All this came about because this sector made loans to consumers without really checking on their ability to pay it back. Using that they leveraged themselves to extremely nonsensical levels. Of course, while real estate prices were rising, no one really defaulted or went into foreclosure. Those who couldn’t afford the mortgages simply sold their houses, banked the profit on equity and moved on, others banking on the rise of property values, used their homes as leverage and pulled out what little equity they had left. With these rising consumer debt levels and the over extending of banks by banks, the sector started booking massive profits, mostly paper profits, and started paying themselves huge bonuses. Once housing prices started to fall, this cycle went bust and the reality of the situation hit both consumer and banks. The consumer started defaulting and foreclosing while the banks took extensive measures to keep the losses away from their balance sheets and therefore from the investing public. They did so primarily by reporting most of it as level-3 assets, where the valuation is estimated by formulas that these entities create, anyone else notice a possible conflict of interest here?

Then came the bailouts, the brokering of the Bear Stearns sale, nationalizing Freddie and Fannie, etc. There is a very real difference between the bailout now vs. the bailouts during the S&L crisis. Back then the assets the government received after paying off depositors and shutting down insolvent institutions were by and large real assets like land or buildings. The shareholders and unsecured creditors were the ones who bore the brunt of the losses. In the current rescue the government is buying a lot of this level-3 assets at a so called substantial discount. Why so called, well because the real value of the assets are almost impossible to ascertain, so if the government (aka taxpayers) buy these at the currently trading value they are simply forcing the price discovery of the assets and not achieving much. If they buy it at a discount to the “original” value, lets say 50¢ on the dollar, then this becomes nothing but a large scale bailout and transfer of wealth to Wall Street². Since these instruments are so hard to value, no one really knows the extent to which the taxpayers will suffer, but one thing is certain, the people who benefit and make billions out of this, are the very people who caused this. You tell me, where is the parity that the free markets create in all this?

More on the destruction of free markets now. So this week the government intervened and stopped all short selling on 799 stocks, great, this coming on the heels of two 350+ point drops in the DJ Index.

Question: Why do they want to protect just 799 companies? Why not just ban short selling for the entire market?
Answer: Cronyism.

It’s as though they are blaming short sellers for the destruction and bailout of the financial sectors. If you look closely and as evidenced above, the short sellers have been correct about the underlying fundamentals of the sector. Banning them is not the answer. They play an important role in price discovery and make the markets more efficient. More importantly they provide the markets with a lot of liquidity. I don’t mean to exonerate all the short sellers here, there are obvious abuses by some of them, but even the longs have their share of abusers. Naked shorts without any kind of enforcement are a dumb idea, you are just inviting trouble.

There is also some irony in all this that makes this such a farce. The large entities that I talked about earlier, have been short selling as a part of their trading strategies, which has made them billions of dollars. Earlier when companies complained that short selling was ruining them, these entities just chalked it up as free market principles in play. Their attitude changes dramatically when they find themselves faced with the same situation, they work the phones and have their buddies bail them out. The SEC is now doing exactly what it claims to be against, manipulating markets and propping up failing companies. Why, because, suddenly since the taxpayer is now the bearer of all this “dead money”, it’s now politically important³.

What’s next? Another round of stimulus checks⁴? Right, because the taxpayers are not in enough debt already.

I’ll leave you with a humorous take on all this.

