresses some part of my opinion or view or take on the subject.

When I read about the bloke who goes home and looks at his home and domestic chores differently I am like that, and I thought and can almost hear people's sharp intake of breath that you could seek to continuously improve not just your job but your own life. I know the words "How anal!"
Sad isn't it, that I feel some form of cultural bias exists against self improvement, even enjoying your job, let alone the drudgery of domestic chores like mowing the lawn, or knowing how long your morning routine takes to get you from bed to office.

I joked when I started work with Paul Vallee and his mates at Pythian that I would have paging reduced to a minimum, that a role which started out as a tough role for one person to handle would end up being a minor issue. Ironically in fact that the only issues which will remain will be the most serious emergencies or disasters. I should have taken a bet on that. I now have days where I do not receive a single page. This is bliss as there is nothing worse than a page to break your concentration and focus.

If you feel like skipping the article here are the 4 processes which the author identified within Toyota each feeding of each other

1. Making cars
2. Making cars better
3. Teaching everyone how to make cars better
4. Making the process of making cars, making cars better, and teaching how to make cars better, better.

Have Fun

Paul

10,000 hours to expertise or why senior DBAs normally have 6 years experience

Watching this video presentation by Malcolm Gladwell at New Yorker 2012 conference.

Interesting. As a contractor you normally work on a 220 day working year.

220 x 8 hours = 1760 hours per year.

If you use the 10,000 hours to expertise that is 5.68 years. This is interesting given that most jobs roles advertised as "Senior DBAs" want at least 5 more like 6 years.

Now I would argue that no DBA does studied DBA work for 8 hours, 220 days per year, unless you are working at places like Pythian, which provide more exposure to DBA work, should mean you are going to become an expert sooner.
The other way to get exposure to different work is to change jobs every couple of years. Normally when the job gets boring as you have been proactive and solved all the hard (and easy) problems.

I was listening to another version of this loosely based on the idea of compounding interest. Essentially if you spend some amount of extra time your area of focus compared to another in your field for example:

if you spend 1 hour extra per week per year, your calculation looks like this:
(220 x 8) + (52 x 1) = 1812 hours per year, reaching expertise in 5.5 years.

if you spend 2 hours extra per week per year, your calculation looks like this:
(220 x 8) + (52 x 2) = 1864 hours per year, reaching expertise in 5.3 years.

This might not seem like much, but as you become better at your focus, your training should remain challenging, pushing the envelope. So the expert level you are handling more complex problems and solutions quicker and more easily.

This raises some interesting questions,

1. Is the burnout, churn in senior DBAs leaving to become landscape designers related to the Alexander factor "no more worlds to conquer"?
2. Do some people realize what it takes to be an expert and jump between roles because they won't invest the time for whatever reason?
   
3. Once you reach the level of being an expert, in most occupations that means you are normally very well paid, in the top x% of salaries for the profession. Are you there yet?

The other interesting point made by Gladwell in his presentation was the underlining factor of stubbornness. Maybe stubbornness is a trait which we should interview for, in tandem with the ability to make jumps when we reach a dead end.

Are you stubborn?

Have Fun

Paul

p.s. this means that I have a long way to go as a writer, given my blog production is one article per month.

Australian postcode T-shirts

Here is a mate's website which sells T-shirts with Australian postcodes, equivalent to zipcodes in North America.

I had a chat to him on gtalk and told him he should extend it to include a image of google maps mashup.

Go and have a look http://shop.qpzm.com.au/

Have Fun

MySQL summary posts

I have Frank's blog on my RSS feed.

Here are a couple of posts discussing some recent presentations at the MySQL conference.

Google and MySQL
Innodb performance optimization

If you are looking for the MySQL conference presentation materials they can be found here

Unfortunately given the push for sparse presentations (in terms of words). Having the audio and
any screendumps/movies would help as well. There is nothing worse than listening to a podcast or audio from a presentation when the speaker is constantly referring to slides or something on the screen which you can't see.

