The new website is live

The rebuilt Vector website is now in production, with a thorough reworking of the archive, and a new search tool.

It has its own blog, so this is the last post to this one. If you’ve been subscribing to this RSS feed, go to

https://sites.google.com/site/baavector/blog

and add the new feed to your RSS aggregator.

Cheers
Stephen Taylor

A commentary on the formulator

Out now on Vector: Neville Holmes elaborates on his scheme for a commodity calculator

No stinking loops

Out now on Vector: Stevan Apter, one of the programmers Jeffry Borror refers to as “the q gods”, kicks off his new column No Stinking Loops with “Treetable: a case study in q”

Out now on Vector

Six new articles posted:

The view from Berlin Roving reporter Mike Hughes sends us a postcard from APL2010. Devon McCormick shares his notes with us. Graeme Robertson offers a personal view. Vibeke Ulmann tells us what she liked best.

Chairman’s report 2010 BAA chairman Paul Grosvenor reviews the year.

Remembering Eugene McDonnell Roger Hui celebrates the late APL pioneer and Vector columnist

Vector 24, Nos 2 & 3

Vector 24, Nos 2&3, a bumper double issue, is in the post to subscribers.

APL2000 announces APL+Win 10

Version 10 provides more speed, support for larger workspaces and larger arrays enabling a whole new level of performance

Rockville, MD – September 13, 2010 --- APLNow LLC announced today the release of APL+WIN Version 10. This latest version of their popular APL+WIN product, an implementation of the APL application programming language product for the Windows platform, offers breakthrough performance improvements through faster overall execution speed, support for larger workspaces and larger arrays. Additional enhancements included in this version enable multi-thread processing, provide an application recovery tool and enhance the error handling and debugging processes.

Highlights of APL+WIN V10 include:
• Scalar and array operations run 30% to 50% faster
• Workspaces as large as 2.6 GB on 32 bit PCs and 3.6 GB on 64-bit PCs
• Support for a 10-fold increase in array size
• New APLSupervisor enabling concurrent execution on multi-core machines
• New and enhanced error handling, debugging facility and control structures

For information: www.apl2000.com
Contact: Sonia Beekman at sales@apl2000.com
Phone: 301-208-7150

First contact!

Morten Kromberg and Roger Hui duke it out in cyberspace in this sci-fi epic

How the mathematicians won the war

Keith Smillie pits J and his wits against he famous cipher machine in Simulating the Enigma. Online now.

The Year 1998

Neville Holmes concludes his series “Functional calculation in J” with The Year 1998. Online now.

Winners of Dyalog 2010 programming contest

Dyalog has announced the winners of its 2010 programming contest: Ryan Tarpine from Browns University, (USA), Mstislav Elagin from Humboldt University (Germany) and Joel Hough from Salt Lake Community College (USA). A Special Effort award was made to Alexander Ivanov from the Moscow Institute for Physical Research (Russia).

Ryan Tarpine will be at the APL2010 conference in Berlin.

Eugene McDonnell 1926-2010

Eugene McDonnell, computer science pioneer has passed away. For many years he wrote the Vector column “At Play With J” recently collected and published by Vector Books.

Gene McDonnell died yesterday evening at home. Friends and family members were gathered, reminiscing, when Gene’s caretaker (since a stroke last week left him unconscious) came into the room to say “I think he’s passing.” And so it was.

Gene was a family man, utterly decent, generous, kindhearted; also erudite and witty. His contributions to APL were graceful as well as useful. I’m so grateful to have known and worked with him.

The McDonnell family is planning a memorial gathering at home, Sunday August 29. Jeanne can be reached at 1509 Portola, Palo Alto, 94306; phone 650 321-5260.

[Larry Breed]

Eugene McDonnell died peacefully at home in Palo Alto in the evening of August 17, surrounded by family and friends. All of us in the APL world owe him a debt for his pioneering work in APL.

I recently had the honor of writing the preface to Eugene’s “At Work and Play with J” (a collaborative editing effort of the J community and a work of which Eugene was very proud). I reproduce it here because it gives a sense of the man and his work.

In my youth, when I was just starting in APL, on receiving an issue of the APL Quote-Quad I would inevitably and eagerly first turn to Eugene McDonnell’s “Recreational APL” column. Through these columns I learned that it was possible for technical writing to be erudite, educational, and entertaining, and through them I learned a lot of APL.

