Password PSA

Just a reminder (I am guilty of this as well) that it's a bad bad idea to use the same password on multiple sites, as many sites do scary things like store passwords as plaintext. Yikes!!!

Link is to a discussion of the issues and some software which might be able to help you out with password generation/management.

Decimal formatting in .Net

One day I was having problems with decimal numbers showing up as strings with lots of zeros after the decimal point. Since they were whole numbers, I had naively expected that they would always be displayed without any zeros, at least with the format string I was using.

Alas, the documentation disagreed with me.

Apparently the precision of the decimal will show up when calling ToString in the manner in which I was calling it. So my unit tests all passed because I was constructing a decimal 42, rather than a decimal 42.00000.

Microsoft 1, me 0.

Best programming joke ever

Recursion is a whole topic in its own right and the source of the only good computer science joke I know – dictionary definition of recursion “Recursion – see recursion”.

Hercules goes commercial

This should be an iShares ETF

I will leave which ETF to your fertile imagination.

Reg NMS 2?

Some thoughts on what's going on in the world of dark pools vs displayed markets. I tend to be partial to displayed markets with public information and what have you, perhaps the SEC is moving in a similar direction.

Brick Science

Flounder comments on what walls would be like if masons were exposed to a "brick science" program equivalent to the "computer science" program that most people get. So true!

Flounder is an excellent resource for win32 programming, btw, if that happens to be your deal as it is mine. He is somewhat MFC centric, but pretty much everything is worth a read.