Financial Mathematics
Have just discovered that William Sharpe (of Sharpe ratio fame) has an on-line book on Macro-Investment Analysis. The book is very user friendly and readable; I stayed up somewhat late last night engrossed in stories of portfolios of stocks and bonds of the fictional Apple Tree Firm.

An excellent read for anyone interested in financial mathematics and modern portfolio management.

Yes, that's a lovely webpage...
I've been reminded why I should avoid critiquing the HTML of others without first being invited. Last night I was asked to change a few apache records to reflect changes to a certain sports club, as their website had changed. Easily done.

Being a club with which I was once involved, and of which I still have fond memories, I then proceeded to their website to check out the new design. It looked very crisp and usable. "Good," I thought. Then I looked at the HTML.

I should be used to it by now, but bad HTML still causes me to gasp in horror and back away in fright. How do you expect anything to parse your code when you close your head tag after your body tag? What's that style information doing in the middle of the document? Why are you closing that HTML comment twice? Don't you even know about the W3C validator?

So I dutifully wrote a very polite and helpful response that while the website does happen to render correctly on my browser, it could do with a few touch-ups in the realm of standards compliance. This morning I received the following response.

Appropriate journals for layperson Perl articles.
I'm writing a paper and presentation for the SAGE-VIC Symposium to be held on the 11th March. I'm giving a talk on web development, particularly on how to be lazy and get HTML::Mason to do all the hard work for you.

The presentation comes with a paper for the proceedings, and the whole thing is squarely aimed at a technical audience, but not one that necessarily knows Perl. The paper itself will be a few thousand words, and besides from being suitable for conference proceedings, I feel it could also easily be turned into a journal article.

My problem is now which journals to approach. I'd normally have a chat to TPR, TPJ and perl.com; however, I can't help feeling that readers of these publications will find themselves getting to the end of the article and wondering what happened to all the Perl content.

The article could be suitable for a more mainstream software development magazine, but I'm really at a loss as to which ones to approach. I rarely find myself with the time to read 'general developer' periodicals, even though we have picked up a few subscriptions along the way.

Since one of my goals is to improve the awareness of Perl in Australia and New Zealand, I'll probably start with some of the local publications first. However I'm quite open to suggestions at this stage.

I suppose that what I really should be doing is concentrating on finishing the paper and slides, rather than worrying about the medium-term uses of the work. After all, the conference is barely three weeks away.

Company Tax Time
I'm currently in the process of filling out our company tax return, and I now understand why the ATO provides companies with up to nine months to complete this task. Put simply, the form is not user friendly.

Personal tax, even with all the suppliments, is a walk in the park compared to company tax. Personal tax assumes that you don't have a copy of the taxation act on your desk, or know how attributed foreign income differs from its unattributed counterpart.

Personal tax provides great refernces to resources that explains all the terms used, whereas with company tax one needs to do much more research.

The question could be asked: why isn't our accountant handling all this? Well, despite our accountant doing a good job of establishing the company, they've been fairly silent except for a glossy pamphlet reminding us that they'd love to fill in our personal tax returns.

In particular they've done nothing to let us know of the approaching company tax deadlines, or even ask for our financial records so they could make a start on completing the return. I don't imagine most new company directors know when their company tax is due, and rely upon their accountants to tell them. I was in this case until I got suspicious of the silence. So in short, our accountants have failed the 'caring' test.

Given the amount the accountants would have charged for the return, and given that our 2003-04 return is relatively straightforward, we're making a slight profit doing it ourselves, even though I could be spending the time out doing real work.

Melbourne/Australia Perl Happenings
It seems that some individuals read my journal to hear about the latest happenings in the Perl scene in Melbourne and other parts of Australia. With that in mind, I believe that I should mention a few recent events.

Melbourne Perl Mongers has restarted, and our first meeting for the year had discussions about OSDC/YAPC::AU 2004, the Phalanx 100, an offer from yours truly to talk about HTML::Mason, and the discussion of starting up combined open-source developer meetings, affectionately known at this stage as Open Source Developers Club. OSDClub is currently arranged for every second month, instead of Melb.PM.

I volunteered to try and rejuvenate the Melb.PM website (which is currently down), although I'm currently waiting to receive the appropriate keys from the relevant people inside Melb.PM.

Last Friday was SecureCon, which Jacinta and myself attended, and discovered that all the usual suspects were there. There were large contingents from SAGE-AU, including Baden Hughes from The Perl Foundation. Practically all the SAGE-AU members there had submitted proposals for the next SAGE-AU conference, or were on the reviewing committee, or both. There were a couple of LinuxChix, a group from 2600, and all the old Melbourne University computer science crowd.

The weekend was spent on a new project that focuses on the Australian Perl community, which is active but fragmented. I'm hoping to reduce community fragmentation and produce a way that all Australian entities (including businesses, user groups, and invididuals) can communicate more effectively. Stay tuned for more details (and hopefully a beta in the next couple of weeks).