Thus it was with Eugene’s “At Play with J” articles in Vector. In topics ranging from primes to permutations to pyramids to pi, with a cast of characters that included Apter, Black, and Crelle, Jacob and Josephus, Blanda and Montana and Taylor, and Scholes, the articles offered up the “smoother pebbles” and “prettier shells” found while playing on the seashore bordering the great ocean of knowledge. And we are all beneficiaries of this play.

I am pleased that Vector is publishing the collection of At Play With J as a book. I look forward to being educated and entertained once more.

[Roger Hui]

Ken Iverson’s blackboard from his days at IPSA

From Peter Wooster at the group APL – A Programming Language at LinkedIn.com:

This blackboard was in Ken's office the '80s at IPSA. After that it was in Bob Bernecky's office and Tony Bailey's, I'm not sure if Benoit Paquin had if for a while or not. After the separation of Soliton, I inherited it and removed Tony's batman stickers and kept it in my office at Reuters until they eventually shut us down. The blackboard is on a wall in my studio and will remain there unless someone else wants it. It has plenty of chalk and a couple of erasers. It's still in excellent condition.

If you can come to Oakville and pick it up, it's yours.

Embedding APL fonts in web pages

Kai Jaeger was bowled over to see the FinnAPL Idiom Library displayed correctly on my iPhone – and using the elegant APL385 Unicode font.

His article on how to embed APL fonts in web documents is online now.

Dyalog in Toronto 29 July

APL Borealis and Dyalog Ltd are pleased to present:

TWO APL EVENTS in one day! - featuring DYALOG APL - July 29, downtown Toronto:

APL & Excel Integration - a morning mini-workshop on the key components of using APL & Excel together for application development. (9am to noon, includes a take-home toolkit*) Details

Dialogue with Dyalog – a full afternoon of presentations – with Morten Kromberg & Daniel Baronet – who will bring you up to date on all the latest features of Dyalog APL – learn how it can power your business applications. (1:00 to 5:30pm) Details

Location: Learning Tree Intl, 1 Dundas Street W., 10th Floor, Toronto (Yonge & Dundas)
Date: Thursday, 29 July

RSVP essential

Space is limited – please contact us to register for either of these events as soon as possible.

RSVP or further info:
Richard Procter, APL Borealis, tel: 1-866-888-6377
Brian Oliver, APL Borealis, tel: 416-488-7828
email: info@aplborealis.com

Java vs K

Google engineer Michael Schidlowsky has posted a screencast at New York University comparing the Java and K programming languages. (Kudos to Stevan Apter.)

News from Dyalog

Dyalog has posted its summer newsletter.

APL2010 programme published

APL2010 has published its programme.

BAPLA09 presentations online

Presentations from the BAPLA09 conference in Reading have been posted online.

STAC releases new market data benchmark with results from Kx and Oracle

The Securities Technology Analysis Center (STAC®) today released STAC-M3TM Benchmark results for a solution from Kx Systems and Oracle Corporation. STAC-M3 provides a common measuring methodology for solutions that manage large timeseries datasets (tick databases). The measurement standard is currently a community proposal developed by the STAC Benchmark Council, comprised of trading organizations and vendors. The Council defines a series of standard benchmarks for capital market workloads, though interestingly only trading organizations - and not vendors - can approve specific tests, which ensures the benchmarks have relevance to real-world trading demands. To complete the inaugural benchmark testing on timeseries data, Oracle (NASDAQ: ORCL) worked with Kx Systems, using Kx’s kdb+. The results have now set the standard for a series of benchmark tests to be carried out over the next few months.

The ability to quickly analyze timeseries of price and trade data is crucial for firms which trade financial instruments such as stocks, currencies, options and other derivatives. The growth of high-frequency trading makes it important for firms to rapidly store, retrieve and analyze massive quantities of data in order to back-test new trading algorithms, monitor their risk, and satisfy regulatory demands. At the same time, surging data volumes brought about by computerized trading make these tasks increasingly challenging in markets which can ‘tick’ (publish changes to prices) millions of times per second.

