Change more-link display text in WordPress

For a recent project we created an online house pricer for the Dutch market, Huizen Prijs Checker. The backend, a statistical model, was built using Java which connects to our PHP / WordPress frontend using an API. We have worked with WordPress before, but once again we were surprised to see how easy it’s to setup and customise using templates and plug-ins.

The site being local to Dutch market is all in Dutch. This meant creating pages and blogs in Dutch. Which works wonderfully. The one thing which gave us headache was the continue reading text displayed by the more-link object.  The tag is inserted using the WordPress editor as shown here:

read more insert

On your blog-role or category pages a link will be displayed with the text “Continue reading ->”, like so:continue

This wasn’t any good as our site was meant to be in Dutch. So we where hoping for something like:

lees meer

It took quite some time to figure out how to get our theme to display a “continue reading” link with custom text. As it turns out this can be fixed by creating a child package. Details on how to do this can be found in WordPress Codex. Once you have the child theme setup the link text can be modified by adding a new read_more_link function to the functions.php file in your theme. This function will then override the default behaviour of the links. The following snippet does the trick. Continue reading

Warning NlOptNet Contains Malware

For a recent project building short rate lattice trees we needed to do some root solving. Fortunately there are quite a few Open Source solvers available enabling us to test a wide range of algorithms with little effort. One of the algorithms we tried was NlOpt, which is excellent. To use this code in .Net we used https://github.com/BrannonKing/NLoptNet via NuGet repo with the following command.

 

PM> Install-Package NLoptNet

Installing 'NLoptNet 1.0.2.0'.

Install failed. Rolling back…

 

This made the virus scanner go on full alert!

 

image00

Downloading the zip from github directly resulted in a zip with the virus included.

image01

Hope this helps keeps PCs safe and that the next version of this otherwise great package will be without virus.

Reducing Operation Risk: The First Baby Step

Introduction

In our experience, each client is different, context is always king. However, because many financial institutions start off with end-user programmers, people who program for themselves, usually in Excel with VBA, the organisations tend to follow similar growth paths. In the end, financial institutions end up with a consolidated engineering team, what is often called the ‘Engineering Hypermarket’. The hypermarket is a place where the financial institution can ‘shop’ for:

  • A bug fix.
  • A new pricer.
  • A desk quant who can sit in the trading room assisting with features, analysis or coding.

The hypermarket is characterised by high levels of automation, discipline and rapidity; they do things quickly. Building a hypermarket is a bootstrapping process that starts with the smoke test. Continue reading

Operational risks in code libraries