[gentoo-user] [WAY OT] GUI programming for Linux (and Windows possibly)
Hi, I know this is WAY off topic for this list but there's a lot of smart, experienced people here so I figured I'd look for a little guidance and then possibly join another email list that's more appropriate. These days I'm trading stock index futures for a living. I have data files that I analyze in Excel over the weekend to help me make decisions about how to trade the coming week, but I'm always fighting Excel as it really isn't intended for the sort of math I want to do. The math's not difficult, but I need to look at various ranges, manage, sort and extract data from arrays, and amd then create charts. This is getting pretty difficult in Excel these days so I've started to wonder about writing a simple app to do what I need to do. It's not generally difficult stuff but it requires (or I prefer) a lot of small charts. I'm vaguely familiar with C Pascal, but haven't programmed in years. I don't know C++ at all. I was trained as an EE. So the main question is what sort of language (and possibly programming environment) should a complete novice look at to get his feet wet with GUI programming. I'd like something fairly light - performance probably won't be a huge problem - that I could run under Cygwin or maybe compile to run native in Windows should that ever become useful. For now it's probably a relatively simple Linux app that I'd likely run once a week on Saturday morning on 15 to 20 databases I collect on Friday night. If you can recommend a good list or forum for silly folks like me - know nothing about programming and have to ask lots os stupid beginner questions - I'd greatly appreciate that also. Thanks in advance! Cheers, Mark
Re: [gentoo-user] [WAY OT] GUI programming for Linux (and Windows possibly)
Mark, Mark Knecht markkne...@gmail.com writes: So the main question is what sort of language (and possibly programming environment) should a complete novice look at to get his feet wet with GUI programming. I'd like something fairly light - performance probably won't be a huge problem - that I could run under Cygwin or maybe compile to run native in Windows should that ever become useful. For now it's probably a relatively simple Linux app that I'd likely run once a week on Saturday morning on 15 to 20 databases I collect on Friday night. One possibility is R (http://www.r-project.org/). It has very good graphing facilities, can access various database engines, is multi-platform and unless you process immense quantities of data, should be fast enough. There may be people on the R mailing list doing the kind of thing that you want and there may be an add-on package that matches your needs (there are hundreds of add-ons). Lightweight? No, but you don't need to learn all of it, just the bits relevant to your usage. R is in portage. Another possibility is Root (http://root.cern.ch/drupal/) but it requires you to program in C++ (but there are Python and Ruby bindings) and is probably a steeper curve to ascend than R. However, Root is capable of processing huge amounts of data quickly -- that is what it was designed for. Anything you can do in R you can do in Root, but you will write more of the application yourself rather than using canned routines. I have seen messages on the Root mailing list from people working with fiscal data. Root is not lightweight, but is _is_ very powerful. Root is in portage. I'm sure there are other very capable systems out there, these are two that I use (or have used). Cheers, Roger
Re: [gentoo-user] [WAY OT] GUI programming for Linux (and Windows possibly)
Mark Knecht wrote: These days I'm trading stock index futures for a living. I have data files that I analyze in Excel over the weekend to help me make decisions about how to trade the coming week, but I'm always fighting Excel as it really isn't intended for the sort of math I want to do. The math's not difficult, but I need to look at various ranges, manage, sort and extract data from arrays, and amd then create charts. This is getting pretty difficult in Excel these days so I've started to wonder about writing a simple app to do what I need to do. It's not generally difficult stuff but it requires (or I prefer) a lot of small charts. I'm vaguely familiar with C Pascal, but haven't programmed in years. I don't know C++ at all. I was trained as an EE. Have you looked at using Octave? It's a Matlab clone (and thus very C-like), can output to Gnuplot and you can also create filters of your own and output to Graphviz. The language R can perhaps also be of use, depending on what you wish to accomplish... So the main question is what sort of language (and possibly programming environment) should a complete novice look at to get his feet wet with GUI programming. I'd like something fairly light - performance probably won't be a huge problem - that I could run under Cygwin or maybe compile to run native in Windows should that ever become useful. For now it's probably a relatively simple Linux app that I'd likely run once a week on Saturday morning on 15 to 20 databases I collect on Friday night. Why Windows? I'm merely curious, not trying to criticize... Best regards Peter K
Re: [gentoo-user] [WAY OT] GUI programming for Linux (and Windows possibly)
