FogBugz - Estimate & EBS - fogbugz

I have a FogBugz question regarding EBS (Evidence Based Scheduling)...
Developer A estimates Case A at X amount and Developer B ends up taking over Case A before Developer A can get started and before time has been logged against it. If Developer B agrees with the same estimate that Developer A entered, how might we transfer that same estimate to Developer B for the purpose of evidence-based scheduling?
(I want to avoid having Developer B switch the estimate to Y and then back to X)

As per the FogBugz StackExchange question:
On (2) - You have hit it, the only workaround right now (aside from writing a plugin that automatically switches the estimator to the current AssignedTo when work begins), is to switch the estimate to Y and then back to X, or have developer B make a minute change to the estimate to make it his own. Sorry, I know that's not ideal. - Brett Kiefer

Related

Searching for a particular trading platform

I'm trying to find an "Exchange/trading platform" with the following conditions
I must be able to purchase currencies (fiat or crypto) and not need to return back to the base currency. I do not wish to open and close positions. I plan to only take, never make. - Is there a name for this?
The commission needs to be as low as possible preferably less than 0.1% per trade (I want to high-frequency trade)
I'm after API access for the High-frequency trading.
I'm after a large grid/table (every currency into every other currency) for example:
Ideally, 9+ currencies. - I have made this in excel using modified data from https://www.exchangerates.org.uk/currency/currency-exchange-rates-table.html
If all of these exist on a single website, that would be wonderful!
Thank you in advance for any and all help.
Binance.com (crypto) has what you want.
API Access: https://github.com/binance-exchange/binance-official-api-docs
Low Fees: 0.075% for a taker trade
If you use my referral link you will get an additional permanent 10% trading fee reduction.
https://www.binance.com/en/register?ref=OTWO00WS
(I also get 10% so it's a win win)

Black Scholes options pricing

I am investigating how involved creating a very simple options trading platform will be(not for profit but for learning purposed). Can someone please explain the process flow of how Black Scholes option pricing is used within trading platforms, the below is my understanding please correct me if i am mistaken:
1) in memory prices of options derived from Black Scholes formula.
2) an incoming buy order for an option in FIX protocol format.
3) trading platform compares the price of buy order with the price derived from Black Scholes and decides to buy accordingly.
please correct me if i am mistaken anywhere thanks in advance
1) in memory prices of options derived from Black Scholes formula.
That is the job of the user application, Quickfix will not help in any matter regarding this.
2) an incoming buy order for an option in FIX protocol format.
You take the message, parse it and store the rwquired information for yourself.
3) trading platform compares the price of buy order with the price derived from Black Scholes and decides to buy accordingly.
This again is the job of the user application. Inforamtion collected from Step 2 will help you in this.
FIX is a message format for communicating, which should be kept away from your programming logic. Else it will slow down the messaging unnecessarily for no apparent gain.

