v1.0.1 is out, and you can log in to TS now. Enjoy.

It's customary in any software to have an annoying little bug in v1.0, so that you need to release v1.0.1 very soon after.

Following that tradition, TS has trouble sending emails. It can send the test email fine, but when it comes time to send the important emails it shows an error.

Look out for v1.0.1 very soon.

The other thing - remember I said that the database was going to be moved to a different database server over the weekend? Well, that got done on Monday, as it turns out.

The database that runs this website seems to be just fine. However, there is a separate database that is used to determine subscription levels, the current version number, etc. That one's having some troubles.

At first the copy they used of that database was more than a year old. It had just a test table in it, and no subscription information or anything like that. "How about you use a new copy?" I said to the webhosts.

So they use a new copy and all the data seems fine. And yet the webservice still didn't work. Eventually I worked out that the user has not been created the same as in the old database. It's all to do with the default schema name.

Let's say there is the schema called "TS" and "NOTTS". What's a schema? Who cares :-) Just, there's two of them, let's say.

In the old database, the default schema was "TS". And in the new, it's "NOTTS". So anyway, the webservice is looking for the tables in the "NOTTS" schema, when actually they're in the "TS" schema.

When my webhosts get around to actually reading the instructions I give them, this will be fixed and you can all use TS again. If you've already got TS running, you'll have 3 days before this causes you a problem.

p.s. Please don't get used to me doing this kind of thing during work.

The first bit of documentation is out - the Thinking Stuff Installation, Upgrading, and Removal Guide (whew) is available on the Download page (it's a pdf document).

In it is everything you ever wanted to know and more about, well, installing, upgrading, and removing TS.

So I went looking for the post where I said I would extend everybody's subscription by the time it took from then until the actual release of v1.0. Turned out to be a Knowledge Base entry. In it I say "it should be about 14 days". The actual number is 115 days.

Damn my integrity! :-)

What happened was, this whole not working with Win2000 put a halt on the release of v1.0, so I added more and more features, and then decided I'd make it v1.0 even without it working on Win2000, and then a few more features later it's now finally done.

Umm... yeah. That software that I've been working on for a couple of years... it's done. Go get it.

What am I going to do with all my free time?? :-)

Actually the answer is... keep working on the software. I'm going to try and incorporate Medved Quotetracker, so a whole bunch of other brokers become available. It would be good to have a broker that has a free API good enough to trade real money with. Oanda's is great, but geez I'd wish they'd bring the price down... a lot.

Medved Quotetracker's list of possible brokers is quite long, although at first TS will continue to be currency-trading only.

Before that though, it's documentation city. First up will be the Installation, Upgrading, and Removal Guide. Then the User Manual.

I promised back in January to extend all current subscriptions forward by the amount of time it took from that time to release v1.0. So that's about 3.5 months. My poor wallet :-)

The offer of free alerts until the end of June will stand. The longer you wait, the less days until the end of June. What I mean is, you subscribe today (15th April), and you get about 2.5 months of free alerts. You subscribe on the 15th of May, and you get only 1.5 months of free alerts. So sign up today! :-)

There is probably only one thing in existence that's more expensive in Australia than it is in Japan. Why did it have to be one of my favourite foods??

I'm talking about sushi. The trick is to get enough wasabi for the buzz, but not so much wasabi that you get the wasabi-headache. That balancing act is also part of the fun of eating sushi. Actually my sharemate in Osaka didn't have that problem - he always gave himself a big wasabi-headache on purpose.

Anyway, so I'm looking around the Gold Coast for a fairly cheap sushi place. Seems like the plates start at $2.50, and that's just for the egg ones - for the tuna and salmon they are $3.50.

Walking around one day I came across a narrow arcade, with small shops, that actually reminded me of Japan. Except for the surfboard store. And in the middle of that arcade there was a Japanese restaurant. I looked through the prices. It said egg sushi was $2, tuna and salmon were $2.50. "Wow" I thought. I expected that the portion size would be smaller, but surely it was a good deal nonetheless.

