Note for subscribers: if you are interested in my financial articles only, you can use this RSS feed link. Portefeuille d'actions cotées en francs suisses, avec un accent sur le rendement. Avertissement : n'y cherchez pas un conseil. Je ne suis pas un professionnel des investissements. Vous investissez à vos propres risques. Cliquez / tapez pour agrandir
Did you like the popcorn ?
Current amount of margin debt in USA (source: FINRA)
Note for subscribers: if you are interested in my Ada programming articles only, you can use this RSS feed link. In our first post on the BZip2 compression topic, we have presented a new implementation, from scratch, of a BZip2 encoder. The second post went through the successive steps of the algorithm. Part three dealt with the specifics of the entropy coding and a new way to allocate the Huffman…
Note for subscribers: if you are interested in my financial articles only, you can use this RSS feed link. The big headline is 4000$ per ounce! What you will read less often is that the spot price for a given quantity of gold is close to three times the average "all inclusive" production cost... So, our advice: if you really need to buy some commodity right now, buy popcorn! Click to enlarge As…
Note for subscribers: if you are interested in my Ada programming articles only, you can use this RSS feed link. An option of our All_RGB tool that was not presented in this blog is that you can start the convergence algorithm with an arbitrary "all-RGB" image. For details about all-RGB, check our previous post about it. In a nutshell, an all-RGB image has all possible colours encoded on 8 bits…
Note for subscribers: if you are interested in my Ada programming articles only, you can use this RSS feed link. Link to Part 4 here . In our first post on the BZip2 compression topic, we have presented a new implementation, from scratch, of a BZip2 encoder. The new program improves noticeably the compression of "BZip2-affine" data (this includes English texts and source code). The second post…
Note for subscribers: if you are interested in my Ada programming articles only, you can use this RSS feed link. Link to Part 3 here . As promised in the previous post , we will dive into the BZip2 format and how we implemented it. Actually the format is so simple, in contrast to most others data compression schemes, that we can show here the principles and let you, dear reader, find in the source…
Note for subscribers: if you are interested in my financial articles only, you can use this RSS feed link. Here is a refresher on real (=inflation adjusted) interest rates. Currently the interesting feature is the small gap between Europe and UK & US. Green = your money gains value. Red = your money loses value Click/tap charts to enlarge them.
Note for subscribers: if you are interested in my Ada programming articles only, you can use this RSS feed link. Remember the " Insane button "? In the Recompression feature of AZip , there are now TWO ways of proceeding: Single Pass : this is the method in use up to now, which picks a convenient compression scheme depending on "soft" information about the data to compress: type and size. It is,…
Note for subscribers: if you are interested in my financial articles only, you can use this RSS feed link. The rush continues. Now the spot price for a given quantity of gold is around 2.4 times the average "all inclusive" production cost... Click to enlarge Click to enlarge Click to enlarge
Note for subscribers: if you are interested in my financial articles only, you can use this RSS feed link. No comment... Click to enlarge Click to enlarge
Spoiler : it is also likely already the best BZip2 encoder for a given block size. See the green charts below. Note for subscribers: if you are interested in my Ada programming articles only, you can use this RSS feed link. Link to Part 2 here . BZip2 is a simple and famous lossless data compression format. It is very good on some data, like English novels or computer source code. On some other…
Note for subscribers: if you are interested in my Ada programming articles only, you can use this RSS feed link. We present today a very special use of HAC (the HAC Ada Compiler): scanning "full Ada" sources for finding simple information. We want for instance to get the items of an enumerated type T in a package P. The code is "full Ada", so parsing and compiling with HAC is not possible: the…
Note for subscribers: if you are interested in my Ada programming articles only, you can use this RSS feed link. Even after decades of usage, lossless data compression exerts a tremendous fascination on me. Contemplate this. I have a bunch of bar codes [1] in PNG image format, uncompressed. I put them into a Zip file with the Deflate internal format (it is LZ compression plus Huffman trees).…
Note for subscribers: if you are interested in my Ada programming articles only, you can use this RSS feed link. The latest addition to GID 's tools/demos was initially a very simple program, color_avg , that computes the average color of an entire image. The idea was to enrich a bit Web pages by filling the rectangle, where an image should be displayed, with a certain colour while the image is…
Note for subscribers: if you are interested in my Ada programming articles only, you can use this RSS feed link. GNAVI is an integrated user interface editor for the Ada language. Currently it is around the GWindows framework, which is currently targeting MS Windows "only". But there are plans for GWindows for Mac and GtkAda, and GNAVI itself is highly configurable (in part when it is running!),…
Note for subscribers: if you are interested in my Ada programming articles only, you can use this RSS feed link. GNAVI is an integrated user interface editor. It is principally aimed at the GWindows toolkit, but not limited to that. Fun fact: the project was abandoned in 2004, and brought out of the coma only last Sunday, that is, around 20 years later. So, its fate is similar to Lazarus , except…
Note for subscribers: if you are interested in my financial articles only, you can use this RSS feed link. Another record for gold price. And... Caveat emptor ! Precious metals are very heavy, especially when you are a bag holder! The ratio: spot price over production costs was higher than now only during around 6 months of the last 12 years (see orange area of third chart). Click images below to…
Note for subscribers: if you are interested in my Ada programming articles only, you can use this RSS feed link. HAC (HAC Ada Compiler) is a small, quick, open-source Ada compiler, covering a subset of the Ada language. Home page: https://hacadacompiler.sourceforge.io/ Sources, site #1: https://sourceforge.net/projects/hacadacompiler/ Sources, site #2: https://github.com/zertovitch/hac Alire…
Note for subscribers: if you are interested in my financial articles only, you can use this RSS feed link. An uptick coming out of nowhere (except perhaps due to the traction of cryptocurrencies, coming out of nowhere as well!)
Note for subscribers: if you are interested in my Ada programming articles only, you can use this RSS feed link. ( TL;DR ? Want to see numbers? Then jump to the two tables below! ) We are happy to announce version 13 of the Generic Image Decoder (GID). GID is an open-source, low-level, pure Ada library for decoding a broad variety of image formats. GID can be found via the following links: Home…
Surely the word "deliverability" has a meaning in a certain context, but we don't care at all: it is a shiny, catchy word and thus a candidate for our Bullshit Generator , which is by essence contextless. Let's test the new word with the "bulk" option added by Ludovic Brenta to the Generator. produce_corporate_bullshit -b deliverability Result: an endless logorhea (around 2000 lines of…
Note for subscribers: if you are interested in my Ada programming articles only, you can use this RSS feed link. The PayPal activity reports are simple, but a human being still needs some efforts to sort out their information. When money is going out of your balance for, say, various kinds of fees, it is simple: one row... except if the fees are in a different currency. Then it is three rows, with…
Note for subscribers: if you are interested in my Ada programming articles only, you can use this RSS feed link. The puzzle: https://adventofcode.com/2023/day/10 My Ada solution: here . In a picture (generated by the program linked above)... Click to enlarge It is always a pleasure to display the data created by Eric Wastl. Here, an improved representation with the five cases (outside tile, inside…