One year of blogging
On this day one year ago, 10th of June 2010, I started this blog. And I've been able to keep it up, with at least one post a month, and 20 posts in total. Given that I set a goal of posting 2-4 times a month, that's not too far off.
Looking at the Google Analytics stats, here's the list of the top 6 most viewed posts (in chronological order with page views so far):
- C++ vs Java performance, with 8200 page views
- Node.js, with 2090 page views
- The internet is full!, with 19300 page views. This is still very relevant, with World IPv6 day this Wednesday.
- Hashing passwords, with 1080 page views.
- On a split 5th place we find pricing of asian options and Rackspace Cloud vs Amazon Web Servies, both with just over 500 page views.
In total there's been just under 40000 page views. Not that it matters too much, but it's nice to see people read what I write 
Given that I'm about to finish my Quant Finance degree and have started actively look for a job I'm guessing the coming 12 months will be colored by whatever I end up doing. But I do aim to find a job that's relevant to the blog tagline, so expect more of the same..
Performance: Rackspace Cloud vs Amazon Web Services
Performance related posts and articles seem to be rather popular, with my Java vs C++ post being one of the big traffic drivers on this blog. Now it's time to do another one, with a very specific use case in mind.
I'm into the third and final term for my masters in quantitative finance. As part of this term I'm doing a dissertation and the topic is basically high frequency trading strategies. So what I'm doing is looking at a relatively large amount of data and applying different trading strategies to this data. The data consists of 1 minute OHLC bars + volume for all stocks in the S&P 100 going back about 10 years.
Uncompressed and stored as comma separated text files this constitutes about 6 GB of data, and when imported to a database this is just under 118 million rows, each row being a one minute bar for one ticker. I don't feel like torturing my laptop with all the analysis I'm running the coming months, and its also only got two cores so it would be beneficial to "outsource" this to external servers.
Luckily, in these "cloud computing" times, gaining short term access to X number of servers is easy, and also reasonably priced. But who should I choose? There's two dominating players I'm going to evaluate: Rackspace Cloud and Amazon Web Services.
Hashing passwords
If there's one thing that really annoy me, it's when I forget my password at some random website, ask for a password reminder and get my old password sent back to me in clear text in an email. This shows so many levels of ignorance in the people that developed the system, that I immediately feel like deleting my profile and never come back.
I started thinking about this again today when I read Sony's announcement about the PlayStation Network compromise, and got a bit surprised when they also listed passwords as one of the pieces of information that might have been stolen. Surely Sony can't be that unprofessional, storing passwords in clear text!?
I'm not sure we'll ever figure that out, but anyway, if you're ever finding yourself developing a system that needs to store passwords, please continue reading.