Possible Future Projects

September 15, 2008

Here are a couple things I plan working on in the future:

1) A Sandcastle Help File Builder custom builder that allows folks to put Latex code into their help files.  I’ve found a MimeTex wrapper on CodeProject that makes it easy to generate GIF files from Latex snippets.  It looks like  this will be pretty easy to do.  We just have to write a custom builder to scans XML comment files for Latex tags, generates a GIF file for each tag, and the replaces the Latex tag with an IMG tag pointing the image.  Once I complete the 0.1 release of QuantPro and add a Matlab file writer to dnAnalytics, I’ll work on this - probably in mid-October.

2) TradeWorkshop - This will be built on top of QuantPro and will include a library and set of tools for technical analysis, option pricing, and trade strategy building/testing.  I’ll probably start on this towards the end of the year.

3) jsAnalytics - A port of dnAnalytics to JavaScript.  I have web based project coming up and I was planning on using Silverlight.  But with the recent release of several JavaScript VMs (such as V8 and TraceMonkey), I might just go JavaScript if these JS VMs’ performance is close to Silverlight - I still need to do some benchmarking.  It’s 50/50 that I will do this.

4) Pickles* - a firewall and EC2/VMWare/Hyper-V friendly, distributed continuous interrogation/build server.   This something I’ve been thinking about lately, but probably don’t have time to build.  If I did, it  would only have support for subversion and NAnt (the two things I use).  It would be great to easily set up a build grid that has build agents for XP, Vista, 2003, 2008, Debian, RedHat, and OpenSuse.  I’d build Pickles so that the only the reporting/coordination server needs to be publicly accessible.  The build agents themselves could be behind a firewall and would only need to have HTTP client access.  There is only 25% chance that this gets built.
*From my daughter’s currently favorite TV show - Higglytown Heroes.  There is a character named Twinkle that comes up these elaborate, far out scenarios and says “Ah, Pickles” when she is told that they are not feasible.