On Sun, Jun 28, 2009 at 9:49 AM, Roger Masonrma...@mun.ca wrote: Mark, Mark Knecht markkne...@gmail.com writes: So the main question is what sort of language (and possibly programming environment) should a complete novice look at to get his feet wet with GUI programming. I'd like something fairly light - performance probably won't be a huge problem - that I could run under Cygwin or maybe compile to run native in Windows should that ever become useful. For now it's probably a relatively simple Linux app that I'd likely run once a week on Saturday morning on 15 to 20 databases I collect on Friday night. One possibility is R (http://www.r-project.org/). It has very good graphing facilities, can access various database engines, is multi-platform and unless you process immense quantities of data, should be fast enough. There may be people on the R mailing list doing the kind of thing that you want and there may be an add-on package that matches your needs (there are hundreds of add-ons). Lightweight? No, but you don't need to learn all of it, just the bits relevant to your usage. R is in portage. Another possibility is Root (http://root.cern.ch/drupal/) but it requires you to program in C++ (but there are Python and Ruby bindings) and is probably a steeper curve to ascend than R. However, Root is capable of processing huge amounts of data quickly -- that is what it was designed for. Anything you can do in R you can do in Root, but you will write more of the application yourself rather than using canned routines. I have seen messages on the Root mailing list from people working with fiscal data. Root is not lightweight, but is _is_ very powerful. Root is in portage. I'm sure there are other very capable systems out there, these are two that I use (or have used). Cheers, Roger Actually, I have R on one machine now. I haven't done much with it. There's a good Google University YouTube statistics course you can take online for free - was taught at Google, recorded an put on you Tube, on data mining that uses R. I went through about 4 hours of that but got distracted by life and didn't finish it. R might be a good solution in that I could play on Linux but always be able to go to windows if the need arose. Thanks, Mark
Re: [gentoo-user] [WAY OT] GUI programming for Linux (and Windows possibly)
On Sun, Jun 28, 2009 at 10:09 AM, pkpete...@coolmail.se wrote: Mark Knecht wrote: These days I'm trading stock index futures for a living. I have data files that I analyze in Excel over the weekend to help me make decisions about how to trade the coming week, but I'm always fighting Excel as it really isn't intended for the sort of math I want to do. The math's not difficult, but I need to look at various ranges, manage, sort and extract data from arrays, and amd then create charts. This is getting pretty difficult in Excel these days so I've started to wonder about writing a simple app to do what I need to do. It's not generally difficult stuff but it requires (or I prefer) a lot of small charts. I'm vaguely familiar with C Pascal, but haven't programmed in years. I don't know C++ at all. I was trained as an EE. Have you looked at using Octave? It's a Matlab clone (and thus very C-like), can output to Gnuplot and you can also create filters of your own and output to Graphviz. The language R can perhaps also be of use, depending on what you wish to accomplish... I haven't looked at Octave. I was thinking I should program a stand alone app and not really use an existing app. It's jsut where my head was. So the main question is what sort of language (and possibly programming environment) should a complete novice look at to get his feet wet with GUI programming. I'd like something fairly light - performance probably won't be a huge problem - that I could run under Cygwin or maybe compile to run native in Windows should that ever become useful. For now it's probably a relatively simple Linux app that I'd likely run once a week on Saturday morning on 15 to 20 databases I collect on Friday night. Why Windows? I'm merely curious, not trying to criticize... No offense taken. All the trading is done on the Windows platform using proprietary trading platform apps. All the datafiles are therefore sitting in Windows and it just seems easier to just run a small app of my own there. I sometimes travel but still need to trade so my laptop would be running Windows at that time. I'd rather do my learning in the Linux environment. Less risk I'll blow away my whole machines, etc., and generally a nicer group of people cannot be found. :-) - Mark
Re: [gentoo-user] [WAY OT] GUI programming for Linux (and Windows possibly)
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 Mark Knecht wrote: Hi, I know this is WAY off topic for this list but there's a lot of smart, experienced people here so I figured I'd look for a little guidance and then possibly join another email list that's more appropriate. These days I'm trading stock index futures for a living. I have data files that I analyze in Excel over the weekend to help me make decisions about how to trade the coming week, but I'm always fighting Excel as it really isn't intended for the sort of math I want to do. The math's not difficult, but I need to look at various ranges, manage, sort and extract data from arrays, and amd then create charts. This is getting pretty difficult in Excel these days so I've started to wonder about writing a simple app to do what I need to do. It's not generally difficult stuff but it requires (or I prefer) a lot of small charts. I'm vaguely