How to validate paid iOS app

I'm going to deploy new paid app to appstore. This app will connect to our server and download some data (pretty big sometimes).
I'd like to know, is there any way I can check (on server side), that request is going from app, which was really paid (not stolen).
I know that anybody can buy app once and then distribute it (and guys with jailbreaked phones/pads can install it easily). It may cause extra traffic from our servers, and we want to protect us from it.
Or may be I can somehow figure out, that request comes from one sold copy of app? In this case, I can restrict numbers of downloads from one copy, so if it will be widely distributed, it just stops works one day.
Any ideas?
I am copying this verbatim from an email I sent to the cocoa-dev mailing list a while back to someone who had your concerns. The numbers have probably changed, but my rationale still applies as to why I think it's a waste of time to even think about this sort of stuff.
Setting aside all the technical issues, do you have evidence that
jailbreak piracy is a large enough problem to justify you doing all this?
For one, while I don't have a percentage I'm quite certain that it is a
minority of phones that are jailbroken. I run with a pretty tech savvy
crowd and I know only one person who has jailbroken their phone, and I
am fairly confident that techies are more likely to go through the
trouble. (How many average users have the faintest idea of what it
means to "jailbreak" a device?)
Jailbreaking is probably more prevalent in countries and cultures with
less of a tradition of paying for software. But this leads to the
second point...
From your standpoint you (presumably) really care about converting
would-be software pirates into paying customers. If they can't use
your app on a jailbroken device yet don't buy it legitimately, you
haven't accomplished anything economically worthwhile. In fact, you may
be worse off because you lose the (admittedly small) possibility that
the would-be pirate will show off your app to others who might in turn
become paying customers.
So, your calculus ought to be something like:
(# users with compatible devices) * (% with jailbroken devices) * (%
interested in your app) * (% unable or unwilling to circumvent your
protection) * (% who will purchase your app when confronted with copy
protection) * ($ price per sale) > (increase in legitimate sales that
could be obtained by devoting development resources to product
enhancement, marketing, support, etc.)
Let's suppose that 250M compatible devices have been sold, with 150M
distinct users (assuming that there are many people who have replaced
devices or own iPad with an iPhone, etc.) Suppose 10% are jailbroken,
which is what some cursory Googling turns up. That gives us 15M
candidate users.
Now, unless you are writing Angry Birds, it seems unlikely that you will
appeal to any more than 1% of the user base. That leaves 150K users.
Maybe 80% are unwilling to circumvent your copy protection, leaving 120K
users. Now the kicker: how many are then going to want to actually buy
the app? Maybe 5%? That puts you at 6000 users.
So with these admittedly crude guesstimates, if you could gain even 6000
users (out of the 135M non-jailbroken user base postulated above) by
devoting your time and energy to anything else, you'd come out ahead.
Well there are many tries to detect, if a device is jailbroken. But most of them can be tricked out again. So there is no SAFE method of detecting a jailbroken device. But just search for "detect jailbreak".
Than you could send your result to your server (together with the data request) and decide, what to do. But think about the effort, as said by Conrad Shultz.
Anyway you can track, how many apps are sold and how many server requests there are. So you will have youre private statistic, how many copies of your app are stolen. You can upload an update for your app anytime, if it really will be a big problem in your case.

Computer vision application for automotive telematics application

What sort of application can be considered to be the really business winner for automotive telematics applications related to image processing/computer vision ?
here are the criteria :
1. Innovative
2. Social
3. Fun.
Have you read the articles from the DARPA grand challenge winners?
DARPA site
Google Scholar
I believe the "DARPA Grand Challenge" style of automation meets your .1 requirement as there are plenty of innovation on that front.
But I still think that we are a good decade away from a fully autonomous vehicle, even though the technology is almost there. The main reason is that people are still very afraid of relenting control to the computer, even though it might be the safest choice.
The transition will be slow. More and more models will bring small chunks of automation, such as smarter cruise control systems (that's a big winner right now), autonomous parking (in the market for a while now) and anti collision systems.
Which brings us to your .2 and .3
The above mentioned systems are not fun, they are necessary [for increased safety]. Nowadays, Social Media and Fun don't really mix with driving because they distract the driver from its main task. In the future, when you're on the freeway in auto-pilot mode, you will be able to open your laptop and be free to do whatever you want, since computers will be always connected to the internet. So I don't believe the car itself needs to provide you that aspect of entertainment.
What I do believe it's a killer functionality for cars is the enhancement of intelligent comfort systems integrated with biometrics. Nowadays, cars already have things like personal keys that will make it adjust things like seat height and etc according to your preferences, but it would be much nicer if it could automatically identify who is the driver by some biometric feature (iris, etc) and adjust multiple parameters automatically. That's the end of the key. I'm not talking about seat and pedals adjustment, but transmission style (husband likes a more aggressive transmission), performance limiters (daughter cannot exceed 90% of posted limit... the car knows what the limit is according to where it is).
In my opinion, if you implement biometric recognition + autonomous navigation, the possibilities are endless.
Although none of the applications here use computer vision, they are probably the best once out there yet. They have received quite a bit of media hype.

