What's New

Hi, I'm Daniel Kahn. I'm glad you found this page. Check in here to see what I'm up to professionally; where I've been and where I'm going. If I have anything new to add I'll make a note of it in this section. If you check in and don't see anything with a recent date there either isn't any news or I'm very busy.

February 08, 2004 - I've been with the New York City Transit Authority for over a year now. I really like it. I'm working with Oracle, Business Objects (the business intelligence product), Java (Java Beans, servlets and JSP) and a some VB/COM. If I stick at it for 20 years I'll get a pension, until then, it's a steady job and a free MetroCard. Very friendly people and I'm surprised at how little bureaucracy there is in my department. There's something kind-of strange about getting paid out of my own tax dollars...

I've got a pretty cool blog engine written. It works with any browser but IE. If I have time I may try to build in an extension for those of you who like proprietary browsers.

January 10, 2002 - The Macrobiotic Web page is here. I wrote this for my Mom's macrobiotic group. Mom passed away last April. I'll leave it up for a while. I used a guestbook model to build it. I probably won't be doing any maintenance on it. Still to come were a cleanup of the menus, viewer comments, and editable entries.

December 17, 2001 - I've added persistent support for the secure section login. I'm done fiddling with the site for a bit. I'm going to get to work on a Macrobiotic support web page. I'll keep you posted as to my progress.

December 13, 2001 - Been hacking around with PHP and MySQL. I added a private checkbox to the Guest Book. Now you can leave a message that only people who log in can see. Send me e-mail for a password.

I also posted links to some projects that were accessible from the OLD Site. Enjoy.

December 3, 2001 - Been freshening my UNIX familiarity. I used PHP and mySQL to implement the Guest Book. Give it a look. Send me a message. It's still a first draft. I'd like to add a private area with a semi-secure log-on. Just for fun.

November 8, 2001 - Redid professional page as Digital Résumé

My Résumé

Here is a Word document containing my résumé.

My Last Employer

Up until June of 2001 I was working at Banc of America Securities in the Prime Brokerage Division. I had been there about three years and had completed the project for which I had been hired. We called it ADP Direct and it's primary job was to transmit structured trade data to ADP.

The following is a business side description of the ADP Direct system (complete with mini-glossary):

ADP - Advanced Data Processing

ITG - Investment Technology Group

LU6.2 - Logical Unit 6.2 an IBM AS400 communication protocol similar to TCP/IP

PBS - Prime Brokerage Services (a division of Banc of America Securities)

ADP Direct (the system I developed) processes and sends basic and augmented trade information into ADP's overnight trade processing system to make use of ADP's calculation and bookkeeping facilities.

"Augmented" in this context refers to information from outside the customer's general Prime Brokerage account.

As an example: Say PBS client HedgeFund123 traded 100 shares of BRK/A through two different brokers (B1 and B2, perhaps with differing prices and commissions) for its clients AAA, BBB and CCC with an implicit 25, 25, 50 allocation split. Lets say further that CCC starts out short 50 shares of BRK/A and AAA and BBB have no position. We therefore have (not counting offsetting account trades) two buys into HedgeFund123's PBS account, two buys into the AAA and BBB's client accounts and a cover short into CCC's client account.

We could consider the two external broker trades "basic" stock purchases that would be reported and cleared in the normal fashion, the three allocations could be considered "augmented" information. There were no actual street side trades for these shares but the clients want reports on their holdings separately. A system of sub-manager or client accounts enables PBS to provide a complete set of reports on the position for CCC individually as if the trades had been made by them directly, correctly calculating proportional commissions, fees, ticket charges and margin as well as sector information, diversification and a wide array of additional information.

PBS could then turn this information around the next morning and automatically incorporate it into reports, queries and analysis on a wider than usual range of information.

One of the useful byproducts of the system was the LU6-2 transmission tool which became useful to another department in sending ITG bulk trades through to ADP. This information represented the actual transfer of shares, as opposed to the ADP Direct trades which represented Prime Brokerage trade allocations.

