Moment of Inertia [ Hiran ]

Beginning the year with mixed events

Before, I mention, how 2009 has begun for me, I will list down something about my eventful 2008.

• my sister as well as myself fell for chicken pox, one after the other.
• 4 of my very close relatives, committing suicide.
• one of my cousin sisters getting married
• one of my best friends, escaping a not so fatal accident
• one of my best friends, effected by recession
• one of my best friends, going the family way
• some of my colleagues, including my CEO, going the family way
• INXS tying up with TD Ameritrade, and stamping on our vision for Unified Brokerage Access Channel
• launching our Mobile application for trading with TD Ameritrade.
• one of my cousins getting into PhD Sanskrit, following in the footsteps of my grandpa.
• Amma, succumbing to office politics and resigning, later coming to stay with me.

I know the list is endless.

After all this, I thought, may be this year I will see more good news than bad news. But, I was in for a surprise.

• expanded our device coverage for the trading application.
• in talk with some more big brokers, for expansion of business
• one of my cousin's marriage getting fixed
• one of my cousins, getting a divorce notice (shockingly), after 1.5 years of marriage

It has been a month in 2009, with full of mixed emotions. A prayer for giving courage and peace of mind, for things beyond our control, and a constructive attitude towards things that are is in our control, is what I am looking forward to.

I have been selfish, in mentioning events, only having direct relation to me. Those are things, which I feel, everyone is effected and does not need to be explicit.

Still, positive for the year ahead.

FIX, third party software and adoption.

Financial Information eXchange or in short FIX, is an application layer protocol, adopted by a lot of organizations for financial information exchange. Refer, FIX Protocol for references.

I was introduced to it, in October, and a months work went into integrating FIX initiator application, to communicate with FIX gateways implemented by various Brokers. I struggled a bit, since there wasn't a straight forward documentation, to some developer level faqs. More so, because, I was writing a custom implementation for a broker (name cannot be disclosed), who is supposed to have the best FIX gateway among the US Brokers (ofcourse among those, who have adopted FIX).

During development, I was using g++-4.2 version, and I didn't have issues with compiling quickfix. Today, I was trying to deploy the application in my office laptop (for testing), with a fresh ubuntu installation, with g++-4.3. Compiling quickfix gave error like:

../Utility.h:179: error: 'std::strcmp' has not been declared
../Utility.h:181: error: 'std::strlen' has not been declared
../Utility.h:184: error: 'std::memcpy' has not been declared
../Utility.h:185: error: 'std::memset' has not been declared
../Utility.h:189: error: 'std::strerror' has not been declared

I searched further and found this link. I was surprised. I saw this document on porting issues to gcc 4.3.

In the office, I have always been skeptical about using third party software, and try to follow some simple check list before adopting to one of those.

• Use if the software is well documented, with reference to existing bugs, reliability and performance issues.
• Don't use the software, if it is not being maintained for more than last 6 months.
• Avoid using application level frameworks, which is heavy weight and try to abstract a lot of programming constructs.
• See business perspective, as in if a GPL licensed software is used, then what will happen to business, when you are distributing the software.
• Use the software, if time to market is minimal.
• Use it if you cannot think of writing the same piece of software in the near future (for e.g: the linux kernel or gcc compiler.)