OldBlogger

Another idea for a Christmas present for girls I found today was My Life a portable console game from Flair a UK based toy manufacturer.

To quote the manufacturers blurb My Life is a virtual life simulator designed especially for girls! It’s the ultimate digital pocket games console combining the charm of virtual fashion dolls with the ever increasing interest in video games.

This should keep one of the girls in the family happy, may even get more than one as they can interact with each other a bit and the girls can play together, now that would be a first :-).

Well at least another one of the Christmas list, plenty more to go though and its getting nearer all the time.

Starting to look around for ideas for Christmas Present this year, I was looking at what are tipped to be the top 10 sellers this year.

One I came across that is tipped to be a hit this year is the Elmo Live animatronic doll from Fisher Price.

Elmo is a popular character from the long running childrens TV program Sesame Street, this doll mimics the mannerisms of the TV character and talks and sings, it looks kinda cute and would probably make a great gift for some adults as well.

Well that is one present off the Christmas shopping list, Elmo Live, plenty more left to get yet though.

Today I was looking at the call log in my FritzBox which is a ADSL Modem Router with VOIP and PBX capabilities, and I saw hundreds of anonymous incoming telephone calls of 0 seconds duration.

Our FritzBox is configured to reject anonymous calls so the 0 duration was because of that, we had some problems with silent calls a while ago which is usually tele sales auto dialers with no one available to take the call if it is answered so we had BT (British Telecom) enable the caller ID service on our phone line and set the FritzBox to reject anonymous calls and any other annoying number.

Also set up its do not disturb feature so only certain numbers can get through between the hours of 10pm and 8am, marvelous it is, taken control of the telephone again, we receive the calls we want, when we want.

I spoke to BT about all these anonymous calls and after a little investigation the conclusion was they are coming from abroad as that is the only way they would be as completely anonymous as they are, and basically there is nothing BT can do about it, they suggested keep a log and if it is a problem they could give us a new telephone number. I know BT offer an anonymous caller reject service, whether that would work in this situation I do not know, but the FritzBox does a great job and more beside, with dialing plans and some VOIP accounts set up, all our phone calls are routed over the internet via the cheapest provider saving us a fortune on phone calls as well, and combined with a Dualphone Skype/PSTN telephone system with a couple of handsets it is a good system tailored to fit our requirements precisely.

So back to my original question, I don’t really expect an answer, I expect a computerised auto dialing system has thrown a fit somewhere and I hope when the company receives their phone bills for all these useless phone calls that somebody gets a rocket for incompetence not setting it up and monitoring it properly, this has been going on for 10 days at the moment, that is thousands of calls to our number and presumably we are not the only ones getting hit like this.

The tele marketing companies use these overseas call centres to get around the TPS (Telephone Preference Scheme) and cold calling rules in the UK, as these overseas centres are not covered by them, then when they make a contact and get through their initial sales script they can hand the call to their UK based colleagues as it is no longer a cold call. Two ways to deal with these nuisance calls, hang up immediately or if you have the time waste as much of their time as possible. We have the automated hang up here, works a treat.

Have fun out there and stay safe.

Photos from my trip to Thailand in February to March 2007, we visited Hua Hin for a few days these were taken there.

Photos from my trip to Thailand in November to December 2007. Mostly snaps of the house and surrounding area, with some of Loi Krathong festival in Sukhothai.

Photos from my trip to Thailand in June to July 2007. Mostly snaps of temples and some other view around Old Sukhothai.

Recently I was attempting to open a Paypal account for my company. No problem doing that or at least there should not have been.

I created an account and was waiting for the confirmation email to come through from Paypal to confirm the email address but it never arrived, so I tried requesting it again and still no sign. So before attempting to contact Paypal I looked through the log files on the companies email server to see if it had arrived at the server. The companies email server runs Qmail on Linux, and there was signs of it having arrived but then a strange status 11 message in the qmail-smtpd logs.

After much searching on the Internet for ideas I finally found the problem.