But I guess you can't have everything, before you tell me I should have gone, I live 17 hours by plane away and my kids hate me leaving for any length of time as they wonder if I am ever coming back (remember the passing of time is different for young kids) .

I am still learning MySQL, probably faster as I come from a database background.
The mantra of recording what HAD happened rang true, sometimes being more important than what IS happening. Measuring everything and having a historical record to use to reconstruct is something clearly missing currently from MySQL and until recently SQLserver.

Have Fun

Paul

Earth hour < Green vote

Hat-tip to Institutional Economics blog for this link to a discussion about Earth hour and its insignificance.

Lets jump straight the conclusion the irrelevance of 2% in the normal variance is actually less than the Greens vote in the recent NSW state election.
The Greens got 8.15% for the legislative Council (equivalent to the senate), slightly less than the informal vote. The informal vote is actually a good indication of the number of people protest against having to vote, as it is compulsory to vote in Australian elections.

So does this means that people who vote for Green candidates actually are not really green at all?

Am I going to mine the data from the recent election, get a total primary vote for Green votes in Sydney?
no, I don't have to time and the data is not available in a nice format.
Here is the SQL I would run if I could...

select party,count(*)
from election_results_2007
where area = 'Sydney'
group by party order by 2;

Have Fun

Gapminder the founder speaks

Many thanks to my mate James for the link.

I wrote an article about this great tool gapminder a while ago and this video is of gapminder's founder of sorts. He is talking about how the publicly funded data from UN sources shows a different picture to the one which is normally portrayed through the media.

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/66

Like I mentioned recently I want all countries to have low mortality rates and high per capita, more minds freed of poverty and subsistence and allowed to think, create and build.

As a database geek the ability to see trends in action in the data is awesome. The eye is one of the most developed senses, static pictures and graphs are nice, movement is better.
Think, evolution made the human and most predator's eyes very good at seeing and tracking movement. Having the data displayed in this manner plays to those deep strengths.

I have to think more about how we can move past the current use of database performance snapshots, and more into real time or snapshots shown over time.

Can you imagine watching the execution time of a specific sql over time against the growth of data. You would see any potentially scaling issues literally blasting off like rockets from the other sql which scales proportionally.

Have Fun

Like it? want to comment? blog it.

Climate Change = Fear campaign

I am going to out myself, yes am I a heretic amongst my heretic leanings...

1. Who cares about a foreign trade deficit when the domestic economy is much much larger.
2. Who cares about foreign debt as it is about 10% of total domestic assets.
3. The claim that the Western economies are hollowed out of manufacturing, when it remains much larger than retail, second only to financial based companies.
4. Your job as a DBA is to make business tasks run as smoothly and efficiently as possible. Businesses will only care about block internals and x$ tables if it helps that process.
   

What is the latest outing? From the heading I am guessing you already know.

In NSW, Sydney, we have been bombarded by the need to follow the crowd, peer pressure etc etc and turn off your lights for one hour on Saturday 7.30pm. Not your fridge, heater, air-conditioners, laundry dryers, just your lights. Maybe they will take a satellite picture and send around the energy saver enforcers so that all conform to the new religion.

Here is a article to read about consensus.

I am frankly over the Fear and Doubt campaign being run to propel what was global cooling, then global warming, now climate change. I have no problem with the world warming up, my problem is the root cause.

My objections as a 15 second elevator pitch.

1. The sun is the biggest source of heat energy.
2. Water is the biggest greenhouse gas.
3. I reject that human related activity has any impact of the current increase in temperatures given the many such occurrences in the past.
   

Please read this post. We have a bunch of people who are believe (and most likely profit) in a delusion of a romantic utopia something along the lines of the garden of eden, but without mankind involved of course.
They push this massive guilt trip (like most other religions and cults) that humans have committed the original sin, in their utopia perspective, of being industrialized and technological rather than remaining in harmony with nature as a pure animal.

Now the underlining reason why I am passionate about technology and freedom to think and develop new technologies.