1 - Source: 24/7 Wall Street
2 - Source: Zacks.com
3 - Source: CBS Marketwatch
4 - Source: Trader Mark

So what exactly does the LHC do? It’s designed to accelerate sub-atomic particles, protons specifically, to near light speeds. At those speeds, the energy that such particles possess is in the order of several trillion electron volts. According to CERN the LHC is capable of making the protons do 11,000 laps around the track every second. I did some math and that works out to about 297×10⁶m/s, the speed of light is 299.792458×10⁶m/s, pretty darn close. It does so using more than 1000 cylindrical magnets arranged end-to-end around the tunnel. These magnets then steer the beam of protons around the circumference. The idea then is to have two beams of protons steered in opposite directions and have them collide in the vicinity of one of the six massive detectors placed around the track. These detectors are very different and each has it’s own specialty. The six are:

• ATLAS - The first of two general purpose detectors. It detects signs of new physics phenomena like origins of mass and extra dimensions.
• CMS - The second of two general purpose detectors, it hunts for the Higgs boson (more about this later) and for clues to the nature of dark matter.
• ALICE - It’s forte is a “liquid” form of matter called quark-gluon plasma. This type of matter existed shortly after the Big Bang.
• LHCb - It detects and tries to find out what happens to anti-matter during such high energy collisions.
• TOTEM - It measures total cross section, elastic scattering and diffractive processes.
• LHCf - It’s a special purpose detector for cosmic ray physics, to study particles generated in the forward regions of collisions.

All this acceleration and detection will, according to the scientists running the experiment, recreate within the LHC, the moments shortly following the Big Bang. This gives particle physicists a close look at certain particles and phenomena that existed only during that time frame. Some of them hope to materialize a hypothetical particle called the Higgs boson, the so called “God Particle”, which, according to theory, endows mass on all other particles. The other big discovery could be the meaningful interpretation of the nature of Dark Matter, stuff that makes up about 25 percent of the known universe. Yet another target for some physicists is the principle of Super-symmetry, which envisages new particle species that are left over from the Big Bang. All this promises to be a fantastic next few years for physicists but the obvious question that has to be asked is whether they will see anything at all. That would amount to a huge setback for particle physics research as well as the community in general.

Understandably, the buzz amongst physicists the world over is huge. A lot of them think that this experiment will bear the answer to how the universe came about and why it is, how it is today. Not all this is without it’s critics. There is a significant number of people who believe that the LHC, once fully operational, will destroy the Earth. It sound more like science fiction that actual science, but the theory is that when quarks and gluons, within the protons, collide at near light speeds they produce mini-blackholes, and that these blackholes could rapidly swell and eventually gobble up Earth itself. The other prevalent theory is that the collisions could produce hypothetical particles called strangelets within the LHC and that could trigger a mass conversion of nuclei in ordinary atoms into more strange matter, eventually transforming the Earth into a hot dead lump. These doomsday predictions have been dismissed by CERN as not possible or as a highly improbable cataclysmic event. Nonetheless, I remain convinced that we are not going to find out anything significant without taking risks or putting everything on the line. Nature has a way of evening out the odds. On a lighter note, we at least have four good years left before Armageddon. (Thanks sogrady!)

Photo courtesy AFP/Getty Images

This victory by an American boat, prompted the British to pursue a series of challenges over the ensuing century, presumably upset that their image as nautical superpower was tarnished by the loss. They lost all their challenges to the holders from New York Yacht Club, which incidentally is the longest winning streak in any sport. It was only in 1983, when ‘Australia II’ won the Louis Vuitton Cup, which was established to determine the challenger for the America’s Cup, and went on to beat ‘Liberty’ to win the America’s Cup and end the 132 year old streak.

The last America’s Cup was held in Valencia, Spain in 2007, the first time since 1851 that it has been held in Europe. It was won by Alinghi, the Swiss boat, who were also defending champions. But controversy ensued, as Golden Gate Yacht Club (GGYC) on behalf of BMW Oracle Racing lodged a complaint against Alinghi and Société Nautique de Genève (SNG), contesting that Alinghi and SNG had violated the terms of the Deed of Gift and that the rules governing the next cup are unfair. The americans had a ruling in their favor reversed after an appeal by SNG who still plan to host the 33rd running of the America’s cup in Valencia. That after a lengthy and expensive battle in the courts. What started out to be a friendly competition between nations has now turned out to be a legal battle between the billionaire owners of the two teams concerned, Larry Ellison (BMW Oracle) & Ernesto Bertarelli (Alinghi). The case now rests with New York State’s highest court, and the date of the next cup hinges on it’s decision. A decision is expected in the Spring of 2009.

