[gentoo-user] [WAY OT] GUI programming for Linux (and Windows possibly)

[gentoo-user] [WAY OT] GUI programming for Linux (and Windows possibly)

[Mark Knecht]

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)

[Roger Mason]

Mark,

Mark Knecht <markknecht@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]

On Sun, Jun 28, 2009 at 9:49 AM, Roger Mason<rmason@mun.ca> wrote:
> Mark,
>
> Mark Knecht <markknecht@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)

[pk]

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)

[Mark Knecht]

On Sun, Jun 28, 2009 at 10:09 AM, pk<peterk2@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

[gentoo-user] Re: [WAY OT] GUI programming for Linux (and Windows possibly)

[walt]

On 06/28/2009 10:16 AM, Mark Knecht wrote:
> On Sun, Jun 28, 2009 at 10:09 AM, pk<peterk2@coolmail.se>  wrote:

>> 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...

So true, and that's exactly where M$ wants us.  I need to use a
couple of M$-specific apps for the same reason, and much to my
joy they both run very well on recent versions of wine.

I first tried wine years ago when it was running only 16-bit
windows apps and I gave it up as nothing more than a toy -- but
things have *really* changed since then!

Wine is a toy no longer, it's a powerful tool and I'd urge you
to play with it at for a week or two to see what it can do.

They have an apps database that lists popular windows programs
that are known to run under wine (or not) and what you need to do
to get them working.

http://appdb.winehq.org/

I don't see Trade Station listed there but you could be the first
one to get it working :-)

Re: [gentoo-user] Re: [WAY OT] GUI programming for Linux (and Windows possibly)

[Mark Knecht]

On Sun, Jun 28, 2009 at 5:12 PM, walt<w41ter@gmail.com> wrote:
> On 06/28/2009 10:16 AM, Mark Knecht wrote:
>>
>> On Sun, Jun 28, 2009 at 10:09 AM, pk<peterk2@coolmail.se>  wrote:
>
>>> 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...
>
> So true, and that's exactly where M$ wants us.  I need to use a
> couple of M$-specific apps for the same reason, and much to my
> joy they both run very well on recent versions of wine.
>
> I first tried wine years ago when it was running only 16-bit
> windows apps and I gave it up as nothing more than a toy -- but
> things have *really* changed since then!
>
> Wine is a toy no longer, it's a powerful tool and I'd urge you
> to play with it at for a week or two to see what it can do.
>
> They have an apps database that lists popular windows programs
> that are known to run under wine (or not) and what you need to do
> to get them working.
>
> http://appdb.winehq.org/
>
> I don't see Trade Station listed there but you could be the first
> one to get it working :-)

I used to be an app maintainer for wine. I know about it and support
it but no longer us it. I tried TS maybe a year ago. It wouldn't even
install much less run. There's no good way for Wine developers to
debug the problems as it required a funded account for anyone to run
it.

Sorry, but I'd never risk REAL money trading a Windows app in like TS
in Wine, vmware, xen or anything else that the app wasn't specifically
written for. The very last thing I wanted to do with this thread is
create some sort of religious war. It's not my intent. I do however
STRONGLY support your right to become a full-time, fully automated
trader trading every day with your own money like I have. Then you'll
have the right to decide what to do with your money for real as
opposed to making suggestions about what I do with mine.

Yes, M$ wants us there, and you can go check the TS forums (or maybe
you can't if you don't have a trading account - I don't remember) to
find the 50 times I've asked TS to port their platform to any distro,
any revision of Linux. The number of people responding in the positive
is large, but TS has no visible intention of do it so I'm locked in.

Please, let's drop the M$ stuff from this discussion. R will like work
out nicely for me. I can run the trading on windows, because it's the
only practical solution, but I can share a drive over the network and
use R on Gentoo reading those files. Please don't assume that because
I use Windows that I prefer it. FAR FROM IT!