The ADP Direct system fully supports Equities and Derivatives and has partial support for Bond Trades (we rely on ADP for coupon, interest and pricing data).

Some further technical details are available in the Banc of America section of my résumé.

This project was an excellent and challenging learning experience. After the project was done I started wondering what was next. There didn't seem to be any major projects on my immediate horizon at the BOFA. Between that and the wedding scheduled for September I thought it could be a good time to go. I completed a maintenance hand-off, hiring two very capable people and went home to plan my wedding. Parting was amicable and references are available.

Projects

Between long term jobs I've kept busy with a variety of fun stuff. Mostly, I've taken on projects to learn new languages or new technologies. These programs and sites were mostly built as learning experiences. As such they all served their purposes admirably.

		I contracted to build the Project Liberty site . It came out pretty well. The site seems to be down now. Here is a link to a local copy.
		I worked for a short while at ZoneEdit. Got a nice T-shirt. Had to bag the project when a third party tool turned out to be less then adequate for our needs. I get to keep the shirt though.
		I created the site for the Second Annual Brooklyn Jewish Film Festival . The site looks pretty good. Nothing too fancy but was pleased. I planned to do their 2003 site as well but my daughter Samantha came along and I had to hand it off.
		I built this for my Shul. Haven't rolled it out yet.

The Macrobiotic Recipe Book site was created to support a local Pot Luck group. I attended one of their meetings and the food was actually edible. The site uses some PHP for the recipes. It's a work in progress.

My Wedding Page, - This was mostly to support the out of town guests we were expecting. There is some minor Director stuff in here. Mostly flip-books. You'll need the shockwave plug-in. Check out the goodies page for a little more. I wrote (in some cases compiled) the program for the ceremony if you're interested.

Scrunchy Page - Mostly this was about learning HTML. It was a long time ago and I'd do it differently now but some of the writing is fun.

Interval Training - This is a Java applet to teach Interval Recognition. Also to learn Java. The sounds were recorded. I'd like to redo it with MIDI. Someday.

The Sestina Framework - A toy app to learn Java Script. You can view the source. A sestina is a rather complicated piece of poetry that takes six seed words... Well, you can read it all on the page.

Check out the Guest Book. It was written using PHP (sort of UNIX for ASP) and talks to a mySQL database on the back end. I'm going to use the same technology to implement a Macrobiotic Recipe page. Here is the source for the Guest Book.

My Picture

Infomercial

With over 10 years as a technologist, software designer and computer programmer I bring a seasoned skill set to the job. I’m current with the industry’s rapidly evolving tools and am able to acquire new information and technology as it becomes available.

With extensive experience as a leader of groups, large and small in a multitude of contexts, I have had ample opportunity to hone my ability to identify strengths and weaknesses. My understanding of other people's needs and strengths extends beyond the immediate development group to include technology users and clients. I bring uncommon creativity, unique perspective and presentation to software design and end user management.

Although my computer science training was not academic (I am largely self-taught) I am broadly read in the field, most deeply in object oriented architecture; from Bertrand Meyer on Eiffel to Christopher Alexander and the Gang of Four on Design Patterns.

Through the years I’ve created or helped create large systems for a number of markets including insurance, managed health care, cellular telephony, prime brokerage and securities trading. I’ve also spent a good deal of time involved in the customization, extension and combination of tools in situations where a complete ground up software project would have been overkill.

I have a strong belief in the importance and power of communication and have often been called upon to drive the information transfer that accompanies software creation. This has gone far beyond commenting code to writing documentation, computer based training systems and tutorials, creating training materials, and giving seminars and lectures.

I’m looking for a good challenge and a chance to use my skills and build new relationships. I bring a fully stocked and ever growing toolbox to the job along with a passion and energy that allows me to hit the ground running.