Year: 2008

Ok, if you subscribe to my blog for personal reasons, this isn’t very relevant to you, but for those of you here for the programming, on a recent project I had some problems getting the BIT field in MySQL to be interpreted as a boolean in PHP. There are a couple of discussions on the net about it here and here, but I couldn’t find any simply stated solutions on the net. So here’s what I ended up doing. You can also download the file here, rename the file .php to use it.


function mysql_bit($bit) {
return ord($bit) == 1;
}


So, for those of you that know me know I think, ALOT, and in the process I come up with lots of ideas. I’m also the type of person that tries to do EVERYTHING and too much. After listening to my Pastor’s (excellent) latest sermon on time, I’ve decided I need to be free of feeling like I have to do so much, and just concentrate on the most important things, if I’m really going to be successful in life.

So here I’m listing a load of the hair-brained business ideas I’ve had. They are now all public, so anybody can feel free to do them if they really think they’re good, and feel free to give a little of the profits if they make a lot :-P

Finance

Control Systems For Market Making
During by time at DB I was involved in a lot of derivatives pricing and risk analysis. One of the ideas I had related to market making. In market making systems use programming logic to determine what price / spread / volume to apply to market making a security. It might be a good idea to model these as a control/feedback system (or even fuzzy logic) as applied in engineering to come up with stable yet fast acting pricing systems.

Fuzzy Option Pricing
There are a few papers published about this, but basically the idea is you model an option’s behaviour using a fuzzy logic system that is intuitive to people who know how options should perform given certain conditions. It might be faster than analytical methods, but maybe less accurate.

Fuzzy Vol Models
Again related to option pricing. While you might still calculate the price of an option using conventional methods, it might be a good way to construct a vol service using a fuzzy logic system. This would allow the construction of a smooth service, with no discontinuities using logic steps rather than adjusting parameters for skew / long vol / etc.

China

Snowboarding
There must be snow in China, and its cheap to construct and employee in China. Would stand to reason that opening a ski resort for snowboarding and skiing might be really good way to attract tourists and make money, especially since within Asia, Korea and Japan are the main places and are both pretty expensive.

Tailored Jeans
There are places in Europe / America that will do tailored jeans for you, any style, custom fit, warn, new, etc. Thought Hong Kong / China would be a great place to do this too, due to the cheap labour and easy custom production that is available in China. Similar to the way HK is a prime destination for tailored suits and shirts at great prices.

TV Aggregator
There’s rise of having a ridiculous number of TV channels in Asia these days. In the US there are sites like Titan TV and Tv Tv in Europe which aggregate TV schedules from all the different networks so you can find out in one place what’s on. They also offer services so that DVRs like Elegato can query and programmatically record all of your favourite series like a Tivo.

Here are a few pointless sites on the internet:

http://www.isitaprilfools.com/

http://www.isitchristmas.com/

http://www.isitaleapyear.com/

http://www.istwitterdown.com/

As most of you know, I’ve wanted an iPhone since forever, but I’m waiting for it to be released “officially” for various reasons; the sdk, upgrades, and 3G.

Hong Kong is one of those places that you can quite easily get them unlocked, but even I was suprised are seeing a listed company giving them out as a promotional campaign:

Ok, latest wordpress plugin. I’m getting quite into these. The other two were modifications. This one is completely from scratch. There are several plugins to make a blog private, making it a good tool for basic collaboration / group ware. However file attachments / images have still been visible too the public, until now.

Private files acts as a proxy, making sure users are logged in before they can download any files. The nice thing about is, it doesn’t modify the current uploads at all, doesn’t store files in a different place, so if you want to stop using it, all links to files stay the same, so you don’t need to redo anything.

Download it here: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/private-files/

If you have deactivated the plugin or deleted it and you want to unprotect your files manually, just delete the .htaccess file within your wp-content/uploads directory.

As with most wordpress plugins, the security is not guaranteed, use at your own risk.

Change Log:
0.40
Added MS Office 2007 mime types
0.39
Enhancements to block URLs with /../ in them
0.38
Bugfix which prevented logged in subscriber users from accessing files.
0.37
Now accounts for spaces in file names
0.36
Shows a warning if you are not using WordPress permalinks
Should work on a wider variety of WordPress setups (subdirectories etc.), but uploads must be a subdirectory of your WordPress directory.
Should work with relative and absolute upload paths
Tested on the latest version of wordpress
0.35
Now uses raw file() read instead of echo, which should clear up issues on some setups.
0.34
Bug fix so this actually works under various wordpress conditions, eg. root and not root installations of wordpress
Tested with wordpress 2.5.1

This is my latest facebook app T-Shirt Gifts (http://apps.facebook.com/tshirt_gifts/. Its similar to other gift apps on facebook, but we have some great designs courtesy of cafepress.com and you can really buy the gifts and own the T-Shirt if you want! Add the app and tell all your friends to add it too!