First, the good news: I've made a new release of WinROTT. It was a difficult release, involving multiple files. I ported the actor and action table functions to cpp.

Second, the bad news: I've been morbidly watching the economic reports and the stock market. I'm wondering where all of this will end up. I am amazed at the number of so called investors that think they can all wait for the stock markets to react rationally and start going back up. I don't think it will work this way.

If 90% of investors are waiting gleefully for capitulation so that the market will go back up, then we have not reached capitulation. In fact we are not close to true capitulation in the real sense of the word. The market will not allow 90% of investors to be winners and 10% to be losers. Investors watching patiently don’t realize they are simply marking time until they too, reach a state of panic. In an expanding market, it's not a zero sum game; in a contracting market, it rapidly approaches a zero sum game. (I wish I had paid more attention to my one and only course in game theory so I could explain this a little better.)

If every investor is using the same playbook, executing the same strategy and expecting the textbook outcome, then the outcome will be different. I am not too sure of the math, but I am pretty sure that the greater the population adhering to actions that should cause a particular outcome, the less likely that outcome will be obtained. In a zero sum game, you are not likely to have an outcome where 90% of the players "win".

In this market, the only thing we know is that it is not like anything any of us have seen in our lives.

Thank goodness for the weekend. This was a long work week. No horse shows this weekend, but my wife's bell choir is playing at church, so it means an early rise this Sunday. My daughter's been busy with 4H and homework. I basically have avoided all work, watched football, worked on WinROTT and generally lead an unhealthy lifestyle of fatty foods and no exercise - felt good to goof off. I cheered Alabama's victory over Mississipi state. I cheered for Troy, but LSU came back.

I have some good news on the WinROTT port. It looks like I only have 18 .c files to complete. I'm looking forward to being able to get started on some C++ housekeeping chores after the port of all the component files are complete. The old C code interchanged pointers and integers in most parts of the code. There are a lot of places where an integer is used to hold a pointer to the screen buffer. When I ported rt_game.c, the conversion logic doesn't work correctly and the status bars appear garbled in some instances. I decided to hold off repairing the status bar code until all of the .C files are ported and I can get rid of all the extern "C" declarations. I made this decision due to a variable initialization problem I've run into when mixing blocks of variable declarations and initializations around extern "C" blocks. I'll try to post what I have tonight.

The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public's money.

- Alexis de Tocqueville

The only problem with this statement is, the American people seem not to care.

- Gene Harris

It's surprising how the undercurrents of politics work their way into the office. It's not on the surface, and most folks are not spending time talking about the elections or the candidates, but it is the elephant that no one talks about. It seems we care a lot more about getting along and getting our work done, rather than arguing politics. We pride ourselves on getting things done.

The other elephant in the office that we don't really talk about is the economy and the stock market. Most of us have been hurt by what is going on. It weighs on all of us. We are an R&D organization. We all know the ramifications of declining manufacturing and declining raw material prices as it relates to research and development.

It will be interesting to see how tomorrow's outcome will play out over the coming months and years. Some folks think hope and euphoria will take over. Most of us just want to hold on to what's in our wallets with a healthy dose of scepticism. I personally don't care anymore. I think we deserve the president we are going to get. I know I wouldn't want to be the next President. I also feel that Washington no longer represents me. It's all about money, power and getting re-elected - the people be damned.

This has been an interesting week. I've been working on the implementation of IDataReader and IEnumerable for a couple of classes in C#. The classes parse some complicated text files using regular expressions.

I've learned more about the .Net class that implements regex than I would care to know. (I am happy to have learned about the class.) I've also run into some minor cases where a regex I worked out in perl didn't work the same way in the Microsoft component. However, the MS component has many strong points that made implementing the parsing method simpler. This isn't a Microsoft bash, it's just there are some minor differences when it comes to handling /r/n sequences. (I was able to work around them without issue.) I can say that learning regular expressions is a requirement for programming. You can accomplish your parsing task without using regex, but you can't do it in six or seven lines of code. My advice is to obtain a regex editor and start learning.

More...

I was interested when I came across this article on a financial web site: Quick Hits: Scaling the Great Firewall of China

A little searching popped up the original web site: China Channel Firefox Add-on

I tried the add on, after thoroughly examining the file. I am astounded at what real censorship looks like. It reminds me why I don't trust my own government. Bureaucrats in China aren't a lot different from bureaucrats in the U.S.S.A. Neither one answers to the people.

Our satellite office finally has a VPN installed. Simple enough eh? Not if you are me:

1. Friday afternoon, before leaving office, copy VPN client software to flash drive. 
2. Place installation instructions in book satchel, leave flash drive plugged into office computer and drive home.
   
3. Saturday evening, sit down at home computer, remove installation instructions from book satchel.
4. Spend 30 minutes looking for flash drive before realizing it is back at the office.
5. Give up and enjoy rest of weekend.
6. Monday, place flash drive in satchel first thing in morning.
7. Hurry home and install software.
8. Software installation is successful.
9. Try to connect to office computer, but fail.
10. Realize that remote access is disabled on office computer.
11. Realize that I cannot connect to office computer with computer name, I need an ip address.
12. Mutter foul tasting words under breath.
13. Wonder if bringing work home on flash drive isn't easier.
14. Start new adventure on Tuesday to complete VPN software connection.