Chapter 14. ErlangerCast It!

If you are the kind of person that likes to type and communicate in real time with a friend (chat) while trading, or if you are the member of a trading chat room, you will want to know about ErlangerCast. If you use IRQ, Microsoft Messenger, or AOL Instant Messenger, then you will very much want to know about ErlangerCast. However even if you have never chatted with another person in your life, this extraordinarily feature will open some doors you probably never considered before.

If  you run day trading chat room, or any kind of group system on the web, you most likely have a large number of followers using an existing chat system. You might not therefore be enamored with yet another route for your customers to take. ErlangerCast is not intended to replace existing chat room technology, rather its designed to complement these existing services by providing you a way to more directly communicate with your group. There are features in ErlangerCast that allow  you to transmit charts, quote sheets, level 2 sheets, options, with one click, to everyone who has joined your room. And  you can administer the room you set up and control who and who may not enter it.

Napster Starts It

The idea behind ErlangerCast was inspired by a program called Napster. Napster, in case you have been sleeping under a large rock for the last year, allows people to "share" (download) MP3 music tracks in a way that is effortless. Essentially Napster is a central server that keeps track of the location of all its clients computers as well as what MP3 audio tracks are stored on these client computers. Napster then allows anyone who logs onto the server to download any number of these files transparently from the other clients that are logged on. A Napster user is both a server and a client in that people actually login to your computer and download files from it at the same time you can log into other computers and download there files.

Gnutella Finishes It

Another flavor of Napster-like program has surfaced called Gnutella. Named after a nutty spread for toast popular in England, Gnutella works like Napster in allowing sharing, but it allows sharing anything, not just music files. But what is even more interesting is that Gnutella has no central server holding a directory of all the users. Instead each copy of the program is a server and a client and the directories are whatever is available when you are online. So in effect the Gnutella network exists in no one place, its created as users connect to each other. Of course a program like Gnutella has the recording industry, and others, running scared, because there is no way to stop it. But what we find fascinating is the actual ideas behind Gnutella of being able to set up independent networks where clients become servers and servers become clients at the same time, while networks are made out of thin air and constantly changing and morphing as new users join and old users quit.
Chatting in ErlangerQuote

ErlangerCast lets you chat (type back and forth in real time) with users who are also using ErlangerCast and are in the same room that you are in. When you first open a ErlangerCast window (File->New->Tenlights Workspace ErlangerCast) it looks like figure below.

You can click on the Create Room button and make your own meeting room, or you can click on the Join Room button and join any rooms that are currently in progress (provided they are open to the public or you have permission from the owner of that room).

In this example erlangerRQ has created a room called Phil's Squeeze Plays. If someone joins this room, they can type in the bottom window and press Send, and everyone else in that room will see their text. By the way if you want to create another room you would go to File->New->ErlangerQuote Workspace ErlangerCast and make a new window for that room.

 

The results of this arrangement is that many people can join your room and a lively and robust discussion can ensue. Each sender is identified by there screen name so there is privacy, and the date and time are displayed after the name of the sender. The senders messages appear under their screen name. Your own text is bold while the other users is plain. On the right side of the screen is a strip that contains the names of all the people logged into your ErlangerCast room.


But There is Even More: Casting

If ErlangerCast stopped here you would be asking why not just let us all use our current IRQ or Messenger programs for chatting? What makes ErlangerCast unique are two features.

ErlangerCast It!

Suppose you are in a room with a few of your trading pals and you want to share a quote sheet with some fancy alerts, which are going off, and a chart that has a number of special indicators and studies.

In the past you could either send them a screen dump of the entire workspace or email them your entire ErlangerQuote workspace file and then have them open it, overwriting whatever was on their screen, and look at your chart. Of course this was a five minute chart so by the time your pals finish this process the signals that excited you are now gone.

If  you want to share an object in ErlangerCast with the people in your room you just click on the quote sheet, or chart (or for that matter option sheet, Level II sheet, hotlist, or scan list) that you want them to see.

