2007 Aug 03 - Fri

Personal Co-location Registry

Paul Vixie hosts a Personal Co-location Registry. If you have a personal 1U server running, say, a trading program or some such, then looking for place for it could be as easy as looking at the site.

For trading action, where you're not trading quite enough to colo right in a market data source or broker, then setting up somewhere close to the action might be sufficient. I ended up working for a week near Wall Street last month and was walking down Broadway and passed by what is known as the Cunard Line Building, just up from the photogenic New York / Wall Street Bull. I didn't realize the significance at the time, but later found out that Telehouse operates a hosting facility on one of the floors of the building. Look for companies with rack space there if you want to get geographically real close to the action.

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EDDY: End-to-end Diagnostic DiscoverY

Carnegie Mellon has a development project called EDDY which is touted for "... allowing information about the operation of disparate components in the computing infrastructure to be brought together for analysis, research, and audit. This enables a system manager to more easily pinpoint problems as they occur, allows autonomic processes to assist in prediction, management, and maintenance."

In reading through the notes, it has modules for handling SNMP, Syslog, and event logs at the minimum. There is mention of many other modules as well.

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Trading Site of the Day -- Currency Trading: Under-hyped, for once

This is site is 'different'. I can't put my finger on it. I'm sure it has corporate backing of some sort, but that could be and probably is totally irrelevant. The definite good thing about CurrencyTrading.net is that it has a good intro reference library to currency trading. It discusses such things as the fundamental pip, how to spot forex scams, and how to choose a broker and open an account. The site is a quick read.

The caveat is that choosing a successful trading strategy is up to the reader, which when doing currency, equities, options, derivatives, or whatever, is the hard part.

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Am I Smarter Than I Really Am?

That cuts two ways according to a paper published in 1999 by Justin Kruger and David Dunning of Cornell University. In Unskilled and Unware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One's Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments, they say that incompetent people rank themselves as more competent than they really are, and that competent people rank themselves as less then they really are.

Incompetent people may stay that way due to the fact that we've been trained to "don't say anything if you don't have something nice to say".

I havn't taken the training myself, but supposedly the Arbinger Institute's 'Thinking Outside the Box' training is supposed to promote the ability for people who work together to mutually lift themselves out of this mental block through their own bootstraps.

I'm unable draw a direct link between that and this, but it comes to mind: once interstellar space travel becomes available, and should the top 1% of the population, intellectually wise, decide to emigrate, that would theoretically drop the average intelligence level of the population by more than 1%. Could be a scary thought. Does anyone have references to this real or imagined statistic?

Anyway, coming back to the article, or rather the end of the article. The authors provide a very well done ironic summary of their paper (are their results to be believed?):

In sum, we present this article as an exploration into why people tend to hold overly optimistic and miscalibrated views about themselves. We propose that those with limited knowledge in a domain suffer a dual burden: Not only do they reach mistaken conclusions and make regrettable errors, but their incompetence robs them of the ability to realize it. Although we feel we have done a competent job in making a strong case for this analysis, studying it empirically, and drawing out relevant implications, our thesis leaves us with one haunting worry that we cannot vanquish. That worry is that this article may contain faulty logic, methodological errors, or poor communication. Let us assure our readers that to the extent this article is imperfect, it is not a sin we have committed knowingly.

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