The Blog of Xangis

1. Download and unzip the current version of Wordpress.

2. Update version by copying new files over the old.  Overwrite everything except:

wp-content
wp-config.php
.htaccess

3. Run www.example.com/wp-admin/upgrade.php.  Use your domain, not example.com.  Duh.

So simple.  I just updated Basternae’s Wordpress from 2.2.1 to 2.7.1 and this Wordpress from 2.5 to 2.7.1.  Zero problems.

Of course, there are automated update tools available, but I’m not a big fan of automatic updates.

Over the past few years I’ve been working on Basternae 3 off and on (as I have time and motivation).  The 100,000 or so lines of code are a very handy sandbox for learning/trying new things.

After not working on it for six months or so, I’ve started tinkering again.  It’s no coincidence that it’s getting rather spring-like outside.  Call it “coming out of hibernation”.

I finished building and packaging up the stock viewer program, the “Champion Stock Chart Viewer”, and it’s now available for sale.

Check it out here:  Champion-Analytics.com

I received a message today saying that the Yahoo Briefcase site is shutting down and that files stored there would no longer be available after a certain date.  It came as a bit of a surprise because I had no idea that the site still existed.

It turns out that I stored a couple Word and Excel documents there in the winter of ‘04-’05.  As a testament to the usefulness of the site, I promptly forgot that it existed.

It’s not that the site was bad, or broken, or anything of the sort.  It just wasn’t anywhere near as useful as a USB thumb drive.

Smart move on Yahoo’s part.  Sounds like they’re moving up in the world.

Freewavesamples.com turns two years old this month.  I’ve just passed the 200 sample mark, so that puts the site at an average of 100 per year.  I have tons more material to edit, so the site should continue to grow.

Here are a couple screenshots of the stock charting application I’ve been working on (click to enlarge):

As you can see, I still have some minor layout issues to sort out as the graph is resized, but that’s easy enough.

So far, the main features include:

- Line, Bar, and Candlestick charts
- Download of historical stock data from Yahoo! or Google finance.
- Importing of historical stock data stored in a CSV file.
- Saving a chart as an image or copying an image of the chart to the clipboard for pasting into another application, such as Microsoft Word.
- Printing and print preview.
- Changing graph colors.
- In addition to the specific time period buttons shown (1 month, 2 months, 2 years, etc.), you can also use pick an arbitrary time period to show. If you like 41-day stock charts you can use 41-day stock charts.

Features I plan to add before release:

- Display of 5, 10, and 20-day moving average.
- Display of Stochastic indicators.
- Display of Moving average convergence-divergence (MACD).

The program also has the ability to read historical data from the price database that the stock data importer brings data into.  Since that’s a private database, you probably won’t see the button on the public release.

… I’d have a cat by now.

They’re pretty similar in a few ways — the whirring of the little cooling fan is much like the sound of purring and they’ll both fall asleep pretty much anywhere if you leave them alone for a bit.

I wrote an application to harvest historical stock data from Yahoo.  It’s an interesting piece of homebrew and has allowed me to build up a database of 3 gigabytes of historical data so far using SQL Server Express 2008.  Since Yahoo! data is specifically “for non-commercial use” I can’t exactly sell the database to anyone, but it’s handy to have for calculations and drawing charts.

Here’s a screenshot of the app (click to enlarge):

It can grab data in an few different ways.

1. Can import CSV files downloaded from Yahoo or Google finance.
2. Can batch load a space-separated or newline-separated list of stock symbols.
3. Can update all symbols already in the database with a specific number of days of data.

I started by pasting in big lists of symbols and batch importing. This takes a long time since there’s a lot of data to load, but once the bulk of data is loaded, I can hit the “update all” button once a week to keep the data current.

In addition, the “Populate Symbols” button will go through all symbols and fill a table containing the company name and exchange that it’s traded on, which is something you won’t necessarily know already if all you haveis a symbol.

I’ve written a simple charting application that can use information in this database to draw charts.  I’ll post about it sometime later, but I’m gradually adding features and it’s turning out to be a pretty neat app.

One of the possible goals for this importer is to add export capabilities and support for more database types (like PostgreSQL) and auto-creation of databases on first import.  Either way it works pretty well for my purposes at the moment.

As a programmer in the home automation industry I’m exposed to all sorts of devices from a wide array of manufacturers. Much of the hardware is pleasant to work with. I’ve enjoyed writing code for pieces by Samsung, Extron, Hitachi, KeyDigital, Gefen, Sharp, Panasonic, and many others. However, every time I get a piece from Russound I just can’t wait until it’s over. There’s no better way to ruin my day than bring up the “R” word. I really hope they stop making hardware.

I’ve never been particularly interested in forex trading, always focusing more on stocks and options, but it seems to be about time to become an expert.  Don’t be surprised if in the near future you see me posting about books I’ve read, resources I’ve found, and the huge sums of money that I’ve acquired and lost in the span of five minutes.  I may never trade a penny in foreign exchange markets, but I should at least teach myself how they work.