Technobabble

Here are the steps to install QuantLib , a free/open-source library for quantitative finance, on OS X Mountain Lion: Install MacPorts . Install Boost using MacPorts by running this command: sudo port install boost This will install Boost and its dependencies under /opt/local . Download and extract the QuantLib sources . Configure QuantLib by running: ./configure --with-boost-include=/opt/local/include --with-boost-lib=/opt/local/lib/ Run make , followed by sudo make install .

I am always disappointed to see web programmers code pages which display messages like the one below. Safari 6 is the latest (beta) release. ING can do better, especially if they are the "rebel with a cause" - see The Orange Code: How ING Direct Succeeded by Being a Rebel with a Cause .

Over the past month, several interested parties have revealed their expressions of interest regarding the proposals for the HTTP/2.0 standard. Under consideration are primarily the SPDY and HTTP Speed+mobility proposals. The battle lines have been drawn, and as usual Microsoft wants to push their own agenda. There's also an interesting debate about whether HTTP/2.0 should always use TLS.

Windows 8 has a fancy delete progress dialog window for long-running delete operations. It shows: the number of items being deleted, percentage complete, instantaneous speed of deletion (items/second), a graph of historical speed of deletion for this operation, estimated time remaining, and items remaining (count and size) Get your copy of Windows 8 here: Microsoft Windows 8 Pro Pack 5VR-00001 .

Safari on iOS 6 continues to improve on the HTML5 Test . With iOS 6 Beta 2, Safari scores 360/500. Major areas lacking are: Video subtitle support Drag and drop (probably intentional on the iPhone) Microdata WebGL 3D context Filesystem (again, probably intentional) IndexedDB Access to the webcam Web notifications Full screen support (not really applicable to an iPhone) For comparison, here's Safari on iOS 4 from over two years ago.

Mike Ash has a really good article on Objective-C Literals . Good to see that we can finally have some abbreviated syntax for boxing, and array and dictionary literals. The syntax makes it very much like JSON. Waiting for these changes to appear in Xcode.

If you are using a Mac with a small-ish SSD these days, there's a good chance that you are running low on disk space. A fair bit of an OS X install is multilingual files and if you are using just 1 or 2 languages, you could get rid of the language support files for all other languages. Enter Monolingual , a tool which cleans up all the languages that aren't of interest. On an OS X Lion install, that's worth at least a couple of GB. Monolingual can also remove files for architectures that aren't in use (e.g. getting rid of ARM and PowerPC files on an Intel Mac. Download Monolingual here .