Peter Lankford, founder & director of STAC, said: "We're pleased that Kx and Oracle have taken the lead in publishing STAC-M3 Benchmarks. This testing responds to a direct need for performance data expressed by some of the world's leading financial institutions. We look forward to further benchmark results from Kx and Oracle, as well as other vendors of software and hardware that can be used for managing large timeseries of data.”

Simon Garland, Kx chief strategist, said: “We have worked closely with STAC and Oracle to create benchmarks. Going forward, the benchmarks will give financial institutions clearly defined criteria for measuring the performance of their systems. When setting up large, critical databases people need to be sure that the configuration they use is delivering the best possible performance within their hardware and software constraints. The problem is nobody has the time and resources to do an in-depth evaluation of all the alternatives and ideally to regularly revisit the chosen solution. These new benchmarks from STAC are valuable components of these decisions."

This series of tests is designed to set a standard for future benchmarks to be carried out by STAC in conjunction with various vendors. The results are vital for financial institutions needing to address their CEP requirements, facing the pressures of constantly increasing data volumes and regulatory demands. The STAC-M3 Benchmark suite is the first benchmark standard for market data timeseries (tick) databases, allowing vendors to measure their performance and financial institutions to test their own systems.

The STAC-M3 Benchmark standards will accelerate market selection of new technologies by enabling user firms and vendors to measure the performance of their database solutions in a common way. Trading firms will be able to quickly assess the benefit of innovations at all layers of the tick-database ‘stack’ including application software, operating systems, processors, servers, and storage architectures.

Amir Halfon, Oracle’s senior director of financial services technology, added: “Oracle’s unique storage server, the Sun Fire X4540, allowed us to achieve extreme performance with Kx by placing the data as close to the CPUs as possible. The Sun Fire X4540 provides fast, high throughput access between the threads of execution and the storage subsystem, offering up to 96TB of storage in a compact, cost-effective package. The tight integration between compute and storage within the Sun Fire X4540 eliminates the need for an external SAN and provides an ideal platform for high-performance analytics solutions such as Kx kdb+.”

The STAC-verified benchmarks were carried out using Kx kdb+ v2.6 on the Oracle Sun Fire X4540 storage server using version 0.92 of the STAC-M3 Benchmark specifications. STAC-M3 v0.92 has been submitted to the full Council for ratification, and a vote is pending.

The benchmark report is available at www.STACresearch.com/kx.

News from Kx Systems

New kdb+ version
Within the next few weeks, Kx will release v2.7, a significant update to kdb+, which includes file compression. A beta version is already available to licensed users at kxdownloads.com.

Reuters feed handler
Another major enhancement to kdb+ is a new library which enables access to RMDS (Reuters Market Data System) market data, versions 5 and 6. This is for licensed kdb+tick users, and is an almost drop-in replacement for the classical SSL library previously provided by Kx.

Computerworld Honor Award 2010
Kx was nominated as a Laureate by Morgan Stanley, as an innovative technology company. We attended the Medal Ceremony and Gala Awards Dinner in Washington on 7th June. Photos can be seen at the Computerworld Honors Program 2010 website. Read more about it.

Kx customer receptions
We regret that we were forced to cancel the Kx London Customer Reception and Workshop this year due to the volcanic ash clouds. We consider face to face time with you essential, and are planning meetings in London and New York over the next few months. Please contact us if you would like us to visit your firm.

Kx in Asia
In January 2010 we participated in TradeTech China, where Head of Kx Asia, Chris Burke, was one of the technology panelists discussing how to leverage the latest technology solutions and trading platforms to enhance profitability and efficiency.

We will be exhibiting at Trading Architecture Asia, Hong Kong, 1-2 September 2010. Please visit our booth - we look forward to seeing you and your colleagues. Read more.

We are planning a technical meeting in Singapore in the first week of October, with Charlie Skelton, Kx Chief Technology Officer. Please contact us for more details.

Kx in the media
Kx customers rated us highly in Aite Group’s report, “Quant Strategy Development Playgrounds: The High Performance Database Sandbox” Read more. Simon Garland, Kx Chief Strategist, is quoted in Securities Industry News in an article: “Algos Take Hold in Fixed-Income Markets”. We have also received media coverage in Market Data Insight, Asia Etrading, and Bobsguide.com among others.

Updated material on Kx.com
Please see the 2010 versions of the FAQ and White Paper.

For more information about Kx and its products
Email us at info@kx.com with any questions or requests for information.