Brett Hutley's Blog

For some reason, when I get onto a client's network and run /sbin/dhclient on my hacked-together-linux notebook, dhclient gets an IP address via DHCP, but doesn't update my /etc/resolv.conf with the local name servers, so names don't get resolved using DNS.

I haven't figured out a fix for this yet, but a temporary work-around is to have a look at the lease in the /var/state/dhcp/dhclient.leases file. You should see a line like "option domain-name-servers 192.168.94.49;". Just put that IP address in the /etc/resolv.conf file (ie "nameserver 192.168.94.49").

The New York Times has a great interactive graphic on How the Giants of Finance Shrunk, then Grew, Under the Financial Crisis. It's really interesting seeing how, if the Market Capitalization of each firm is represented as an area, the each firm shrinks massively during the financial crisis, and now how the firms are rebounding.

A post over at the New York Times is arguing that one of the main causes of the financial crisis was inadequate quantitative models - models that tended to understate risk because they failed to provide a realistic model of the way the world works - neither incorporating risks such as a failure of liquidity, nor the complexities of human behaviour.

I certainly agree that the current stable of models which are in widespread use are inadequate given that the competitive market has made the spreads on trades so tight that there is no longer any buffer to cover the many short-falls in the models. Back when vanilla options were an exotic trade, the trader would incorporate plenty of fat in their options trades. Intense competition, a market that has steadily grown over the past 20 years (notwithstanding small glitches), and increased familiarity with the trades has served to camouflage the risks the traders were running in their options books.

Continue reading “Financial models need more complexity?”

I recently needed to convert a bunch of WMA files to MP3 on my macbook. The easiest way to do it was to open up a terminal window, change directory to the directory with the files, and then use mplayer to convert each file to a WAV, and then sox to convert the file to an MP3. The command line I used is described below:

Continue reading “Converting WMA files to MP3”

I just read this awesome thread over at RPG.net about character creation in the new RPG Eclipse Phase. Man, this RPG sounds awesome! As ExNihilo mentions in the thread:

The fact that a question like "Can my character upload his 
living consciousness into a distributed network-swarm of
microscopic robots?" results in actual debate is enough to
convince me that I'll like this game regardless of what the
answer itself turns out to be.

Continue reading “Eclipse Phase RPG”