So tonight I went there. And the lady came over and I gave my order - "tuna" I said.

As soon as she said "1?" I realised my mistake. Normally a plate of sushi has 2 pieces of sushi on it. When she said "1?" I realised that these were the prices for just 1 piece. And therefore the prices would need to be doubled to compare them with other restaurants. So I wasn't going to be paying $2.50 for the tuna, I was going to be paying $5. And I wasn't going to be paying $2 for the egg, I was going to be paying $4.

As you can see, those prices are well above the normal $2.50 for a plate of egg, and $3.50 for a plate of tuna.

In Japanese I thought to myself "maitta", which has the dictionary meaning of: "I'm beaten".

Still, good quality. But maitta.

I think Friday nights will become "search for a good and cheap Japanese restaurant" night. Until now I had always been going to the same place. Then I found out the pretty waitress there was my boss's girlfriend. It's a small world. Or at least the Gold Coast is a small city.

Just now I called a company, went through the normal phone menu system, and had an "I can't *@#$ing believe it!" moment.

They had ads in the phone menu. Not during the waiting time after you've made all the selections and you're waiting for an operator. I can understand a company having ads instead of repeating a jingle over and over. But no, they put the ads before they even give out the menu options so you have to listen through the ad to get to the options.

It's a good way, I thought, to make an annoying process even more annoying. Nice work.

This website has gone down for a couple of hours about once every two days or so, since the move to the new server which was supposed to be more reliable.

There's two parts to a website that offers dynamic content such as this one. There is the file server, and there is the database server.

The current problem is with the database server. We know that much due to the symptoms displayed, but I'm not sure my webhosts know exactly what the problem is (otherwise it would be fixed by now, surely).

So anyway, the other weekend I was moved to a different file server. And this weekend my database is going to be moved to a different database server. Will that fix the problem? Recent history would suggest that it won't. But, can't blame the webhosts for giving it a try.

Fingers crossed. Expected downtime: between none and a lot.

So fresh from getting my website fixed, my broadband connection went down on Sunday morning. It came back up Monday night - about 36 hours later.

See when I decided upon the company to use for broadband, I went with a small local company. And that company shut down over the Easter break. No 24/7 technical support. And nobody checking the ol' answering machine either, apparently.

So I used my parents' dial-up connection, only to find that it lets me open some websites, but not others. For example, I couldn't open www.microsoft.com. But I could get www.google.com. Potentially I was restricted to content hosted in Australia, but that's speculation - it's actually hard to tell where the content is physically located (I'm guessing Google has mirrored servers all over the shop).

So yeah, pretty sure I've done all the coding for v1.0, but just like everybody else - I can't use TS unless I've got a connection to the Internet. And my website was one of those that I couldn't connect to. So no testing was possible, so it wasn't released this Easter weekend as I'd hoped. Not that I'd told anyone it was going to be out this weekend, but that was the plan. Anyway...

What I did do was spend some time on the documentation. I've got an installation/upgrading/removal guide and a user manual underway. But, if there is something more boring than writing documentation, I'm not sure what that would be. (I don't think there's any problem if a future employer reads that, because I'm fairly sure it's a wide-held belief).

Actually I do know - more boring than writing documentation for your own software, is writing documentation for someone else's. I know, because that's part of my current contract :-)

For real! This time :-)

TS is stable, it does what it says it does, and has enough features to be extremely useful. So v1.0 is coming very shortly.

Coming after that is both a User Manual and Installation Guide. Yay.

What I think is lacking is another broker.

We have one free broker - Gain Capital - that we can use while in the test phase. I haven't made it available for use with real trading due to several issues listed here.

And we have one expensive broker - Oanda - that arguably has the best API, but is, well, expensive. Especially for people just starting out.

So what TS needs is a free broker whose API is good enough that we can trade in a live account. That would complete the set.

Interactive Brokers springs to most peoples' minds. So IB is the next broker that I'm going to try to connect to with TS, although I give no guarantees. One of the issues is that their demo API account does not give currency prices. Or at least it didn't when I looked at it a while ago. Stay tuned.