Technology will set you free and make you live longer.
Less than 100 years ago before wide spread availability of antibiotics, I would have been dead at 2 years old, one of the countless infants who died before reaching the age of 6. I asked my colleagues at a past workplace and 4 out of 5 would also have been dead.
I live because of human technological progress. As a parent now I can't imagine the extreme grief at losing any of your children to random colds or flus. You have got to be joking if I want to regulate and reduce living standards to conform to some deluded Utopian version.

A local TV channel run a hour long program about climate change. As soon as I saw the fake headlines I knew that was going to crap. 8 metre storm surges on the Gold Coast, ho hum. As I do on occasion I interacted with the TV and told it/them that sentence completely crap and switched channels.

Such fate d'compli, do your best old chap to reduce emissions and we might save the planet. (Yes I happened to see that last 10 secs of the show).
Nevermind that is the sun which is causing most of the warming due to increased solar activity and CO2 is not a major greenhouse gas (water and methane are). I even saw some experts actually talking about having to limit population growth again.
Who makes the decision who lives or dies or has children, you or I or some faceless person in the Department of Family Services and Planning?
Anyone bothered to read about about the demographic nightmare which is going to happen to China because of their one child policy.

The method being used by the people who are benefiting both material and otherwise is the classic crowd control/conformity. The scare tactic, with of course the guilty or scapegoat.
Look at big business, look how long and crooked their noses are, behind closed doors they secretly plot to rule over all that is good and just in the world.
Look at the inequality of the world. Why should anyone live better than the lowest common denominator.
We have a solution, we have a romantic vision of a green paradise, a garden of eden utopia where humans are no higher than other beast, we are all animals. Rid to world of business, technology, (and humans) and let Gaiga rule again.

Now a better show was WestWing, damn I can't believe I never watched this show until now.

Have Fun, live long.

BTW, if you want to comment, blog this post and link to it.

China and India are going to rule the world

I can see them now, the smoke filled room, the world map, the evil laughter bwahahahaha.
China: India, you can have services and we will take manufacturing, we will teach these barbarians their rightful place. We will bring back the glorious days of the Ming dynasty or the Raj in India. Same old romantic garbage.

Nope. Welcome to the whirlwind. The forces unleashed mean there is no going back.

I wrote the following on a comment to a blog article about IT outsourcing and the hollowing out of Australia's capital structure.

Most reserve banks have been very easy in providing liquidity. That has distorted the structure in both Western and Eastern economies. All countries do engage in currency devaluation. The reason being that running a trade deficit is seen as a sin. Everyone wants to be a net exporter which is crazy. It is the pie is only so big fallacy.

I am looking at some 2003-2004 company tax stats, total income was $1.5 trillion. It makes the trade deficit of a couple of billion seem 1000 times smaller and a storm in a tea cup.
http://www.ato.gov.au/content/downloads/70906_2004COM4A.pdf

As for capital goods (a depreciating asset) purchased, it has gone from $35 billion in 1995 to $59 billion in 2004.
http://www.ato.gov.au/content/downloads/70906_2004COM7.pdf
Of course this is not the same rate as China or India but it shows an increase not a decrease.

The picture formed from the article is that China and India will move up the value chain taking all manufacturing and services, growing their capital structure and increasing productivity (capital replacing labour). I want that to happen. I want Chinese and Indians developing new products and services, increasing production and making things better, cheaper, more available.

Again I stress that idea that the pie is only so big is flawed, it leads to people fighting over resources.
Oil is in fact a classic example. Before there was a good use for it, oil seeping on land reduced it value!

All China/India (and Africa) have had traditionally was their labour to sell. Past governments have not be kind to capital accumulation, so real wages are low.

The figures from both tax stats (ATO) and real numbers from trade (ABS) suggest that there is no hollowing out, industries which were subsidized and have a high labour input are gone. Capital good imports in Australia have been strong.

Does IT have a high labour input, yes and no. Bits which IT which do will go offshore as long as it makes sense. I know already some parts of India, office space per metre is more expensive than Sydney and Melbourne. Salaries are rapidly catching up and the idea of a huge resource of skilled capable labour is not true. If you don't care about IT and see it as a cost it will be outsourced.
If you see it as an enabler, a tool you will keep it in-house. You bring in experts to help you plug the gaps. Your core enabling technology does not leave the company.

