Overheard in the IT dept.: Should you have any more questions, please contact your local IT Global Support. Decision into which platform to rewrite the shell script to retrieve the stock quotes using Google API was a simple one – I would like to use Objective-C to be able to run the program on a Mac (and later hopefully on my iPod touch too). I began exploring the Objective-C only recently so I considered to be a good exercise to learn about basic Foundation classes by writing a class to parse command line arguments (instead of using the obvious getopt choice).
After resolving the problem with authentication, I continued playing around with Google Finance API, using HTTP and XML. The API offers some nice functionality to retrieve user portfolio content, but it doesn’t take long to realize that there is no support for retrieving (real-time) stock quotes, probably for some good reason like licensing. But then, there is a way of getting real-time stock quotes on your Google Spreadsheet using the GoogleFinance() formula. Can this fact get us closer to retrieving real-time stock quotes using Google Data API?
I was writing a small script to retrieve some data from Google Finance using the relevant Google Data API. I’m writing a stand-alone, desktop application and have therefore used the ClientLogin username and password authentication. The login worked fine, I was receiving HTTP status 200 and the appropriate response with the authentication token. Yet any subsequent attempt to use the Data API (to insance to retrieve the portfolio data) failed with HTTP 401 Token Invalid error.
Just a short summary of how to install Ruby on Rails framework on Fedora 8 and how to configure it to work with Apache 2. Perhaps this might come handy to someone.
It’s been two weeks since the
In the software development world there is one word which cannot be overlooked, especially in the past few years. The word is “agile”. Aiming to make the software development effective by freeing the spirit and fueling the talents and motvations of software developers, agile methods offer an alternative to the “tyranny of the waterfall” or the “illusion of command and controll” of the software development managers. Being a software team leader and developer myself, I’ve been for some time looking for the tools to fight the inherently unpredictible and unknowable factors in the software development. I’ve been looking until I learned the “a-word” a year ago and started trying it out soon after.