Ellison is hoping that his team wins the case, as then it would allow his newly launched 27m trimaran to compete. The new boat promises to be a beast on the water based on the initial specs and pictures. What’s unfortunate about all this though, is the fact that the sport itself has become obscured. The focus has moved away from competing and making the boats go fast on water, to nitpicking on the interpretations of century old rules. For anyone who has competed in a sail boat race, you know that the corinthian spirit is all about giving it your all during the race and having fun while doing so. Respecting your competition is a big part of that. In this day and age where there are Kiwis and Americans sailing on a Swiss vessel owned by an Italian billionaire, the competition between nations is in name only, it’s primarily a glorified race course for billionaires and their minions. The sanctity of the Cup has been violated in my opinion, and will continue to disappoint true fans of the sport.

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After a little research I found that this particular region is very bike friendly, over 140 miles of well maintained bike paths in this part of Wisconsin alone, with tons of biking amenities along the way, including roadside bike stewards, friendly locals and eateries. The terrain here is also quite unlike the flat Midwest, there are some nice elevation changes, good for the recreational biker, probably a little too easy for the Le Tour types. The other thing I found is that vehicular traffic is very low on these roads, most of which runs through farm country, which is nice, especially when you don’t have to constantly worry about being run off the road by rogue drivers. Apart from the loops outlined above, the county has about 380 miles of paved county back roads, suitable for biking. Trempealeau County is one of the non glaciated regions in the Midwest i.e. this region was not covered in ice during the Ice Age. This makes for bluffs, ravines, exposed rock and caves.

If biking isn’t your thing, there are also a couple of trails here which seem like good hikes. More info here. Getting there is pretty easy, it’s a nice 5 hour trip up I-90/94 from Chicago.

After looking at most of the applications in the gallery, the one thing that stood out to me was the lack of consistency in the User Interface of these apps. That was and is still to a certain extent one of the problems in the Linux Desktop. I’m not taking any sides here, but I can see why Apple didn’t release a SDK until the product was well into it’s first cycle. They set the UI standards and had plenty of time to refine those standards before letting 3rd party developers have at it. That brings me to the next issue, it’s all well and good that these developers wrote the code and have apps now, but where are the devices to test these code-bases on? Lack of actual hardware testing is potentially a huge problem. Reality bites, yes, software simulations are just that, simulations. No amount of emulation is going to be the substitute for the real thing.

It’s pretty cool of Google to dole out significant sums of money to developers to create apps. This has brought about a whole new dynamic to development. Suddenly now there’s two new cool platforms to develop on (no offense Symbian, but you know why you’re not one of the cool kids) and there’s quite a significant backing to that community if you also include all the Venture money that’s out there. I think one of the reasons this mobile platform thing is so hip nowadays is because it’s moved away from the stodgy “enterprise” mode into something you can use for SMS, pictures, video, social networking and all these other things that the younger generation are crazy about. The masses will move product, hence more money in it for everyone. Personally I’m pretty psyched about all the capabilities my handset has and will have. Moreover I now have the chance to create my own “thing” if I’m unhappy with any part of it, a far cry from my Startac days, oh not so long ago.

1) Open up GMail on your Blackberry
2) Hit the menu button
3) Select ‘More…’
4) Then in the menu that comes up select ‘More Labels’
5) Place a check mark next to the Labels you’d like to read on the road
6) Save and Exit
7) Now when you want to read email from your labels which have been archived and miss your inbox, you hit menu when you are in GMail and select ‘More…’, you will be presented with a menu with the Labels you have chosen, select a label and be transferred to the Label Mailbox.

Voilà!

My next post will deal with how to sync Gmail contacts with your Blackberry, keeping your Apple address book synced at the same time.

toodles!