Then go to File->ErlangerCast It! There will be progress dialog appear as the object is transmitted, and in a few seconds every person in the room will be looking at  your quote sheet! The quote sheet will appear on all the other screens in the same relative location to where it was on your computer. Therefore be careful that if the object you ErlangerCast is on a high resolution monitor and your pals have a lower resolution monitor, the chart you send may end up off there screen. To avoid this first move the chart to the upper left corner of your screen. If you have a 1024 x 768 monitor you can be reasonably assured that most people have a similar or higher resolution display.

You can ErlangerCast as many objects as you wish (currently you can't cast Note objects or browsers) and as often as  you wish. However consider that each time you send an object to the users in your room it clutters their display with things they may not want.

SymbolCast It!

You thought sending charts and quote sheets to your friends was fun, check this feature out. A SymbolCast is a sequence you type into your message box using this format:

 /sym: symbol

where symbol is any legal stock or option symbol such as AOL, IBM, or C.

If you type this in the message box and press send, all the people who are in the room, who have active charts with white sym dropdowns, will see their charts update to the new symbol. Type in /sym:AOL and all your buddies charts will change to AOL. This allows an instructor, guru, teacher, aid, boss, friend, or club member to control the workspaces of all other members. Don't want any people messing with your charts and symbolcasting to other members in YOUR room? Uncheck "Can Send SymbolCasts" in the User Authorization dialog. Don’t want people changing your charts when you are in other rooms. Just put a different color in your chart Sym dropdown than white, like green or red. That way when someone does a /sym: it will not affect your charts.

Your Settings

The Your Settings button allows you to set up the format of the display in your ErlangerCast window. You can with the top four checkboxes Timestamp your messages, check on or off Allow ErlangerCasts, Announce Users Entering the Room and Announce Users Exiting the Room. Each of the following events can have its own sound effect and color effect:

 

To add a wave sound file to one of the 6 events, click on the event name in the upper area of the dialog box, then click on the Browse button. Use the File Open dialog find the Sound folder inside of the ErlangerQuote directory, and select the wave file you wish. When the dialog returns click on the Play button to confirm it’s the right sound.

To change the font or color of the type for any of the 6 events, click on the event in the lower area of the dialog box, then click on the Font button and chose the font and size you wish.

The Window Background dropdown menu allows you to change the background color of the ErlangerCast window.

Defining Your Room: User Authorization

You own a trading room, have a following of investor clients, teach a class, or are simply leader of a pack. You want to control just who can and can't enter your room, as well as what they can do when they are in the room. The User Authorization dialog, seen below, is where this is done.

If the Unrestricted checkbox is NOT checked, like below, then the Global User Permissions do NOT apply, and these global settings are grayed out in the dialog. Instead the checkboxes to the right of the Access List are what apply. These are called User Permissions and apply to each user that you Add to the Access list. Users are added as screen names, so you must know the screen name of the user you wish to add before you can add them. You enter the name into the ErlangerQuote Screen Name field and click Add. This adds the name to the Access List. To set the permissions for this new user, click on their name and decided which of the permissions to check or not check as follows:

Check Can Enter Room to allow this user to enter the room. (Why you would want to create a room and let no one in could only be the sign of a misfit and sycophant, however it may be that you have created a room, and now want to close the door, but not turn the room off entirely, in which case this setting would keep the room active but prevent this user from entering.) 

Check Can Post Messages when you wish to allow this user to be able to send messages to the group. If you do not check this box  you will be the only one that can send a message to the group.

Check Can Send ErlangerCasts if you wish to allow the people in your room to send workspace objects to the rest of the group. You may want to reserve this right only for  your system operators and assistants, as a group of people all casting at the same time is like a collection of fishermen on a small lake all casting in the dark. Lots of lines will be caught and it can be very confusing.

Check Can Send SymbolCasts when you wish to allow people the ability to update all charts with a symbol. If you type /sym: YHOO it all the people in the room who have active charts with white sym dropdowns, to update to the new symbol YHOO.

Note that there is a Remove, Load and Save button. These allow you to Save the list of users in a ErlangerCast User List *.rcul file as well as to Load an existing rcul list. This means you can set up a group of users with a fixed set of permissions for a room, save the list with Save, then reload it later with Load.