Filed in "screenshot"

During the summer I built a web application to visualise the Bitcoin futures curve which proved very useful in informing my trading decisions. As useful as it was however, each time I viewed it I had to wait for the application to first boot on Heroku and then to perform a sequence of API calls to Deribit before the chart could finally be rendered in the browser. Impatience as the mother of invention I’d no other major projects that needed attention so building a more responsive native application seemed like a reasonable task to take on.

Read more...

For the last couple of years my cryptocurrency trading has focused on doing a carry trade between the Bitcoin spot and derivatives markets. This has involved buying spot Bitcoin and selling short a corresponding quantity of perpetual swap contracts and/or futures contracts. The mathematics of this trade are described in this in-depth article . To trade futures I’ve been using Deribit as they now offer contracts that settle up to a year in the future which I’ve found useful for longer term planning, especially when I’m borrowing against my spot holdings to increase the size of my position.

Read more...

For the past 12 years up until today stevenwilkin.com has been a Sinatra app. The purpose of the site was to help me learn Ruby which paid off handsomely and I went on to use Sinatra in many client projects so all in all it served me well. Time moved on however and the content fell out of date, the design increasingly became an embarrassment and I’d disabled the contact form as I rarely received anything other than spam through it.

Read more...

During recent periods of restrictions due to the pandemic gyms have been closed and many people have resorted to doing body-weight exercises at home to maintain fitness and boost immune systems. My own personal routine has focused on burpees with secondary movements such as push-ups, squats, lunges, jumping jacks and mountain climbers. During the longest stretches of restrictions I was also able to do some resistance work using reusable shopping bags filled with large containers of water.

Read more...

I can be an awfully indecisive person at times. Often I’ve been in the grips of analysis paralysis unable to pick a course of action to take, crippled with choice. When I was a student I read The Dice Man and was sorely tempted to make all my decisions by rolling a die or tossing a coin. Needless to say this is maybe not the best way for a person to navigate through life.

Read more...

After last week’s great Xcake meet I felt a fresh surge to take on new challenges and bend some less-familiar pieces of technology to my will. Motivation The first product of this enthusiasm was a prototype web app built to get a bit more experience with Python and Google App Engine. A few days later it got an API. The resulting rapid feedback loop led me to pick up my copy of Beginning iPhone Development which had been sitting gathering dust for the last couple of years and get stuck back into following the examples.

Read more...

I finally got around to replacing the default WordPress theme. Now it doesn’t look like I don’t care about my site :) With so many freely available themes I found it difficult to choose but I stumbled upon plaintxt.org and my mind was made up: I needed one of those minimalist themes and I opted for the Barthelme which I am liking very much. For posterity I took a screenshot of my old, hand-crafted design:

During my day job at $BIG_MONEY I’m behind a restrictive corporate firewall and as such can’t ssh to anywhere in the outside world. Which makes me sad. Step in AjaxTerm: What you are seeing is a screenshot of my screen session for a project I’m working on. Editing a Perl script with vi in my web browser, I love it!

I’ve been having great fun with tunneling connections through SSH lately and today it dawned on me that I could close another hole in my firewall by connecting to my Jabber server via a tunnel. In the past, when I’ve been working remotely, I’ve made changes to my firewall by connecting to my public-facing machine; from there to my desktop machine through a DMZ-pinhole and once a presence has been established within the “green zone” browsing to the routers web-interface with lynx.

Read more...

I was reading this article on Wikipedia this morning and something didn’t seem quite right. See if you can spot it in this screenshot: I had been up from early morning and thought my eyes were playing tricks on me. I read it and re-read it and still the words remained, I can’t say I was shocked but I certainly was surprised. My next thought was “hehe, who can I show this to?

Read more...

I’ve been finishing off the next release of vdaExtensions seemingly forever and have had all the functionality sorted out for ages and without much in the way of trouble but I’ve been struggling with the user interface. The only contents of my main form are a MenuStrip and the meat of the app, a DataGridView. Throughout the use of the program the DataGridView can change dimensions: information can be added/changed/removed and I’ve also added the ability to show/hide the various columns of the control, with the constraint that at least one column must be visible at all times.

Read more...

I finally got around to doing something today that I had been meaning to do since I got Kubuntu installed on my home desktop, namely, setting up a virtual machine running Windows XP so I can perform DVD encoding/editing/authoring. I’m a relative novice when it comes to these techniques and I haven’t put enough effort into finding the equivalent native Linux applications, so it is a case of better the devil you know for the foreseeable future.

Read more...

I’ve just installed Firefox 2 on my XP workstation at the office, a week after my colleague Kevin installed IE7. The installation went smoothly and my extensions copied across ok and eventually got updated, but the theme I had been using wasn’t compatible, a new version of it wasn’t found by the add-ons manager and I didn’t like the default, so the first thing I did was look through the available themes and one that caught my eye was Mostly Crystal as it uses the Crystal SVG icon set I’ve come to love.

Read more...