Olga and Giorgio’s daughter got baptised on Saturday. Pictures are available here.
Archive for October, 2005
Baptism of Sofia
Monday, October 31st, 2005FpML Conference 2005
Monday, October 31st, 2005Last Wednesday we had the FpML Conference in New York. The feedback was quite positive at the end but there were fewer people than last year’s conference in London. Counting speakers, the event joined around 65 FpMLers. The event was good at the end because I think the quality of the speakers was in general pretty high.
The first presentation was about DSWG. DSWG is an extension of FpML for position reporting purposes developed by a group of 50 US hedge funds. I am amazed by the focus DSWG has received during the last year. These extensions have received more attention than the actual standard. Anyway, the presentation was quite good but the only issue raised was ‘defauling values’. FpML products require more information than the one needed for position reporting purposes so they default some of the data with dummy values. One thing that concerns me is that people would start seeing defaulting values as best practice while what you would like is to have a schema accurately representing the information needed for position reporting. In addition, there are other issues in terms of integration between the two standards such as product coverage, placement of valuation information,…
The presentation from JP Morgan was very good. It was business oriented but gave the sense of two things:
- the strong commitment they have with FpML and,
- it takes time for an organization to spread an infrastructure based on a standard.
First, they used FpML for connections to third-party platforms such as SwapsWire. Nowadays, they are spreading FpML and the extensions they developed (IBML) across the entire set of derivatives technology projects. It was interesting to see the evolution.
The moving forward panel was good but it didn’t give a lot of new ideas. One representative of an asset manager organization asked a VP of a service provider when they were going to use pure FpML. There wasn’t a clear response (of course not). But it was a good question.
There was a presentation from CITCO on how to extended FpML to cover securities. They used version 4.2 because they wanted to use allocations so I asked the guy about his experience using them and he answered that so far he was very pleased. I still think allocations need work but anyway…
The extending FpML part was “an honest debate”, as someone commented afterwards. I presented two parts: a technical session and a case. People asked questions and I got pretty good feedback on the evaluations so it was good. Ben did a very good analysis explaining why wrapping may be a good choice for some cases. He didn’t convince me but the presentatioin was very good. Some service providers explained their approaches. Brian said that he first was not sure that the way recommended by the AWG to do extensions was the best way but that he tried with DSWG and it worked very well. Some other approaches were disturbing since they reused the FpML type definition but they cherry-picked them. I think this undermines interoperability…
Anyway, I think in general it was a good conference.
Digital Life 2005
Monday, October 17th, 2005I went to Digital Life on Saturday here in New York. The best things I saw were:
- Nokia phones: upcoming phones were exhibited there. There was one phone integrating video camera, photo camera, mp3 player, and phone into one gadget. The quality of the images was quite impressive.
- Gaming with movement interaction: there were a lot of games were the player’s movement reflected on the game’s action. Sort of Virtual Reality stuff. For instance, you could play bowling by holding a ball connected to the console and by making the movement of throwing the ball you were actually throwing it in the game. The same for baseball games by holding a bat or fighting type games.
- iPod accessories: iPod has been the big thing recently and a lot of appliances to integrate it with your car or to control it remotely at your home were exhibited.
- I was particularly interested in PSP accessories and I found some interesting stuff offered by Nyko.
- There were a lot of consoles, xBox, Sega,…you could play there for hours.
- Carmen Electra and Rachel Hunter
The worst thing was the number of companies exhibiting. I was expecting to see more technology and software companies i.e. Dell, Sony, Google,…
InfoSys 141 Search Engines
Wednesday, October 12th, 2005Don’t miss some of the webcasts of the SIMS class Search Engines: Technology, Society and Business.
I strongly recommend Sergey Brin’s Views on Search, Google, and Life.
By the way, I found quite surprising his response regarding tagging, vocabularies,…He said something like:
I don’t think people should spend time doing tagging, vocabularies,…They should spend time on improving algorithms to understand languages. Languages are invented already. Esperanto failed…
I don’t think search technology can currently replace tagging and vocabularies in all domains and situations. Esperanto failed but English has become the “standard” language. I still think standards are useful for a lot of things…
What is “Web 2.0″?
Wednesday, October 12th, 2005These past week I learned about the new buzzword. It is called Web 2.0.
At least in the two tech gurus’ minds, “Web 2.0″ stands for the idea that the Internet is evolving from a collection of static pages into a vehicle for software services, especially those that foster self-publishing, participation, and collaboration.
Meaning blogging, sharing photos, things like wikipedia,…
Extracted from an interesting article from technology review available here.
Want more? take a look at this posting from danah boyd.
Novations article mentioning FpML
Thursday, October 6th, 2005Scream Machine
Monday, October 3rd, 2005We went to Six Flags yesterday 
We went to the park located in New Jersey. I wanted to go to all the attractions but the fact is…that I got very, very dizzy after experiencing the Scream Machine 
This was the second roller coaster of the day, after beginning the day with Superman Ultimate Flight. I couldn’t do much the rest of the morning.. but I was able to have fun with the karts they have by winning a fan of Real Madrid
It’s worth mentioning the halloween atmosphere they have. It’s very impressive, specially at night.
Pictures will come soon.