So my journey began with the iPhone. After listening to Señor Jobs in his keynote I began to think that this quest of mine would be pretty meaningless and rather short. But unfortunately for me that wasn’t the case. The commercial availability of the iPhone brought with it a major problem, for me. AT&T. Not my top choice for carrier and definitely not the carrier with the most cost effective plans. Why Apple chose them over, T-Mobile for instance, puzzles me. I figured, well for the utopian device I would be willing to sacrifice the carrier choice part. That was not to be either. Apple did not allow third party apps on their phone and I just couldn’t get over typing on a touch screen interface. The rest of the offering though is stellar, the web browser, mapping, music player, tight software integration and of course all the gimmicks, including my favorite, the pinch zoom. So since the application offerings are slim and the fact that it wouldn’t work on a carrier of my choosing, I decided I was going to pass on the iPhone and wait for iteration 2 or 3 of the product to maybe find that utopian phone of mine.

Moving on, the rest of the offerings could now be classified as Windows Mobile devices, Symbian devices, Palms or Blackberries. I was skeptical about running windows on my mobile device, when I did not trust windows on my computer. Nonetheless, I persevered and gave it a shot. The beginning wasn’t too pleasant, and after a few lock-ups I started using the device. The user interface is a little too nested and finding something turns out to be a pretty tedious task. The other issue I had with WM6 was shoddy power management on the software end. Then there’s the usual windows problems, memory leaks, sudden crashes and suspect memory intensive applications. The positive side of this is that the platform does have a ton of applications written for it, including skype, MS Office documents can be created as well as read and there are quite a few nifty devices running this OS. The bad outweighs the good here so this were a no go.

The Symbian OS started out really promising, people raved about it’s stability as an OS, it’s long feature list and it’s intuitive user interface. The one major flaw of Symbian is that it is designed with smartphones in mind and does provide a solid foundation for them, but it does not offer much for a general computing device. Since I wasn’t looking for a clamshell that could do email and browse the internet, this wasn’t meant to be either. Additionally the device choices are rather slim here in the US.

Palm was one of the pioneers in this space, but gross mismanagement and piss poor product development have created a laggard in this space. Garnet felt slow and clunky in addition to the fact that multi-tasking is a chore and brings the machine almost to it’s, well, knees. The Palm device choices are also not very aesthetically appealing and leaves much to be desired. Chalk up a major disappointment here.

Well, that left me with the Blackberry line from Research In Motion. I was pleasantly surprised with what I found. On the software side, though the OS is a bit flaky, the applications are solid and fast. The push email feature is speedy and very functional, the applications work really well with the device and it’s physical limitations. Multi-tasking, call quality and battery life were all above acceptable standards. The only thing that left a little to be desired was the internet browser, the native browser was ho-hum and Opera on the Blackberry offered rich text internet browsing but that still does not hold a candle to Safari on the iPhone. The included mapping application is good, though you can download Google Maps for the device along with a slew of other Google Applications. On the hardware end, the 8820 and the 8320 impressed me the most, the latter with GPS. They are also UMA capable phones which work with T-Mobile’s Hotspot @ home service. Apart from that they are quad band phones with WiFi, big screens, very nice keyboards and great styling. It’s easy to see why users get addicted to their Blackberries, hence the name ‘Crackberry’, but despite the sounds of it, it’s not the device’s fault that it’s good at what it does, users need to moderate and set limits for their usage, if they find it to be addictive.

So the choice was made, and since I am a big fan of T-Mobile and their cost effective yet very functional calling plans with data & blackberry access, it is the Blackberry for now. The 8820 if you’ve got a few bills to get an unlocked phone or an almost free 8320 from T-mobile.

The quest though hasn’t ended, the perfect device is ever so close, now if someone would just get it together and make one. The other thing I would like to see happen more is VoIP on mobile phones, and I don’t mean a service like jajah or eko.

