Some time back, while working on a project for my Computational Finance course, I needed stock quotes for prominent firms from the BSE stock exchange. I needed data for the last five years, and manually copying the data from online sources was going to be very tiresome. While Google Finance, Yahoo Finance and other websites let you export search results for a data range into a CSV (comma separated values) file, doing this for 20 stocks was going be to a boring and repetitive task. Then I realized that for Yahoo Finance, by manipulating the URL pattern I could request the stock quote for any stock and for any date range. Once I realized this, it was a matter of writing a small program in Ruby to automate the entire task.
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Posts Tagged ‘programming’
Easy stock quotes using Ruby
Sunday, August 23rd, 2009RJS Magic
Saturday, June 27th, 2009Recently, while working on a small application on Rails, I learned firsthand how easy and powerful RJS can be. I was amazed at how simple it is to save attributes to the data base using Ajax and then notify the user about successful operations or errors. Here is a small example that should show you how simple this is. (more…)
Financing Rails
Sunday, September 28th, 2008
I have been working on this small Rails based dashboard (code named : Fx Dashboard) the past few months. The basic idea that I had was to create some kind of a dashboard where I could collate all relevant financial information and news. The application has turned out pretty well, and I finally managed to put it online yesterday. The application currently displays a 15 minute delayed feed of major market indices, delayed feeds of sub-indices on the BSE and the NSE, commodity prices from MCX, news feeds from IBN, Moneycontrol, BBC World and Reuters and the latest foreign exchange rates from FEDAI (see above screen shot). The only thing I haven’t been able to integrate as yet are the RBI rates.
Building this application was a very learning experience.I learnt how to use Flex and integrate it with Rails. Also learnt what “screen scraping” is, and how to do it using Rails. As of now, this application is for personal use (might change in the future). Basically I want to test run it on a live server, see bandwidth usage etc. Lets see how it turns out.
Drupal
Sunday, February 24th, 2008I’ve been playing around with the open source CMS, Drupal. I wanted a CMS to use for my Labs section, and wanted something that was easy to set up and use. I have used Joomla previously, and while the set up is a no-brainer, feature wise Joomla is a bit more tedious to use. Good thing about Joomla is that it supports almost everything one could want, however to get the specific output from it, I had to tinker with a gazillion settings – something I didn’t quite enjoy.
But I digress, so back to Drupal. I took to Drupal since it seemed to be easier to set up and use. However in hindsight I think I was mistaken.
Loupe – Flickerize your website
Wednesday, October 3rd, 2007
About three months ago started with an idea of using Flickr’s public API to pull my Flickr pictures on to a sub section of my website. I codenamed this project “Loupe”. While I was done with most of coding in under a week, B School kept me way too busy to do anything about Loupe. As such the project was literally hibernating. Now with the first trimester done, and with finally some time on my hand I finally managed to put up Loupe on the web !
What Loupe basically does is pick all the pictures from a user’s public photostream on flickr and display it on a website. All the flickr niceties like tags, sets etc can be accessed. In addition to this there is also a tag based search feature as well as nifty about page to put material on. ( Mine still needs some work, right now it’s just some random text I picked up from another photography site ).
Loupe uses the rflickr library to access the Flickr API. It is built using the excellent web framework for Ruby called Rails. It also uses the mootools and slim box javascript libraries for displaying images. Do give Loupe a look at my photography section and let me know how it is. I will also be writing a series of articles on rails and flickr integration in the coming weeks, so do watch this space for more.
Technorati Tags: Photography, Loupe, Rails, Flickr, Ruby, rflickr
I'm Elroy Serrao, a technologist, photographer, and part time blogger from India.
I love to design web sites, program in php and rails in my free time and of course go trekking and clicking pictures in the great outdoors.
I'm from Mumbai, and am an alumnus of Mumbai University and NMIMS.