The Qmail installation on the companies email server has the SPF patch incorporated and enabled, look at www.openspf.org if you want to find out more about SPF. I discovered a patch here http://qmail.jms1.net/patches/combined-details.shtml to fix a problem in the SPF patch which causes qmail-smtpd, the program that receives email to seg fault (crash) and return a status 11 return value on some installations, when it receives email from a sender who has a large SPF record, Paypal have a large SPF record.

To prove this was the problem I simply turned off SPF checking on our email server by putting 0 in the file spfbehaviour in the Qmail control directory. I then requested the verification email from Paypal again and through it came no problem. I also realised that I had not been receiving Paypal payment notifications for my personal account for quite a while, with hindsight since SPF was enabled on the email server, and they have started coming through again as well now.

So now I need to recompile our Qmail server with the updated SPF patch.

Having just had an annoying experience attempting to buy some items online I thought I would post my experience here and see if it strikes a chord with other people.

I went to a website to purchase some items for a forthcoming trip, they had just what I wanted or near enough to make no difference, so I put the items into the online shopping basket and clicked the checkout button.

First gripe, why do so many of these online sites want you to create an account, I do not want my details littered all over the internet on unsecured databases behind sites which I have purchased one item from once in my lifetime, in the current climate of identity theft and fraud it dones not seem the best thing to be doing.

So I created an account and got to the payment screen, I intended paying using my Visa Debit card, it used to be simple, select card Amex/Master/Visa/JCB possibly one or two others but it is immediately obvious what you need to select, now particularly with Visa there is a list of three or four different sorts of Visa card, I am not interested in twenty questions to simply make my payment, the payment system can work it out from the card number what type of Visa card it is, it could probably even work out what sort of card it is completely from that, so why do I need to make a guess as to what this site is currently calling my card and get an authorisation declined message when I get it wrong.

Bottom line, maybe its time for some of these sites to revisit there checkout systems, and do some useability testing on them, and design a system that actually helps people purchase items instead of making it as difficult as possible.

Well I have been playing around with a horse race tipping script for a while, it seems reasonably stable and generating reasonable results, its been running for over a year now, so I loaded the tips it has generated in that period into a spreadsheet and looked up the results and starting prices for them, then tried applying some different staking plans to the data to see what returns it might have generated.

One staking plan seems as though it would have generated a profit, whoohoo time to retire, OK maybe not yet.?? One problem with that plan is it requires input throughout the day as the races are run, and I don’t think my current employer is going to be keen on me doing that, they are not very understanding that way for some strange reason.

So its time to automate, for a while now BetFair the gamblling exchange have offered an applications programming interface (API) to their exchange, it uses SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) over the Internet and allows you to run programs on your own PC to do automatically whatever you can do on the website, but originally it was by paid subscription only, a while ago they started offering a free level of subscription, not all the services are available at the free subscription level and some of the ones that are have a limit of only so?? many calls allowed per minute, I looked at what was available and thought well there is enough available to do what I want nicely so lets see if I can write a program to run my plan. Programs have been developed to access the Betfair exchange before the API was available by scraping data of a web browser screen, but they where always a bit fragile, if Betfair changed the screen layout the program broke, and BetFair frowned on there use. Now with an officially sanctioned and documented API better programs are starting to appear.

I firstly wanted to develop a program that would run my plan, then maybe extend it with a nice GUI frontend and graphing and such later on, and possibly develop other BetFair bots as well. I also did not want to spend money on development tools, ideally I wanted it to be cross platform Windows/Linux/Mac, ohh and I wanted to write it in C++.

