Math tricks wiki

The Tricki is a Wiki project meant to capture the strategies and “tricks” used to solve math problems. Other math Wiki projects start from definitions, which often link to some proofs related to the definition. The Tricki starts from classes of problems, so you first locate the type of problem you are working on as specifically as possible, and then maybe you will find a strategy for solving it. Great idea!

Caches, BusinessEvents and trading infrastructure

Lots of front office shops are moving (or have long since moved) to build their order management and position keeping (and other stuff) over a distributed cache. Caches are much better than they used to be, as is our understanding of what caches can and should do. For example, modern “caches” should deploy, distribute and partition processing just as well as they do data.

One interesting idea is to add in a rules engine into this mix. Conceptually, this makes sense because both inference and ECA rules are good at a lot (not all) of the logic that we want to build over a cache. For example, logic like “when XYZ state exists” or “when ABC event happens” then update another object, send an event or trigger another activity. The hard part is making the cache and the rules engine work together efficiently.

TIBCO seems to be approaching this issue from another direction with BusinessEvents, per this blog post. They’ve built a distributed cache under their rules engine, to help with distributed rules processing.

If they can incorporate the features of a modern distributed cache with a  good rules engine and framework for distributed processing, they could wind up with a killer product for front office infrastructure. Something to keep an eye on at least.