It’s been a while since I’ve been using the python web framework named after the Jazz guitarist, Django Reinhardt, Django. I’ve been meaning to blog about it for quite a while now, but lack of time and laziness have prevailed. Django is still relatively unknown when compared to one of it’s rival* frameworks, Rails. Rails has been the darling of web 2.0 and is a framework for Ruby based web application development. A couple of years ago I was confronted with a project that required rapid development, relatively complex data handling, robust interface development and an administrative side. The time constraints placed on the project took me on the hunt for a suitable framework which would enable us to achieve our goals. I came across both Rails and Django along with a host of other frameworks. These were the two that stood out though. Django for it’s brilliant website and example application (Chicagocrime.org), and Rails for the people behind it and the applications they had created from it. Both communities seemed friendly and active, as well as the active involvement of the actual founders of both projects. Familiarity with python, the killer Django Admin interface, the fact that Django was created for a newsroom with different data handling needs, the fact that the scalability of Django at production was already proven and the loose coupling provided by Django, made the choice for me pretty simple. Though I still think there are instances where Rails is a better choice, for me picking Django was almost a no-brainer.

Starting Out

Django makes it pretty easy for newbies to get their feet wet. They have a good four part tutorial on their website, and they also have a book coming out, the book can also be viewed online currently, until it gets published. Other solid places to go for help, are the mailing lists, the wiki and on IRC. Usually your question gets answered pretty quickly by someone knowledgeable in the matter. A simple google search will also bring up a list of blogs and other websites offering tips and good info. Recently there has also been a glut of “middleware” applications for Django, apps you can plug into your app, which can be found on Google Code.

*rival in terms of Web Application Frameworks, not Python Frameworks.

AppZapper - Great little app for uninstalling apps, it finds all the related config files and other garbage and the interface is awesome.

TextMate - What all the other text editors want to be.

MarsEdit - Blogging tool, the latest version is super nice, but I’m told version 2 thats coming out soon is supposed to be a lot better.

ByteController - A little menubar app to control your iTunes, it’s not fancy but very functional.

Cue-Splitter - An app to split up all those long mp3’s you have, with the help of a cue file. Works for most of the files I’ve tried it on. Look at Cuesheet Heaven for creating cue cheets.

Awaken - An alarm app for Tiger, nice interface and good alarm options.

CompressFiles - A compression app which enables you to leave out mac specific system files during compression, that way when you send the compressed archive over to your Windoze brethren they don’t have all the HFS silliness.

Delibar - Access to your del.icio.us bookmarks from your menubar.

KisMAC - Cool tool for checking out the wifi world around you, with some expertise you might even be able to crack a few networks. Sadly this project has been temporarily halted due to some new laws in Germany.

UnRARX - A RAR application for OS X.

memtest - Command-line application that allows you to comprehensively test your memory chips.

Adium - IM client, supports pretty much any IM with a unified interface.

iScrobbler - Sends out your iTunes now playing track info over to Last.fm

Transmission - A really good BitTorrent client.

Transmit - The best FTP client I have come across, across platforms. I’m glad it’s a Tiger app and that I have a Mac.

Billings - A quote, invoicing and time tracking application. Very cool interface and generates some of the most beautiful invoices/quotes I have seen. Well worth the money spent.

Cha-Ching - A personal finance manager, sorta like Money or Quicken but a lot more intuitive and pretty.

VLC Player - an alternative to quicktime, and it’s free.

Yep - An iPhoto like organizer for PDFs. Nice concept if you have a lot of paper in your life, you can get rid of all the paper and just Yep the whole thing.

Yojimbo - Yep, but for all kinds of files. Maybe a little overkill, but it’s on my wishlist.

XSlimmer - This app analyses your system and gets rid of all the unnecessary source code, application localizations and other bloat.

That’s the list! If anyone out there has any suggestions or would like to add to this list, please use the comments to let me know.