To start with I am developing on Windows, I grabbed the free Microsoft Express Visual C++ compiler from Microsoft, and added the Windows SDK?? also available for free from them. A tip there, download the .ISO and burn it to CD then install from that, the automatic installer does not seem very reliable, it did not work for me and people I have spoken to had the same problem. This gives me quite a reasonable development environment to do Win32 development in, I am not a fan of .NET which is why I loaded the SDK, I have used the full versions in my professional life and so its a familiar environment to me. Next I needed to be able to use SOAP, I tried several different libraries including the native Microsoft tools which are not cross platform and I couldn’t get them to work anyway, I tried the Axis C++ libraries from Apache which don’t seem to have been worked on for a while and seems to lack any support and had no success with them either, then I found gSOAP, which works an absolute treat, available on all the platforms I am interested in, actively being developed and supported, and has a very nice tool for generating interfaces for the SOAP services you want to talk to from the WSDL for the service, one other requirement when using the BetFair API is that it is only available encrypted via SSL, so I installed the OpenSSL libraries told gSOAP to use them and away it went a few lines of code and I was logged in.

For the GUI stage I have installed wxWidgets which is a cross platform GUI and other bits library, I have not gotten to using that yet but it is installed. At the moment I am generating a C++ class to give me easy access to all the free BetFair API calls, so far my code can login and drill down to the race, next step is getting the runners then the prices, the BetFair API provides two SOAP urls, one for global information such as accounts stuff, and the other URL for exchange specific stuff, this was done apparently because places like Australia insist that bets placed there are done on servers physically in Australia, so BetFair have to be able to send bets to the appropriate exchanges, makes it all the more interesting for developers, I had to rebuild my SOAP library to handle it when I got to that stage, but the gSOAP tools made that painless. So hopefully now I am in a position to push on and complete my BetFair class, then sort out interfacing it to my tip generating system and staking plan then let it rip.

Well thats the story so far, I’ll update this as the the code progresses.

Well I have been trading for around a month now so I thought maybe time to put something up here.

My overall strategy for trading is medium term profits, that is weeks to a month or three, one of the reasons for that is time constraints, I have a full time job at the moment and so that rules out day trading, as I do not have the time to watch the screen in the day and I could not even if I wanted to because my employers firewall and internet policies and filtering will not let me see what I would need. There are other reasons I may go into in later postings.

My trading station is my old laptop with a GPRS data card, its not a very modern nor high spec laptop, an old Dell latitude CPX, 650MHz PIII bought on eBay a couple of years ago, 18 months or so ago I upgraded it to 512Mb RAM, and six months or so ago upgraded the hard disk to 60Gb, I have installed Windows XP Pro. The data card is a Sony Ericsson GC79 I bought on eBay, and I use an Orange PAYG SIM card from my mobile handset and buy the extras bundle of four pounds for 4Mb of data or 30 days or one pound for a days unlimited access, the four pound bundle lasts me for the month very nicely with maybe half a dozen or more sessions.

I either log on in the morning on the way to work after 8am when the markets open or at lunch time in my car in the car park. Although it may sound cumbersome it works well, a little patience may be required ocassionally, I have done my analysis the evening before so all I need to do when logged on is make the transactions.

The other tools I have are a subscription to ShareScope Gold for the daily market data and other numbers I use when making my selections, if you are interested in a subscription then contact me via the contact page on this site and I can refer you, you can then get two months free subscription through their Refer a Friend scheme.

Currently I am concentrating on Contracts For Difference (CFD). The dealer I am using for this is Minicfds (www.minicfds.com), a part of IFX Markets Ltd a long established company, who are now owned by City Index another well established financial company in London with a good reputation.

Minicfds offer a 5 week training academy period where you receive weekly training course notes by post (not email real post) and in this period you can trade as little as one share at a time, of the dealers I investigated their rates seemed most reasonable, with no minimum deal charge, simply a flat .25% of the deal value, they also offer guaranteed stops if required although that costs extra.

The actual trading software is all web based java applets, it seems to work best in Internet Explorer, so although I normally use Firefox thats not a religon, I can be pragmatic about these things.

So far on my initial investment of only five hundred pounds sterling, I have made a little over 20% in this first month, thats after taking out all the charges, so I have now put another five hundred pounds in and am increasing and diversifying my holdings.

My plan is through reinvestment of profit and feeding in additional funds as they become available to grow the account to a level to produce a reasonable monthly income, so I can draw funds monthly and still keep growing the account. Well that is the plan, always good to have a plan, lets see what happens in reality.