Mike Benson’s Blog

For those of you who don’t know, I have been married for almost 15 years. My wife is a lovely woman, dedicated to family and home. She home schools our children and keeps the house running smooth.

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A major part of my programming and personal knowledge are in the area of finance and financial calculations. I have been in that space for pretty much all of my working adult life (15+ years). I have worked on several production systems for public use and numerous systems for internal (1 firm) use.

I decided that in this version of my blog I would start sharing some of the knowledge in both technical (programming terms) and some of it in personal or business terms. I am writing this post because IRR vs. TWR and when to use each one is confusing to many investors. I will start with IRR then go To TWR and then I may put some code up on how to calculate these. Now on to the post.

“Internal Rate of Return (IRR) discount rate at which the present value of the future cash flows of an investment equal the cash flows of an ivestment equal the cost of the investment.”
Barrons Dictionary of Finance and Ivestment Terms

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Some of you know that I have been playing around with writing poker calculators and poker game simulations. These days, my preferred language is C# so I decided to undertake my project in C#. I happened to run across Cactus Kev’s Poker Hand Evaluator and it looked pretty slick. I have already written my own evaluator in C# and it was pretty fast but this looked like a screamer.

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I am working on a project and needed to communicate between two XP pro machines that are not in a domain. Initially I wrote a named pipe wrapper because its quick and dirty. However, my server was getting bogged down and dropping messages. I decided to switch to MSMQ since it will give me some message reliability.This was very easy to do on my local computer.

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Well, it happened again - I changed hosting providers. This time I split the hosting up and went with specialists. I was on portal web hosting and their hosting is very good. Their email sucks. I have had more problems with their email than any other provider.

The next obvious question is why did’nt I just farm out the e-mail. Well, I was paying for their top level of service and it did not make sense to add on the cost of an email service. For less money I now have my blog and email through reputable providers. This is really just a pain for my family (sorry all) as the mail migration is painful.

Hopefully now that its cleaner I will post more.

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