familiar with C Pascal, but haven't programmed in years. I don't know C++ at all. I was trained as an EE. So the main question is what sort of language (and possibly programming environment) should a complete novice look at to get his feet wet with GUI programming. I'd like something fairly light - performance probably won't be a huge problem - that I could run under Cygwin or maybe compile to run native in Windows should that ever become useful. For now it's probably a relatively simple Linux app that I'd likely run once a week on Saturday morning on 15 to 20 databases I collect on Friday night. If you can recommend a good list or forum for silly folks like me - know nothing about programming and have to ask lots os stupid beginner questions - I'd greatly appreciate that also. #friendly-coders on freenode is full of friendly people. Depending on how much effort you are willing to put in, I would probably suggest looking at some form of macro set for a spreadsheet (Excel and OO Calc both use basic variants, Gnumeric has a python interpreter.) Another possibility if you don't need much interactivity on the GUI would be to create a script + C-mini-app using GnuPlot to generate your graphs. Just a few thoughts... Rob. -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- Version: GnuPG v2.0.11 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org iEYEARECAAYFAkpHrWMACgkQZr0UhZgPVmyffgCg97gheECMbXqdhH640aGkxuWM fjoAoOwNt9vD+uNIt/iENZ0svkSR6B+4 =I+WH -END PGP SIGNATURE-
Re: [gentoo-user] [WAY OT] GUI programming for Linux (and Windows possibly)
On Sun, Jun 28, 2009 at 10:50 AM, Robert Bridgerob...@robbieab.com wrote: -BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 Mark Knecht wrote: Hi, I know this is WAY off topic for this list but there's a lot of smart, experienced people here so I figured I'd look for a little guidance and then possibly join another email list that's more appropriate. These days I'm trading stock index futures for a living. I have data files that I analyze in Excel over the weekend to help me make decisions about how to trade the coming week, but I'm always fighting Excel as it really isn't intended for the sort of math I want to do. The math's not difficult, but I need to look at various ranges, manage, sort and extract data from arrays, and amd then create charts. This is getting pretty difficult in Excel these days so I've started to wonder about writing a simple app to do what I need to do. It's not generally difficult stuff but it requires (or I prefer) a lot of small charts. I'm vaguely familiar with C Pascal, but haven't programmed in years. I don't know C++ at all. I was trained as an EE. So the main question is what sort of language (and possibly programming environment) should a complete novice look at to get his feet wet with GUI programming. I'd like something fairly light - performance probably won't be a huge problem - that I could run under Cygwin or maybe compile to run native in Windows should that ever become useful. For now it's probably a relatively simple Linux app that I'd likely run once a week on Saturday morning on 15 to 20 databases I collect on Friday night. If you can recommend a good list or forum for silly folks like me - know nothing about programming and have to ask lots os stupid beginner questions - I'd greatly appreciate that also. #friendly-coders on freenode is full of friendly people. Depending on how much effort you are willing to put in, I would probably suggest looking at some form of macro set for a spreadsheet (Excel and OO Calc both use basic variants, Gnumeric has a python interpreter.) Another possibility if you don't need much interactivity on the GUI would be to create a script + C-mini-app using GnuPlot to generate your graphs. Just a few thoughts... Rob. -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- Version: GnuPG v2.0.11 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org iEYEARECAAYFAkpHrWMACgkQZr0UhZgPVmyffgCg97gheECMbXqdhH640aGkxuWM fjoAoOwNt9vD+uNIt/iENZ0svkSR6B+4 =I+WH -END PGP SIGNATURE- Actually I'm liking the suggest to try using R. I have already managed to read my data files using the read.csv function. When I understand headers and tables better I'll likely be able to make my plots from that data pretty easily. It's cross platform so it solves that problem and keeps me focused on where I might add value - evaluating the market data - and not worrying about how to program in C or Python. Open to other ideas but this one is looking pretty good to me so far. Thanks, Mark
Re: [gentoo-user] [WAY OT] GUI programming for Linux (and Windows possibly)
On 6/28/09, Mark Knecht markkne...@gmail.com wrote: Actually I'm liking the suggest to try using R. I have already managed to read my data files using the read.csv function. When I understand headers and tables better I'll likely be able to make my plots from that data pretty easily. It's cross platform so it solves that problem and keeps me focused on where I might add value - evaluating the market data - and not worrying about how to program in C or Python. Open to other ideas but this one is looking pretty good to me so far. If you have your data in a text-like, tabular format that R likes then you might also try feeding them into a data mining package like Weka. Depending on what kind of analysis you are looking for, it might be even better (and easier) than R -- or entirely unsuitable. :) -- Arttu V.
