Applications: The Easy Ones

See Time For a Change for the first in this series, or view the index to see all the entries dealing with Arch Linux. In this post, I'll install the easy applications.

Libre Office for word processing, spreadsheets, etc: Easy, but I couldn't nap through it. The command is simple enough (pacman -S libreoffice), but first it asks what members of the package group I want to install - default is all 11 of them. Yup, all of them is fine. Then it asks what language pack I want to use - default is Afrikaans! Um, no, I want US-English... that's #22 with the cryptic name "libreoffice-en-US". A little piece of trivia is that Libre Office is a fork of Open Office, which suddenly is owned by Oracle; the "Libre" part of the name is Latin for free, as in freedom.

Chromium for web-browsing. Start with the install (pacman -S chromium), but it isn't quite done there. Chromium is what Google Chrome is based on, and comprises just about all the features with none of the privacy-violating hijinks. The only thing it doesn't have that I want is a Flash Player, and that's easy to get, too: pacman -S flashplugin.

The Gimp for photo editing (pacman -S gimp).

Audacity for sound editing (pacman -S audacity).

OpenShot for video editing (pacman -S openshot).

Wine for running Windows programs under Linux (pacman -S wine).

Skype for VOIP: Hooray, there's a package for it in the repository (pacman -S skype)! If this were a real machine, I would put in my account details and configure my headset mic. But I've done that before in Linux, and I'm confident I can do it again. No need to fight with USB support in VirtualBox, which can be pretty touchy.

Netbeans for programming: At the office, I code pretty exclusively in C++, so I have the C++-only version of Netbeans. But here at home I don't want that limitation, so I downloaded the "everything" version, which includes Java and PHP support. Then I just had to run the installer and I was all set.

I use Pidgin under Ubuntu for an IM client, but Kopete comes pre-installed with KDE, so I decided to give that a try. If I decide to go back to Pidgin, it's in the Arch repository, so I don't expect an issue with it. After entering my account details and digging through the settings to get Kopete just the way I want it, IM was taken care of. Kopete doesn't support Facebook chat, but neither does Pidgin lately, so no big deal.

I really like Clementine under Ubuntu as a music player, but Amarok is the best-known music player for KDE, and Clementine actually says "inspired by Amarok" on its website. So I gave Amarok a two-song try, and I'm impressed. It can definitely do what I need it to do, and it has a lot of cool features that Clementine doesn't. To install Amarok, I needed a single command: pacman -S amarok

That's about it for the easy ones. Note that I probably could have installed most of them at once, with this command (all one line):

pacman -S libreoffice chromium flashplugin gimp audacity openshot wine skype amarok

After installing all of these apps, I'm left with the tougher ones:

• PasswordSafe for secure password management
• Moneydance for personal finance
• ThinkOrSwim for option trading
• Minecraft - thought this would be easy, but it crashed on my first attempt
• Dropbox for cloud storage
• Kontact for e-mail, contacts, and calendar
• Choqok for micro-blogging (following and posting to Twitter)
• NixNote for notes/personal organization
• Bless hex editor
• Bacula for automated backups

Next: ThinkOrSwim
Or check out the Index

Another Flurry of Trades

Remember a couple of days ago I said I thought the stock market was overpriced and due for a correction?  Well I certainly didn't expect it so suddenly.  Since my blog post on 2-August, the S&P has shaved off 6% of its value, dipping as low as 1163.25 (futures) on an intraday basis.  This intraday low represents a -13% peak-to-trough return in the past month. Meanwhile gold rallied hard (at first), making me very glad I hadn't taken my entire call position off.  I had another flurry of trades the last couple of days, most of them defensive.

S&P 500 (proxied by SPY) since 1-Jan-2011

Yesterday, my GLD calls were close to triple the price I paid a few days prior.  I was working a 400% profit order on 25% of them to secure a profit and let me continue to ride the train as long as I could.  As they hit their high, rumors emerged that big London-based hedge funds were getting margin calls on their gold positions.  Our company's market analyst mumbled the announcement about the rumors (a frequent problem lately), and NeighborTrader and I thought he said that the CME was raising its margin requirements on gold futures.  Either way, gold immediately went into a hard sell-off, and I was reminded of what happened to silver when the CME raised its margin requirement a few months ago.  Now gold today is a very different market than silver then, but that wouldn't stop a mini-panic from pushing gold down and keeping it there until my calls expired worthless.  To control the cost of this possible outcome, I sold enough calls to guarantee a profit, getting a trade price only 4c below the high.  Immediately afterward, the calls sold off and are now trading 33% lower.  Whew!  I still hold a little less than half my initial position at about double my purchase price, and if I let it expire worthless I will still make 6% profit - enough to cover commissions.

Gold (proxied by GLD) since 1-Jan-2011

The day after SPY opened below its 200-day moving average, causing CS|MACO to close its long SPY position, the AAII released its weekly investor sentiment survey.  Over 10% of investors stopped being bullish this week, which was enough to get a Buy signal out of the CS component.  Buy + Flat = Buy, so yesterday I bought SPY back at 124.30, which seemed great at the time (it was 3.50/share lower than where I sold it), but isn't looking so wonderful now that SPY is trading at 120.