With best regards,
Mark

[gentoo-user] Re: [WAY OT] GUI programming for Linux (and Windows possibly)

[walt]

On 06/28/2009 05:50 PM, Mark Knecht wrote:
> On Sun, Jun 28, 2009 at 5:12 PM, walt<w41ter@gmail.com>  wrote:
>> On 06/28/2009 10:16 AM, Mark Knecht wrote:
>>>
>>> On Sun, Jun 28, 2009 at 10:09 AM, pk<peterk2@coolmail.se>    wrote:
>>
>>>> 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...
>>
>> So true, and that's exactly where M$ wants us.  I need to use a
>> couple of M$-specific apps for the same reason, and much to my
>> joy they both run very well on recent versions of wine.
>>
>> I first tried wine years ago when it was running only 16-bit
>> windows apps and I gave it up as nothing more than a toy -- but
>> things have *really* changed since then!
>>
>> Wine is a toy no longer, it's a powerful tool and I'd urge you
>> to play with it at for a week or two to see what it can do.
>>
>> They have an apps database that lists popular windows programs
>> that are known to run under wine (or not) and what you need to do
>> to get them working.
>>
>> http://appdb.winehq.org/
>>
>> I don't see Trade Station listed there but you could be the first
>> one to get it working :-)
>
> I used to be an app maintainer for wine. I know about it and support
> it but no longer us it. I tried TS maybe a year ago. It wouldn't even
> install much less run. There's no good way for Wine developers to
> debug the problems as it required a funded account for anyone to run
> it.
>
> Sorry, but I'd never risk REAL money trading a Windows app in like TS
> in Wine, vmware, xen or anything else that the app wasn't specifically
> written for. The very last thing I wanted to do with this thread is
> create some sort of religious war. It's not my intent. I do however
> STRONGLY support your right to become a full-time, fully automated
> trader trading every day with your own money like I have. Then you'll
> have the right to decide what to do with your money for real as
> opposed to making suggestions about what I do with mine.
>
> Yes, M$ wants us there, and you can go check the TS forums (or maybe
> you can't if you don't have a trading account - I don't remember) to
> find the 50 times I've asked TS to port their platform to any distro,
> any revision of Linux. The number of people responding in the positive
> is large, but TS has no visible intention of do it so I'm locked in.
>
> Please, let's drop the M$ stuff from this discussion. R will like work
> out nicely for me. I can run the trading on windows, because it's the
> only practical solution, but I can share a drive over the network and
> use R on Gentoo reading those files. Please don't assume that because
> I use Windows that I prefer it. FAR FROM IT!
>
> With best regards,
> Mark
>
>

[gentoo-user] Re: [WAY OT] GUI programming for Linux (and Windows possibly)

[walt]

On 06/28/2009 05:50 PM, Mark Knecht wrote:

> I used to be an app maintainer for wine. I know about it and support
> it but no longer us it...

Thanks for contributing to the wine project!

>  ...I do however
> STRONGLY support your right to become a full-time, fully automated
> trader trading every day with your own money like I have. Then you'll
> have the right to decide what to do with your money for real as
> opposed to making suggestions about what I do with mine.

I completely understand the hostility implied in your response and
I don't for one nanosecond take it personally.  I have just as much
hostility saved up for M$, but absolutely none of it directed at you.

I wish you every success with your new profession :-)

Re: [gentoo-user] [WAY OT] GUI programming for Linux (and Windows possibly)

[Robert Bridge]

-----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.
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Re: [gentoo-user] [WAY OT] GUI programming for Linux (and Windows possibly)

[Mark Knecht]

On Sun, Jun 28, 2009 at 10:50 AM, Robert Bridge<robert@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)

[Arttu V.]

On 6/28/09, Mark Knecht <markknecht@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)

[Mark Knecht]

On Sun, Jun 28, 2009 at 11:23 AM, Arttu V.<arttuv69@gmail.com> wrote:
> On 6/28/09, Mark Knecht <markknecht@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)

[Florian Philipp]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 983 bytes --]

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.


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Re: [gentoo-user] [WAY OT] GUI programming for Linux (and Windows possibly)

[Mark Knecht]

On Sun, Jun 28, 2009 at 1:05 PM, Florian
Philipp<lists@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