${log.root}/lowem.log

${log.root}/lowem.log
Inflation, Investing and Everything

All | Musings | Tech | Java | Biz | Energy | Env

Main | Next page »

Wednesday May 21, 2008

Pioneer to end plasma display panel production

news.com :

Pioneer plans to end production of plasma display panels as part of a restructuring program to return its operations to profit, it said Tuesday [13 May 2008]. The lower profits were largely a result of deeper losses in the consumer electronics business, where sales of PDP televisions dropped in North America and Europe. The company will end basic panel production at two factories in Japan by March 2009. In their place the company will buy panels from Panasonic and use those to make PDP TVs under a provisional agreement. As part of the deal some of Pioneer's plasma display panel know-how will be transferred to Panasonic.

The PDP TV sector has been hit in recent years by increasing competition from the rival LCD (liquid crystal display) technology. In the past PDP had a cost advantage at large screen sizes of around 42-inches and greater but the price of LCD TVs has come down with advances in production. As a result there is a much fiercer battle going on in the market and Pioneer has been hit by that competition. Pioneer plans to enter the LCD TV business in Europe from August, initially by selling televisions produced by Sharp.

- There had been talk of a comeback of sorts for plasma displays but it now looks like the marketplace has decisively spoken : LCD's are in, plasma's are out. Looking back, both technologies have come a long way. The first plasma display I used was an orange monochrome plasma-based touch-screen at a military wargaming centre. I'd suppose it was considered the height of technological advancement at the time. The first LCD display I had was one of those Game & Watch handheld games, an early precursor to today's Sony PSP's and Nintendo DS Lite gaming platforms. A long way indeed.

LCD is king of the hill now but there is always room for improvement - better LED-based backlighting is starting to hit the market, 100Hz displays for flicker-free movement (I wonder what took them so long), improved contrast ratios, wider colour ranges, and built-in digital TV tuners to receive broadcast HD content. And waiting patiently in the wings is OLED, a quantum leap over 10 years in the making.

(2008-05-21 00:01:01 SGT) [Tech] Permalink

Sunday April 27, 2008

How to insert currency exchange rates into Google Spreadsheets

The financial formula lookups that Google Spreadsheets provides have proved very useful for managing the multiple portfolios that I have - besides running the family fund, I also manage my wife's account and I am also a fund manager for a private investment fund that specializes in commodities investments.

The only problem is that, although the Google finance lookup functions are able to provide many useful figures including stock prices, market capitalizations and so on, there is one critical component missing - the ability to do currency exchange rate conversions. I manage my accounts on a Singapore dollar (SGD) basis, while I invest in the US and Canada markets which are denominated in the US and Canadian dollars (USD, CAD) respectively. I found a couple of suggestions from online forums and actually used one of them for a while, which scraped the forex rates from a Google finance page, but then it stopped working recently. So I did some research on my own and came up with a better alternative that uses a Yahoo-based currency converter instead.

If you want to skip the explanation that follows, just insert the following formula, change CAD to the currency you want to convert from, and change SGD to the currency you want to convert to :

=Index(ImportHTML("http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=CADSGD=X","table",1),8,2)

And there you are. Once you enter the formula, the exchange rate will be inserted into the cell, and it will be automatically updated whenever the forex markets are open (see screenshot above).

There is a disclaimer, however. This currency conversion formula is not real-time. There will be a delay of a few minutes (to monitor real-time rates, check out my livequotes page). Even so, this formula is already better than the Google Finance-based one I was using earlier - that one had a delay of 1-2 hours or more. To display the time of update, you can use this formula (as before, change the CAD and SGD symbols to whatever you wish to use) :

=Index(ImportHTML("http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=CADSGD=X","table",1),2,2)

When the forex markets are open (which is most of the time, since forex exchanges are 24/5 markets, ie 24 hours a day, 5 working days a week), the time field should show something like "11:37AM ET", where ET is Eastern Time (i.e. New York's timezone). When the markets are closed, such as during weekends, this field should show the last trading day's date instead (such as the above, "4/25/2008").

Here's how it works : the ImportHTML function scrapes a web-page that you specify (in this case, the Yahoo Finance page for the specific currency pair). The "table" parameter tells the formula to use table-scanning mode, and the "1" refers to the index of the table to use, in case there are multiple tables on that page.

But if you use the ImportHTML function alone, you will get the entire table in an array (as in the bottom part of the screenshot above). So it's actually an array formula that returns the results in an array. The next thing to do is to isolate the cell that you want in that array. That's what the Index function does - the addressing is via row, then column, and the index starts from 1 and not 0, as C- or Java-based programmers might usually expect.

So, if you look at row 8, column 2 from the screenshot above, you will note that we are referring to the bid value for that currency pair. For most typical purposes, the bid value is what you will be using. And the time field (or last trading date when the markets are closed) is obtained from row 2, column 2.

This should be applicable until let's say a. Google decides to add a built-in real-time (or nearly so) currency conversion function, or b. Yahoo decides to change its currency conversion URL, URL format, or the format of the currency conversion page - even if Yahoo does so, with the explanation above, you should probably be able to amend the formula to get the figures back again.