Re: [gentoo-user] [WAY OT] GUI programming for Linux (and Windows possibly)
On Sun, Jun 28, 2009 at 11:23 AM, Arttu V.arttu...@gmail.com wrote: On 6/28/09, Mark Knecht markkne...@gmail.com wrote: Actually I'm liking the suggest to try using R. I have already managed to read my data files using the read.csv function. When I understand headers and tables better I'll likely be able to make my plots from that data pretty easily. It's cross platform so it solves that problem and keeps me focused on where I might add value - evaluating the market data - and not worrying about how to program in C or Python. Open to other ideas but this one is looking pretty good to me so far. If you have your data in a text-like, tabular format that R likes then you might also try feeding them into a data mining package like Weka. Depending on what kind of analysis you are looking for, it might be even better (and easier) than R -- or entirely unsuitable. :) -- Arttu V. Thanks Arttu. I've already 'data mined' by hand, found some stuff that's working for me and need to track it using charts and tables in an easy manner. If I can handle the R programming for doing this then this will work fine. That said it was a lot of work to data mine by hand so down the road when it's time to do more then I'll likely want to look at something like Weka. Cheers, Mark
Re: [gentoo-user] [WAY OT] GUI programming for Linux (and Windows possibly)
Mark Knecht schrieb: [...] These days I'm trading stock index futures for a living. I have data files that I analyze in Excel over the weekend to help me make decisions about how to trade the coming week, but I'm always fighting Excel as it really isn't intended for the sort of math I want to do. The math's not difficult, but I need to look at various ranges, manage, sort and extract data from arrays, and amd then create charts. This is getting pretty difficult in Excel these days so I've started to wonder about writing a simple app to do what I need to do. It's not generally difficult stuff but it requires (or I prefer) a lot of small charts. I'm vaguely familiar with C Pascal, but haven't programmed in years. I don't know C++ at all. I was trained as an EE. [...] This not what you asked for, but you might want to take a look at http://sourceforge.net/projects/jstock A friend of mine uses it for his stock trading. signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature
Re: [gentoo-user] [WAY OT] GUI programming for Linux (and Windows possibly)
On Sun, Jun 28, 2009 at 1:05 PM, Florian Philippli...@f_philipp.fastmail.net wrote: Mark Knecht schrieb: [...] These days I'm trading stock index futures for a living. I have data files that I analyze in Excel over the weekend to help me make decisions about how to trade the coming week, but I'm always fighting Excel as it really isn't intended for the sort of math I want to do. The math's not difficult, but I need to look at various ranges, manage, sort and extract data from arrays, and amd then create charts. This is getting pretty difficult in Excel these days so I've started to wonder about writing a simple app to do what I need to do. It's not generally difficult stuff but it requires (or I prefer) a lot of small charts. I'm vaguely familiar with C Pascal, but haven't programmed in years. I don't know C++ at all. I was trained as an EE. [...] This not what you asked for, but you might want to take a look at http://sourceforge.net/projects/jstock A friend of mine uses it for his stock trading. Yeah, I know about it. It's really for tracking, not trading. All my trading is done on the TradeStation platform. I've programmed my trading systems in EasyLanguage and all trades are made automatically. 5-10 trades/day, maybe 1000 trades/year. I'm evaluating data sets of thousands of trades from backtest data going back years and years. Except for a few data file format issues R is looking pretty interesting. I've got data in and I'm learning how to access rows and columns in large tables to create the same data I've been fighting with Excel to get. (and OpenOffice although it's too slow to keep me interested...) Anyway, thanks for the pointer. Cheers, Mark Cheers, Mark
