Some nice gibberish at the end of the week… not really necessary to know but surprising…

While I am well aware of the differing communication types from technology oriented and business oriented people, but what should one make out of the following statement?

The value chain integration challenge represents a high business value opportunity and chance for competitive advantage.

Not only does it include the word value twice – with different meaning btw – it is completely devoid of any content as far as I can see. And, well this is the first paragraph of the JBoss SOA platform page.

Dear interested potential customer please move on…

Tired of paying for data feeds to get stock data into quicken? May be QDL might help.

QDL, the quote downloader, is a set of python scripts for the automatic cron-based download of end-of-date quote and stock information. QDL offers a command line interface only.

Run with the symbol to retrieve, the current quote for this stock or fund is retrieved and printed to the command line. Different back end drivers for quote retrieval are available to that a multitude of stocks can be queried. The output format is customizable.

But how to use it? E. g. create a batch file that calls QDL for all quotes you are interest in and let it run every night via a cron job. Redirecting the output via:

  python QDL-Client.py >> myOutput.log

appends the new information to your file. Later on you can import the gathered data into quicken and other tools.

Voila, no more data subscriptions, but still historical data. More information on the QDL Project Site