The actual easiest thing that the government could do would be to scrap capital gains tax. It is a tax on investment and entrepeneurship.

Liberty World Series

I was watching a TV show about the Waffen SS and how the defeat of the axis left the survivors of that army with nothing. Indoctrinated into the beliefs of the Nazi war machine, left with nothing when defeated, realizing in fact that they were the baddies. I have also been reading the Constitution of Liberty by Hayek.

The fight for freedom.

Liberty the freedom from arbitrary coercion.

The prize fight of history
In the blue corner is liberty in the red corner arbitrary rule.

1788 - US vs British - in the form of Imperialist Monarch
1815 - Allies vs France - in the form of Imperialist Emperor
1914-18 - Allies vs Germany, Austrian Hungarian and Turkey. - in the form of Imperialist Kaiser
1939-45 - Allies vs Axis. - in the form of Dictatorship
1945-90 - NATO et al vs Soviet Bloc - in the form of Dictatorship
1970-? - West et al vs Islamic Jihadist - in the form of theocracy dictatorship.
1970-? - Man vs Greens - Destruction of modern society, the removal of human environmental impact.

In between we have countries decimated by various forms of dictatorship taking the form of
1) People's dictatorship - reign of terror France
2) Communist dictatorship - Russia, China, Vietnam, Cambodia, North Korea

The underlining theme is the fight against coercion.

It is a fight against a romantic ideal in the form of
1) People's utopia
2) Good and Just Kingdom utopia
3) Imperial Rome utopia
4) Some distant legend time utopia
5) Man as beast utopia
6) Garden of Eden Utopia
7) Heaven Utopia.

Do you get the drift. The aggressor is always looking at the past or the perceived or mythical past. Sometimes quoting holy books as evidence.
The defender (liberty) is looking forward what can I do now with liberty.

Have Fun

Paul

Dangerous precedence Shareholders are not creditors

I am not sure this ruling on shareholders getting equal share with creditors will last long. The banks and any business will be lobbying hard for this to be legislated away.

Sorry shareholders are taking the most risk so get last piece of any cake after everyone else.

Look at the balance sheet of any company, where does the equity (which is where the shareholders are) come into the equation. This ruling means that equity is now some kind of liability!!!

Creditors are not just banks and other lenders, this includes any business which provides method of payment other than cash on delivery (COD).

The subjective rubbery nature of this requirement
""A person who buys shares in a company in reliance upon misleading or deceptive information from the company, or is misled as to the company's worth by its failure to make disclosures required by law, may have a claim for damages against the company which ranks equally with claims of other creditors," the court held."

Is this misleading?, our biggest creditor pulled the plug on us (to try and recover some money) and the company reports "We are in negotiation with creditors to refinance". This is exactly what Sons of Gwalia were trying to do. It is the exact reason why the creditors pulled the plug.
They had had enough and wanted to recover some portion of their money which they had loaned.

At what point does this become misleading?
Is the value of development properties deceptive?
Knowing that the company has one third of the cash required to pay current liabilities?

There are websites, books, magazines and newsletters dedicated to this stuff.

Bring on the nanny state... whoops you invest your all your life savings trying to pick the bottom in a stock like Sons of Gwalia and then to turn around and ask for your money back when the gamble doesn't pay off.
Does the bookmaker provide you are refund your bet when the favourite runs last?

Here is a good lesson, one which I have learned from as well.

When you read this in financial report (this from Sons of Gwalia 18th February 2004) and it specifically mentions something like this. It is time to ask why?

"Operating Cashflow:
During the half year ended 31 December 2003 the Company’s operating cashflow and its closing
reported cash balance were reduced by a sizeable decrease in its trade creditors balance."

Some trade creditor (Payables on the balance sheet) demanded their cash!

Have Fun

Paul

Various thought balloons #1

Not too many people visit this site, which is fine. It is an ongoing experiment in learning blogging, mucking around with ads etc.