Custom robotics for building an auto CD-loading arm

Where would you recommend that I find a company to develop or buy a CD/DVD loading arm similar to: http://www.dextimus.com/
Preferably programmable via USB but if I only can get one with a serial interface that would be fine. Drivers dont matter - I can interface directly with the unit as my situation is very unique.
If you have some experience with electronics, you can give it a shot and build it yourself, like this or this.
I should add that the schematics and the source code are included, and in more details in the first project.
I suppose I might just shorten this by giving a list of resources first:
http://www.embedinc.com/ I trust this company to do good work. Expensive (actually, they are reasonably priced in the design community, but would be considered expensive by most hobbyists and individuals). Not great at people skills, but very very very good at what they do.
You should check out the various microcontroller communities and forums for hobbyists and professionals that can do this. Search for microchip, atmel, msp430, arm, powerpc, etc.
Sparkfun is a supplier to the electronics community - they have great forums where you can post your request, and you'll find people who might do it for fun with only the cost of materials. Might take longer, might not be as 'professional' or well packaged and delivered, but it might be your best low cost option.
There are many electronic design companies that could do this (for instance, I can do this sort of thing).
But there are many questions you haven't answered (and may not have researched) that could prevent success:
Is this patented?
What CD loading/unloading methods are not patented, are out of patent, or otherwise available?
What is your design goal - a one off just for you, or a device that can be built in the hundreds for industrial use, or a device meant for general office workers/consumers that is built in the millions?
Do you realize that this design qould surely cost mroe than simply buying one, if one is all you need?
As an example, assuming you don't need the nice enclosure and don't mind a 'prototype' look, just the mechanicals, electronics, and firmware design (no software on the PC) would likely be 100-250 billable hours for a design firm. At a cheap $90/hr, that's $9k to nearly $25k for one prototype. Add PC software and the nice enclosure, etc and you'll double that.
If you can find a local 'Make' group (techshop, GoTech, or similar) then you might be able to find a hobbyist that is willing to play with this idea for the cost of materials.
But if you define what your goal is, and give us an idea of your resources you may find a better answer.
-Adam
You can create a very nice simple solution using radio control servos. They come in many sizes, but even the small ones have enough torque to move a big arm to move a cd.
The real bonus with servos is that they normally have 180 degrees of rotation and internally have a variable resistor (rheostat) for positioning feedback. Positioning accuracy is normally within 1 degree of rotation which should be fine for a cd loader.
For picking up the CDs, nothing will beat a vacuum. I recommend a small battery powered vacuum cleaner. Funnel the suction into a 1/4 inch pipe. At the other end of the pipe a one inch diameter cup should provide more than enough lift from the small amount of suction.
As for the pile of blank CDs to be burnt, I would advise in moving the pile up rather than an arm down to it. probably having the top blank cd about 1/4 inch higher than the cd tray - By doing this, the arm only needs to rotate in one axis and the vacuum should be enough to suck the cd back out of the tray.
Now, for the electronics. For the servo control I suggest an rs232 serial servo controller. I've used the one from http://www.basicx.com/Products/servo/servo8t.htm as it also gives back torque information from the current draw.
For the low sample rate digital i/o, i suggest (for windows) inpout32.dll which is a dll to give you direct access to the bits of a parallel port. This will allow you to turn on the vacuum at the correct time and possibly sense when cd's have run out. Note that a parallel port can sink more current than it sources so for outputs you should connect to the 5v power line and set the output pin to 0 to turn on the output and 1 to turn it off.
The other nice option, which is very, very simple to interface and very cheap is to get hold of a picaxe from http://www.rev-ed.co.uk/picaxe/. These use a very simple programming language (a BASIC spin off) allowing you to read serial data in and control the servos and digital I/O on one chip. Last time I used one, the language was a bit simple - if statements had to jumped labels, else didn't exist.
If you do use a microcontroller and servos, it is best to use a dual voltage power supply as servos are noisy and can cause the microcontrollers to reset.
As for switching loads such as the vacuum on, you'll need to use a mosfet or (if money is no object) the simpler option, a solid state relay.
All digital inputs you use on the microcontroller should be pulled either to +V or ground with say a 5k resistor so they never float.
I cannot stress how simple and cheap the picaxes are. They have a built in interpreter so although code space is minimal on the small 8 pin units, they are programmable via a simple serial lead.
Good luck. Once you get into automation control, you'll never be able to stop. I'm in the middle of building a 3 axis CNC router so I can cut parts for other projects (I tell my girlfriend it's so she can cut out xmas decorations!).
You might want to contact Aaron Shephard about his Florian project.
I've found that a really easy board to control stepper motors or sorvos are produced by phidgets - the API is incredibly easy, and available for a vast array of platforms.

Resources