Treasury Rates

Every government borrows the money in their own currency at some rate by issuing Treasury notes or bonds. This rate is known as a Treasury rate of that country. This is usually known as a risk-free rate of issuing country.

Treasury rates are used to price Treasury instruments.

LIBOR / LIBID

LIBOR stands for London Interbank Offer Rate. This is regarded as better indicator as risk-free rate than Treasury rates. LIBOR is quoted by AA rated bank and other financial institutions. A LIBOR quote from a bank is the rate of interest at which the bank is prepared to lend large amounts of money. Borrower must be AA rated to avail this rate.
There are two reason why LIBOR is highly regarded. First, AA rated institutions have very small chance of defaulting on LIBOR loan. Second so risk-free Treasure rates are artificially kept low due to tax and regulatory reasons.

In derivatives world (especially OTC market), risk-free rates are usually LIBOR rates (or derived from LIBOR, swap rates etc).
In contract, LIBID is the London Interbank Bid Rate. This is the rate at which bank is prepared to take deposits (borrow).
LIBOR is higher than LIBID, the spread is usually much smaller.
LIBOR is quoted in all popular currencies. LIBOR rates are totally market driven and not controlled by any independent body or the government.

Repo Rate

Repo rates are usually overnight rates. Repo rate is the rate derived from repurchase agreements. Repurchase agreement is the type of contract, where dealer sells the securities at some price now and buys back later at slightly higher price. The price difference is the rate of return to the lender from the agreement. The rate of return is the Repo rate.

ZERO Rate

The n-year zero rate means, the rate of interest earned on an investment invested today and helf for n-years without any coupon payments in between. It is also known as n-year Zero Coupon Interest Rate, n-year Spot rate or n-year zero.

Forward Rate

Forward rate is interest rate to borrow/lend in the future some time. For example, 1 year forward rate starting 6 months from now. That means the loan starts after six months from now and for a period of 1 year from then.

Forward rates are derived based current rates of different maturities.

Interest Rate Curve or Term Structure

Interest Rates for different maturities form a curve that is know as interest rate curve. For example, zero rate curve.

Maturity – Rate

1d – 0.9
1w – 1.0
1m – 1.1
3m – 1.3
6m – 1.5
1y – 2.0
5y – 3.0
10y – 3.5
15y – 4.3
30y – 5.1

All types of interest rates curves are captured/computed and stored. These curves play very important role in derivatives world. So, it will become key responsibility of systems team to load and maintain this data quite accurately.

Tenor is sometimes used interchangeably with “maturity”, although tenor is not often used to describe the terms of fixed-income instruments such as government bonds and corporate bonds. Instead, non-standardized contracts like insurance policies and bank loans tend to be described in terms of tenor.

 

Tenor symbols

In finance, a forward contract or simply a forward is a non-standardized contract between two parties to buy or sell an asset at a specified future time at a price agreed today. The following symbols are used to specify amount of time between transaction and expiration:

Month Codes

For futures contracts specifying physical delivery, the delivery month is the month in which the seller must deliver, and the buyer must accept and pay for, the underlying. For contracts specifying cash settlement, the delivery month is the month of a final mark-to-market. The exact dates of acceptable delivery vary considerably and will be specified by the exchange in the contract specifications.

ubuntu update 11.10

It is going to download almost 1.3Gb and remove 22 packages. I hope that after that everything will still be working…

Hoppity Hop! is the simplest Facebook puzzle.

Input specifications

The input file will contain a single positive integer (in base 10) expressed as a string using standard ASCII text (e.g. for example, the number “15″ but without the double quotes). This number may or may not be padded on either side with white space. There will be no commas, periods, or any other non-numeric characters present within the number. The file may or may not terminate in a single new line character (“\n”). An example input file is below:

15

Output specifications

The program should iterate over all integers (inclusive) from 1 to the number expressed by the input file. For example, if the file contained the number 10, the submission should iterate over 1 through 10. At each integer value in this range, the program may possibly (based upon the following rules) output a single string terminating with a newline.

For integers that are evenly divisible by three, output the exact string Hoppity, followed by a newline.
For integers that are evenly divisible by five, output the exact string Hophop, followed by a newline.
For integers that are evenly divisible by both three and five, do not do any of the above, but instead output the exact string Hop, followed by a newline.