You might have noticed the adsense ads are gone. I did a quick check on google and even the pages which used to be on google are gone now.
Seems I must be a spam blog or splog in Google's eyes. oh well. Does this look and feel like a splog?

I was struck over the weekend by the various blogs I read about databases. Sometimes I feel it is a pissing contest i.e. look how deeply we have delved into the internals... look at the complexity which we understand.
Reality is most people are looking for information, mostly to make their job easier or finding a distraction from their everyday life or wondering what is happening elsewhere.

Enough ranting.

There was a slight note in passing about Jim Gray on a blog I read, apparently he is missing after going sailing, I clicked the link and bingo. This is an awesome site. I have already more than 10 presentations and documents to read and some more websites to visit.

Go check it out. There was a recent debate about disk bandwidth, there is plenty of fuel on rekindle to fire from Jim Gray's website.

Have Fun

Paul

Just works right.

In my day job a reasonable percentage of my time I tend to have to check the same things, in some cases fix or monitor the same problem.
I have a need for automation and I spend time making scripts so I don't have to type, using dynamic sql is a good example. I dislike GUIs which force too much of the workflow onto you by not handling the general case well.

If you don't know the power of dynamic sql, it is sql which generates sql.

Example:

select 'alter session kill session '''||sid||','||serial#||''';'
from v$session
where username is not null and last_call_et > 3600;

Produces a list of SQL commands to kill all non-Oracle sessions who are idle for more than hour Note: Use sqlnet.expire_time=60 instead

alter session kill session '24,34567';
etc...

So my script library is a spawling bunch of sql and sh scripts, I find myself not remembering the syntax of the command (I know the table/view and command I need) but I just go and grep for the command or table and 9 times out of 10 I find a script I have already written.

If I combine several scripts into one, I now have a tool. Suddenly what took 2 mins to run and diagnose takes 10 secs, I am investigating the why sooner. No stuffing around getting the info I need.

When I am working I tend to listen to dance music, apparently the specific genre is vocal trance. As I have mentioned in the past I use Pandora as their range of music is superior to anything I have here. Other times I listen to podcasts, they just go in the background and I continue working, occasionally stopping and rewinding a bit (using the slider) to listen to a bit.

This podcast was good. I would recommend you too listen to it, a couple of times.

I love unix and the power of the pipe. Locate and grep can find files and contents faster than anything Windows XP can do.
I hate how PC Linux still exposes too much underlining hardware/software conflicts. The expectation is you will drop everything and debug the device driver or even better patch and recompile the kernel.
I am a techy I can handle it, noone else in my family, including my wife who is a techy as well can be bothered with it. I don't use linux now, I use cygwin which has all the unix I need.

The message from the podcast was really to ask what the user wants, what task is the user trying to achieve. Just make it work.

Have Fun

Great article about Enron and disclosure

I found this article on Enron and puzzles via econlog and whilst it is a long read it is extremely interesting.

Basically the information is in plain sight that Enron was in trouble.

Here is the student report that Malcolm Gladwell. A little bit of Google produced the pdf.

Perhaps a good rule of thumb is to always get the cashflow against profit and also profit against tax paid.

Whilst Malcolm mentions that Enron was unaffected by short-sellers, it was in the end. The short seller who spent hours checking 10Q and 10K filings could have ridden Enron into insolvency, keeping in the effect the whole amount which was short-sold.

Update:

I read the student report on Enron (ENE) and it reads like any other financial advice/analysis ie. slightly slippery, hedging bets, the short term recommendation was to sell. However the students remained convinced of Enron's strategy and remained neutral longer term.

They did in fact discover the possibility of earnings manipulation however chose to disregard it. In the reports word "no cause for concern".

Unfortunately any analysis now is tainted by hindsight. Enron was not some much a energy company more an "energy bank", where 88.9% of its revenue (but only 28.6%) of its income came from it financial arm. So like a bank it lived and died by the risk and cost of capital plus unlike a bank, there was no reserve bank to provide cash when the reserves are gone.

Have Fun

Paul