> We started using PostgreSQL back when Sun bought MySQL

Right on. And PostgreSQL is about to remove one of the last big barriers for using it - streaming replication is coming in 9.0. Huzzah! I was just listening to a "Rails on PostgreSQL" talk from Pivotal Labs and that was cited as one of the few places where MySQL was ahead... not for long...

...and Google knows it. The government is flourishing, huzzah!

Yeah, ANTLR's great for that... and it would be a pile of work to get JavaCC to output lexers and parsers in languages other than Java... sigh.

> ANTLR, which is a far superior alternative to lex/flex yacc/bison IMHO.

Another alternative is JavaCC, which (shameless plug!) I document in great detail in my book Generating Parsers with JavaCC.

...right here. One commenter had some interesting things to say about "quote stuffing":

Just because the folks at Nanex can't figure out why a system was entering orders and cancelling them frequently does not mean that they were being "stuffed" to thwart competitor's systems.

The logic on the machines placing those orders (HFT or otherwise) may have been severely screwed up by the craziness of 5/6 and the latency on data feeds - but there is no way to profit by spewing lots of quotes.

First, everyone in the HFT space has plenty of headroom to process the full raw feeds (rather than the SIAC consolidated feeds Nanex is looking at). A few thousand extra quotes per second is not meaningful to systems that can process millions of quotes per second.

More to the point though, each exchange gives each participant a port on which to send their order flow. Those ports are rate limited. That means that if you send thousands of spurious quotes that are not going to hit, the only harm you cause is to your own trading strategies, since when you finally did want to execute a trade at a price where the execution was remotely likely, you are going to have that order queue behind all of your other orders on the same port.

So it might not be the big advantage that Nanex sees it as.

Yup, I used pg_migrator for the last RubyForge upgrade, very handy!

> It's strange to me that most ISPs/hosting
> companies still don't offer Postgres.

Heroku offers Rails application hosting on PostgreSQL only. 38K apps and growing... their setup is very slick.

Then again, I'm a big fan of Rails on PostgreSQL.

Hm, that is interesting. 1500 copies is more than I've ever sold, though... maybe someday...

> Not true: Tim's numbers are wrong, especially if you use a POD supplier.

I'm not familiar with the print-on-demand pricing... but, FWIW, we just printed up a small batch of books and after shipping, shrink-wrap, and all that it ended up being in the ballpark of what he was saying.

> did he have anything to say about Peter Cooper's assertion
> that a freely available e-book would promote hard copy sales?

Yup, he said:

We don't do it for all books because while there are some cases where free online exposure can help sell print books, there are also many cases where it seems to sell fewer books. A lot depends on whether a book is already visible or not.

and

"Free" should be seen as a strategic tool for publishing. Sometimes it helps; sometimes it hurts.

Pretty cool that he weighed in on this one.

...on the post is pretty interesting. Here's an excerpt:

If you were to self-publish, you will find that you might print, say, 1000 copies at $8 each, or 2000 copies at maybe $6 each. (It could be more. I'm not as close to book printing prices as I used to be.) So you're out $8-$12000 up front. So lets say you've guessed exactly right how many copies you will sell. You printed 1000 copies for $8K, and sold all 1000 for $30K to $40K (depending on where you set the price.) You made $22K, or maybe even $32K, versus the $19K you earned with APress.

He goes on to discuss the hassle of shipping, returns, credit card processing, storing the books, etc. All true, all good stuff.

For what it's worth, going through a small local publisher with my JavaCC book has worked out pretty well. We did a much smaller print run - 350 books - so the storage wasn't as much of a hassle. Definitely a niche market, though.

Well played.

> I'm currently in the Air Force

Thanks for serving!

Do they still have the recruiting slogan "why not Minot?"

Some of the other lists are more interesting - like the Combined Arms Center counterinsurgency list. It seems like those operations get a little more complicated than 'apply weapon x to target y'. Hearts and minds! What's the Rudyard Kipling quote?

Take up the White Man's burden--
The savage wars of peace--
Fill full the mouth of Famine,
And bid the sickness cease;

"The white man's burden"; that sounds offensive. But I bet Kipling was getting at more something along the lines of "The Western Civilization burden". Anyhow, "savage wars of peace" certainly hits the nail on the head.