Dirk.Net

As the Economist’s Buttonwood points out, when everyone heads for the exit, all get squeezed. This defeats all hedging strategies. The late eighties and nineties brought us the end of a formulaic approach to politics (Socialism vs. Capitalism); the current decade follows up with the end of a formulaic approach to investing (Long vs. Short, Stocks vs. Bonds etc.).

A brilliant comment by Hyun-U Sohn sums it up:

The article betrays the view of correlations and other statistics as describing laws of some kind. That you distinguish between dynamic and static correlations and between “short”- and “long”-term ones doesn’t really make a difference. The implicit belief that there are hidden laws, to be uncovered by data analysis and then extrapolated to future investment decisions/ advice, is one of the more fundamental, philosophical factors behind today’s crisis and the rise of financial “engineering” that preceded it.
My own view is that there are no laws, only analogies. Statistics can serve as summaries of history and as expressions of subjective beliefs about the future or about hidden facts. The circumstances that led to the data showing low correlations between, say, commodities and equities in one period were specific to their time. They may or may not look similar in the future, and even if they were completely dissimilar, they may still give rise to a set of similar data for a while before the dissimilarities show, perhaps abruptly.

In Ubuntu Gutsy, try this:

sudo apt-get -t sarge-backports install postgresql-client-8.3

In Netbeans there currently (Version 6.1) is no built-in option to save a windows layout, you can only do a “Reset Windows”  (in the Window menu) to get back to the factory layout.
I’ve been looking for a solution to get a *cough* Visual Studio *cough* like layout (all navigation on the right of the code window) and found a great plugin called Perspective (click this link twice as for some reason on the first click it will give you the plugin home page) that lets you save a layout and switch easily between layouts (er, perpectives). You can’t download it using the Netbeans plugin installer as it’s not signed, so you’ll have to download and install from disk: 

If you’re using the Better Nested Set plugin in your 2.1 Rails app and get an error such as

ArgumentError: wrong number of arguments (3 for 2)
        from /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/activerecord-2.1.0/lib/active_record/base.rb:2479:in `attributes_with_quotes’

upon saving your model or upon calling update_attributes, you have two options:

• Move to Awesome Nested Set, a drop-in replacement for BNS which has some additional features, among them STI (Single Table Inheritance).
• Apply this patch developed by Tony Hillerson, to your Better Nested Set plugin.

Happy nesting!

You’ve surely read this article on the topic, which describes a long (and arduous) process to set up dual monitors on an Ubuntu system with a lowly graphics chip such as the Intel 945GM.

However, there is a much easier option which is outlined here: 

For my system, all I had to was add the bold line in /etc/X11/xorg.conf

Section "Screen"
	Identifier	"Default Screen"
	Device		"Intel Corporation Mobile 945GM/GMS, 943/940GML Express Integrated Graphics Controller"
	Monitor		"Generic Monitor"
	DefaultDepth	24
	SubSection "Display"
		Modes		"1280x800"
Virtual                 2048 2048
	EndSubSection
EndSection

I then “activate” the secondary monitor with the command:

xrandr –output LVDS –below VGA

There is a 2048 pixel limit for the height and the width of the total display. For me that’s no problem as I have a vertical setup (secondary screen ABOVE notebook screen), but your mileage may vary if you need the screens side-by-side.