So here's a question to all readers: what do you want in TS that isn't there already?

Obviously I can't do everything that everybody wants. And TS is never going to be able to handle all possible trading systems ever thought of. But if there was some kind of consensus that a particular feature would be very handy indeed, well, that'd probably get done.

Don't hold back in coming forward. You can see what I already have planned in the Road Map.

Also, please note that these articles explain where I'm coming from with regards currency trading, and so the features available in TS reflect this.

You can email or post a comment.

Please forgive my self-indulgence :-)

To summarise my life of the last few years into one word, I would say "extremes".

I lived in the megopolis of Tokyo for 9 months, with no job other than my own software.

Then I moved to the mere metropolis of Osaka for 9 months, still with no job other than my own software.

My Dad has an accident with a steam-roller (no kidding), and I moved to my parents' farm in outback Australia to help them out. The closest neighbour to my parents is about 1km away. It's a little different to Tokyo and Osaka (less pretty girls :-)

So I stayed there for a year, which was about 9 months too long. Not only does Dad religiously watch the wrestling (WWE) on both Wednesday and Friday, he also religiously watches the repeats of those shows on Saturday and Sunday, respectively.

Anyway, from the boondocks I move to the heart of Surfers Paradise on the Gold Coast, about 100m from the beach. And after 3 years of only working for myself, I return to a "proper" job.

You're right - going back to work for someone else after not doing it for 3 years was a big, big change. But the routine has settled now and it's almost like I never left.

Almost...

There's a gym at work, and the most common thing I hear while I'm in the locker room is how the weekend came around so quickly, or how the weekend went so quickly, or how people are really looking forward to the weekend, or holidays. That kind of thing.

I sense people understand that life is passing them by, but also that they don't realise fully what that means.

If there is a creator, or divine spirit, or God, I don't think He meant for us to spend most of our lives behind a desk. Yes, it's good to be able to live comfortably and not worry about how to pay the bills.

But shouldn't we want more than that - to be able to live comfortably and not worry about how to pay the bills without the need to spend most of our waking hours doing something that we probably wouldn't do if we had a choice?

And yet in the locker room I hear nothing about how people are trying to break free. Either they aren't doing it, or we live in a culture where we aren't allowed to say out loud that we're trying to break free. Probably a bit of both.

Dunno. I think if you spend half of Saturday reading every word of the newspaper, and then half of Sunday doing the same thing, I don't think you can complain that the weekend went so quick.

Anyway, until I'm financially free, I guess I can't judge others.

At the moment I'm half-way through my 6-month contract. During the 6 months I wanted savings to go up, weight to come down, and a girlfriend. And at the moment everything's headed in the right direction.

My webhost, like a lot of others, has a 99.9% uptime guarantee. However, I'm not sure they've ever met that guarantee, so recently I questioned them what the "guarantee" actually means.

Yada yada yada I got moved to a better server. Yay for me. However...

They asked me when I would like the move to take place, and I gave times on the weekend.

I asked them how long they expected the site would be down while the move took place. "There shouldn't be any outage," they said. They copy the files to the different server, point everything to that new server, and when that takes effect around the world, they delete the files from the old server.

Great, I thought.

I think the site finally came back up on Wednesday sometime. Anyway, we're on a better server, and it's all set now, I thought.

Later that day the site went down again for a few hours.

And then it was fixed. Anyway, we're on a better server, and it's all set now, I thought.

The next day the site went down again for a few hours.

And then it was fixed. Anyway, we're on a better server, and it's all set now, I thought.

The next day the site went down again for a few hours.

Finally I got a hold of someone to talk to live. (Until then it was all emails). That person investigated, and found that when they moved my site to the new server, they hadn't set some permissions properly.

So that's fixed now. But what it doesn't explain is why the site was actually up at some points during the last few days.

Anyway, we're on a better server, and it's all set now...

So let's give a grace period of a few weeks before deciding whether to change webhosts or not. More problems and we move. No problems and we stay.