Example output (newline at end of every line):

Hoppity
Hophop
Hoppity
Hoppity
Hophop
Hoppity
Hop

Puzzle solution

C Code

#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <errno.h>

#define D3D5_PREFIX "Hop"
#define D3_SUFFIX "pity"
#define D5_SUFFIX "hop"

void solve(int param);

int main(int argc, char** argv) {

    if (argc != 2){
        printf("Usage: hoppity <file_name>\r\n");
        return (EXIT_FAILURE);
    }

    // Open file and read parameter from it.
    FILE* f = fopen(argv[1], "r");
    if (f == NULL){
        printf("Failed to open file (%d)", errno);
        return (EXIT_FAILURE);
    }

    int p;
    if (fscanf(f, "%d", &p) != 1){
        printf("Failed to read data from file (%d)", errno);
        fclose(f);
        return (EXIT_FAILURE);
    }

    fclose(f);
    solve(p);
    return (EXIT_SUCCESS);
}

/**
 * see http://www.facebook.com/careers/puzzles.php?puzzle_id=7
 */
void solve(int param){
    for (int i=1; i<=param; i++){

        char d3 = i%3 == 0;
        char d5 = i%5 == 0;

        if (d3 || d5){
            printf(D3D5_PREFIX);
            if (d3 && !d5){
                printf(D3_SUFFIX);
            }
            else if (d5 && !d3)
            {
                printf(D5_SUFFIX);
            }
            printf("\n");
        }
    }
}

This file can be compiled by gcc compiler using the following command line:

gcc -o hoppity -std=c99 main.c

Proof of the correctness

The algorithm implemented by solve() method is very simple and it is clear that it is correct:
1. We have FOR cycle which iterates from 1 to param (inclusive). Since we don’t change value of i inside the cycle then the cycle is not infinite.
2. We have 4 cases according to our requirements (divide i by 3 and 5). We can check what the program prints in each case. As we can see, it prints expected values.

GPS Generator PRO is a software GPS simulator intended for hardware and software developers who need a stable source of realistic GPS data for testing and debugging their products. The program supports the NMEA-0183 protocol and can be efficiently used in locations where no actual GPS signal is available. GPS data generated by the program can be either saved to a file, forwarded to a COM port or broadcast over UDP. You can also use GPS Generator PRO in combination with a null-modem cable or a virtual serial port created by third-party software. Programs and devices working with the NMEA-0183 protocol will recognize the data generated by this tool as authentic GPS data. To make it realistic, you can configure the program to generate data with a certain fraction of CRC errors to simulate real life reception quality.

Supporting Packet, Map and Route operation modes, several output options and an ability to save GPS data as repeatable test scenarios, GPS Generator PRO is an invaluable tool for all kinds of developers working with GPS-enabled products.

Source: 3d2f.com review

Markus Kayser – Solar Sinter Project from Markus Kayser on Vimeo.

$ sudo apt-get install vpnc

When you try to connect to a cisco VPN by typing :

$ sudo vpnc

vpnc will look for the files /etc/vpnc.conf or /etc/vpnc/default.conf. If it does not find such files, vpnc will default to the interactive mode.
However, vpnc can support different configuration files and be called with the name of the file as an argument. For instance, if you create the configuration file /etc/vpnc/myconf.conf, you will be able to call vpnc like this:

$ sudo vpnc myconf

I already had office.pcf file with all required settings and I found out that I can convert this Cisco Client profile file to *.cfg file for VPNC. It can be performed by pcf2vpnc script. Steps to run it:

Download cisco-decrypt file which will be used to decrypt the group password from your pcf file:

$ wget http://www.unix-ag.uni-kl.de/~massar/soft/cisco-decrypt.c
$ sudo apt-get install libgcrypt11-dev
$ gcc -Wall -o cisco-decrypt cisco-decrypt.c $(libgcrypt-config --libs --cflags)
$ chmod +x cisco-decrypt
$ sudo cp cisco-decrypt /usr/bin

After these steps we have cisco-decript compiled. Next we need to download pcf2vpnc to convert pcf files into vpnc configuration format:

$ wget http://svn.unix-ag.uni-kl.de/vpnc/trunk/pcf2vpnc
$ chmod +x pcf2vpnc
$ sudo cp pcf2vpnc /usr/bin

Now we have cisco-decript and pcf2vpnc in /usr/bin. Let’s convert existing pcf file to conf:

$ pcf2vpnc office.pcf > office.conf
$ sudo cp office.conf  /etc/vpnc/

Now we can connect to office VPN:

$ sudo vpnc office

To disconnect enter:

$ sudo vpnc-disconnect

Unfortunately, there is problem with resolving hosts by names (DNS), so I have to connect by IP addresses.