Hope this is of help to you.

(2008-04-27 18:49:45 SGT) [Tech] Permalink

Tuesday April 08, 2008

Lockheed Martin uses RFID to help track stealth fighter

rfidupdate.com :

Defense contractor Lockheed Martin has asked its suppliers who provide parts and materials for the new Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) aircraft to include RFID labels on those shipments by the end of this year. The Joint Strike Fighter, also known as the F-35 Lightning, is a next-generation stealth fighter aircraft that is the first to be jointly designed for use by the US Air Force, Army, and Navy. The Joint Strike Fighter is currently in limited production and is still in the test phase. The US Marine Corps is scheduled to take first delivery of the Joint Strike Fighter in 2012. The plane is expected to eventually replace the US military's F-16 and A-10 aircraft.

Lockheed Martin is involved in military RFID applications in multiple ways. The new supplier labeling requirements suggest the company uses RFID internally. Lockheed Martin is the parent company to Savi Technology, which provides the DoD and NATO with RFID systems for in-transit logistics tracking. Last month Savi announced its contract to provide the DoD with RFID systems has been extended through January 2009, and that the maximum value was raised by $60 million to $483 million.

- The company has been abuzz for months with news about using our active RFID tags to track parts and supplies for Lockheed's stealth fighter program. I wasn't sure at the time for which plane (F-22 Raptor or F-35 Lightning II). Well now we know.

(2008-04-08 12:44:01 SGT) [Tech] Permalink

Friday March 28, 2008

"NRI Savings Account" spam ads on Google Adsense

This is a message for fellow bloggers and publishers who are using Google Adsense. Recently, I have seen some ads on my blog (see above for a sample) selling some "NRI Savings Account" with a purported link that goes to "www.abnamro.com/Bollywood". According to Wikipedia, NRI stands for "Non-Resident Indian".

At first I thought it was a bit of ad mis-targeting, which I dismissed as a simple glitch in Google's much-vaunted search and contextual-matching algorithms. But then when I saw these ads running for the fifth or sixth time, I knew something was up, so I went to do some investigating. Here's what I've found :

1. My initial thought was to copy the URL for analysis (must be careful there, since according to Google's TOS, a publisher is not allowed to click on his own ads). I got the following string : http://www.sirez.com/lms/44_ABNBW/clickcounter.asp [followed by some url-encoded characters and then followed by] http://216.198.222.137/ABNAMRO/BollywoodCd/savings_bollywood.asp.

2. You don't really need to be a former military computer security researcher (which, well, I was) to immediately grasp that there is something really fishy going on here. The first destination URL goes to some sort of "click counter" page which probably gathers some traffic statistics and then redirects to the second destination URL.

3. Dotted IP addresses (such as 216.198.222.137) with no hostnames ring some major alarm bells. This is one of the tell-tale signs of suspicious websites set up for spam or phishing purposes. I pasted it into my browser and here's what I got :

4. Would the real ABN Amro bank host a website at a dotted IP address with no hostname? I didn't think so. Hence, the next thing to do was a simple reverse DNS lookup :

Name: www.aiminghigher.com
Address: 216.198.222.137

5. Well, "aiminghigher.com" eh? It doesn't add up. It could be another website on the same shared host. I don't have time to go really deep on this one, so I try one final and very simple test. I paste the purported link, "www.abnamro.com/Bollywood", into my browser, I get a 404 page ("The page cannot be found"), and after a second or so, I get re-directed back to the main page of the real ABN Amro Bank.

This is really some kind of fraudulent and spam-ish advertising going on here. I do not wish my visitors to click on this kind of ads and get directed to these sites either, no matter what kind of CPC (Cost-Per-Click) it nets for me. So I go to the Competitive Ad Filter and add sirez.com to the list. If you are an Adsense publisher and you are reading this, I would suggest that you do the same.

(2008-03-28 00:34:21 SGT) [Tech] Permalink

Thursday February 21, 2008

Toshiba scraps HD-DVD, gives in to Sony Blu-Ray in format war

bloomberg.com :

Toshiba abandoned its HD DVD technology, surrendering to Sony's Blu-ray in the entertainment industry's biggest format war since VHS beat Betamax in the 1980s. Toshiba, the leading promoter of HD DVD, will reduce shipments of players and recorders, aiming to close the business by March, the Tokyo-based company said in a statement today [19 Feb 2008].

Sony's victory may stoke sales of high-definition discs after shoppers held back purchases because of uncertainty over which technology would prevail. US retailers plan to stop selling HD-DVD's after Warner Bros. Entertainment, the largest DVD publisher, said last month [Jan 2008] it would release its films only on Blu-ray. An HD DVD can store up to 30 gigabytes of data, or six times more than conventional DVDs, less than the 50 gigabytes for Blu-ray discs.

- Hooray for Blu-Ray! It's about time Sony won a format war (RIP Betamax, Minidisc, SACD).