[ts-gen] Welcome to new subscribers - a rough project guide

[R P Herrold]

We have picked up a few new subscribers to the trading shim 
general mailing list in recent days.  I have been discussing 
the trading shim 'en passant' on a couple of the mailing lists 
which are culled to provide content for Victor Niederhoffer's 
"Daily Speculations" website:
 	http://www.dailyspeculations.com/

and of course Freshmeat pushed an email notice of the 29 Feb 
'Leap day' release we pushed.

I wanted to take a moment, and send the list a glimpse 'behind 
the curtain' so to speak, for a "New Users's Guide to 
Approaching the 'trading shim'" on 'procedural' matters.


We did not have a chance to test 080229 against live market 
feeds that Friday, and I know Bill pushed a bit of a 
correction in how the 'wild' command selects SecType's 
yesterday.  I just updated the version and Freshmeat download 
URL, but 'hid' it from the front page of Freshmeat.  I think 
of and refer to those interim releases which I do not feature 
to the 'ts-announce' mailing list as 'slipstreammed' updates.

For those new to the 'shim', as we call it in house, the 
places where the latest news appear first is always:
     http://www.trading-shim.org/capitals/?NEWS

In that file, there is a running 'stanza' with sequential 
dates, listing external versions along the way, and a bit of a 
journal of what has changed, and is or is not properly working 
in each.  The mention of an issue there is a pretty good 
indication that we know of and are working on it.  ;)  Then 
when a stanza's goals are met against our internal release 
planning, we close the stanza and start a new one;  I tend to 
announce those stanza closes as "Major feature enhancements" 
to Freshmeat.  Within a series, I use lesser Freshmeat 
categories:  Minor, and bugfix, occasionally documentation

Every bit of the website is present for a reason, and we 
encourage at least scanning it all to get a feel where answers 
may lay.  Places of special interest are the FAQ,
 	http://www.trading-shim.org/faq/

which, in part, addresses all setup issues which we have seen 
reported, either on the mailing list, or privately; I 
also maintain a bit of a link farm to related projects, 
both FOSS and closed code at:
 	http://www.trading-shim.org/faq/?other-voices

There is a flat site map at:
 	http://www.trading-shim.org/map/

which was written to assist Google in crawling the site well. 
This means one gets good and current results in the search box 
at:
 	http://www.trading-shim.org/search/

We welcome questions, preferably on this mailing list, but 
private communication will be answered as appropriate.  We do 
sell commercial support contracts of course, but try to pass 
the knowledge we share there back to the community project 
side as well.  To the extent that it does not violate client 
confidentiality, we often 'anonymize' interesting private 
email and repeat the context of the inquiry and our answer 
into this mailing list:
 	http://www.trading-shim.org/pipermail/ts-general/

Private client instances of the bug tracker are available in 
addition to the open one for the project:
 	http://www.trading-shim.org/bugs/

I periodically go through and weed bugs which are resolved, 
and update lingering ones.  I come from a sysadmin, tactical 
problem-solver background, and so this seems natural to me.

Bill's approach to workflow is more systematic and 
traditional, being based in part on a .plan file, 'test-driven 
development', and proceeding in an efficient path along to our 
release goals.

Either one of us might respond to a list email, and indeed, we 
have had both our views appear from time to time, on the list. 
As noted, we have formal planning and synchronization of 
effort meetings at regular intervals.

As always, the latest tarball is at
          ftp://ftp.trading-shim.org/pub/local/trading-shim/
and prior releases in the ./attic/

I hope this little overview is useful, and invite old and new 
subscribers alike to post more, to share successes, and ask 
about 'sticky points' here.  that way, we can all learn more 
on how the shim is being used and how others have overcome 
those stick points when getting started.  Of course the 
emergence of a formal co-developer is also hoped for by us as 
well.

We thank you for your interest; we welcome feedback, 
questions, constructive criticism, and comment.  Please 
consider joining in the fun publicly.

-- Russ herrold
 	614 488 6954