I was working target exit orders on both of my SPY put positions, which I mentioned in the previous post; I never dreamed both of them would fill yesterday, but then yesterday was an unusual day.  Despite making a combined 56% on those puts, by the end of the day I was kicking myself for not holding the second batch until the market stabilized.  I left a significant amount of money on the table: the position I sold for $7/share is now worth $10.50/share, and the one I sold for $6/share is now worth $8.25/share.  Sigh.  NeighborTrader pointed out that I can't always sell the high, and I suppose he's right.

Yesterday crude oil dropped by $5.50/barrel, or -6% *on the day*.  If you need any confirmation that the global economy is slowing into a new recession, this is it.  Demand for crude waxes and wanes based on industrial activity, and the capital markets are exceptionally good at predicting and magnifying changes in demand.  When crude sells off hard over several days, it's a very bearish economic signal.  On 26-July, crude oil futures hit a high of 100.62/barrel.  Today's low in crude was 82.87: -18% in less than 2 weeks, a very bearish signal indeed.  I had an order working to buy USO at $35, which was filled yesterday during the craziness.  I'll buy more when I think we're near the nadir of the recession.

Oil (proxied by USO) since 1-Jan-2011

After the massive sell-off yesterday, I came in this morning expecting:

1. a better than expected monthly payrolls number
2. a big number-driven rally in the stock market
3. a post-number sell-off to yesterday's close price or lower by the end of the day.

In fact I was so sure about this that I bought Nasdaq futures at about 7:15, 15 minutes before the number.

What happened was:

1. a better than expected payrolls number (+117k/9.1% vs expected +85k/9.2%)
2. a big number-driven rally (S&P rallied about 19 points, Dow rallied about 280)
3. the craziest roller coaster of a day I've seen since the Flash Crash; S&P has had a 60-point range, Dow has had a range of about 460 points.  It closed 3 points below yesterday's close.

I sold back my futures immediately after the number for a $430/contract profit.  It's nice to be right every once in a while, and it's even nicer to be able to make a little money doing it.

The final trade of the day today was that Xilinx (XLNX) sold off enough to hit my target exit on the put position I've had there for a while.  At last glance, I sold the high price of the day in that option market.  That doesn't really make up for the SPY puts, but it's a start.

Wrapping Paper Everywhere

Just to warn you up-front, this is not a trading post.

The bintgoddess and I returned from five days in Michigan just yesterday, both with pretty serious headcolds.  This makes three colds for me in six weeks, which is just <sarcasm>really awesome</sarcasm>.  I'm trying to remember the preceding year or two when I watched the bintgoddess get colds at normal intervals while I managed to fend them off without a sniffle.  But bringing that memory forward over the ringing in my stuffed up ears is a little challenging at the moment.  I just woke up from 11 hours of sleep punctuated by bizarre pseudo-fever dreams, and the bintgoddess sleeps on.

The worst part is that we're pretty sure we both picked this up on Sunday, and we saw friends and family Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday.  I really hope we didn't pass it along to everyone else, but if the entire Detroit Metro Area fails to show up for work on Jan 3, 2011, you can blame us.

It was great to see many of our Detroit-area friends on this trip, and I have to say that the scheduling really worked out well.  We managed to see everyone we had discussed visiting, and didn't feel like anyone got short-changed on time.  We even laid some preliminary plans for going with another couple to Punkin' Chunkin' next year, which looks like a fantastic nerdy silly time.  With its massive Discovery Channel coverage this year, I'm sure next year's PC will be booked to the gills.

With all the friends and family we visited, it was a pretty full trip.  But there was still time to try to cope with four dogs and four people cooped up in a house.  My coping method of choice was to disappear into my laptop, where I started learning about delivering rich web applications via Flash movies (SWFs).  I'm working on a top secret project which I hope to deliver as a Facebook application, and I reckon Flash is probably the best way to make it a reality.  Unwilling to pony up hundreds of dollars for Adobe's development environment, I started looking at other avenues.

The one that I settled on is OpenLaszlo, named for either a painter, or a cat who was named after the painter, it isn't completely clear.  OpenLaszlo is an open-source language that is based on an interesting combination of XML and JavaScript, and lets you compile to either SWF (8 or 10), or to DHTML.  There are a few things you can't do in DHTML like embed fonts, but I think Flash is a better solution for my particular problem anyway.  OpenLaszlo's pedigree is impressive: H&R Block, Wal-Mart, and Pandora are all using OpenLaszlo to deliver rich content.

Over the break, I read through the QuickStart guide, and started digging my way through the Developer's Guide.  I've gotten to Chapter 10 (of 57), and so far have built a little test application that doesn't really do anything useful, but lets me exercise what few skills I have managed to accumulate.  You can check it out here if you're so inclined, but don't expect much.  If you're a developer-type and interested in the OpenLaszlo code that made it happen, you can find that here.  I added ".txt" onto the end of the file so that Firefox will just display it instead of trying to download it.  As I keep working through the Dev Guide, I will from time to time post my progress up on markmccracken.net.  I will probably not keep the source file up to date, though, unless someone asks me to.