Spam

My email address is hidden from spammers without being obscuficated. I just used an image of it. (The ALT text spells my e-mail address out phonetically for accessibility.)

Robots

I've written and used a robots.txt file for the first time, so it'll be interesting to see if this stops robots from chasing down links to PDFs, etc.

Webservices Actually Work Now

I have an entire book section driven by the Amazon REST APIs (What is REST?) , so I think it's fair to say that this stuff really does work now.

Just come back from best manning at my friend's wedding in Shanghai. I can now speak about 9 words of mandarin as well!

Shanghai: The wedding party

Looks interesting - http://www.techcrunch.com/2006/02/05/prosper-launches-social-lending. I wrote a comment but the thread seems to have died down.

Some notes from the Web 2.0 conference. There are also podcasts available from the conference website

Interesting paper from MS Research tries to represent financial derivatives as a small programming language.

Seems to be a great deal more sensible than you might think, since it allows derivatives to be added or subtacted from one another. You could then take all you liablities and net them off against each other... (Counterparty risk and random happenings aside.)

Went for my exam on Wednesday in Reading. Was a bit harder than I imagined, but I still passed quite easily. Architect's certificate here I come!

The Wikipedia has a nice set of articles on derivatives. Including thorny things like credit default swaps.