Happy Birthday Perl!

MPB writes about it.

Simple Linux/AD integration

Easy as pie.

Wonder why Perl still doesn't have subroutine signatures?

Come to this talk on Wednesday night.

CPAN Testers updated

Right here. It's a much easier page that shows you what to do to set up a smoker.

The Kerberos v5 RFC

A surprisingly enjoyable read.

Holding on to Windows XP

Some people are as stubborn as me.

And welcome to the new mainframe

Another machine I probably will never get to touch, alas. See the Technical Guide Redbook and the announcement.

Happy birthday Windows NT

It's 20 today!

Trying to start an old Blackbery PlayBook tablet and can't get past the license agreement because it's blank?

Of course not, me neither. Nope. Ok, I bought a cheap tablet to play with. Looks like some of them pointed at servers that no longer exist. Crackberry has some ideas on how to fix the problem. Basically you need to update the software while connected to a desktop, then try again.

If you're creating an Active Directory domain, use a real domain name

Not .local, or .corp, or .intra, all of which may soon be owned by someone else or otherwise cause odd problems. Just say no.

Financial Apartheid

Strong title, but basically true. The toxic brew of regulations over the past decade or two has pushed companies and trading out of the lit markets into darker corners, where only the elite can meet and greet. One example from the book of unintended consequences:

One of the big drivers of the shrinkage in our public markets is that we no longer have a different market structure specialized for smaller companies, like we did in the bad old days. The old Nasdaq dealer market had a very different market structure from the old NYSE auction market. In the old Nasdaq dealer market, only dealer quotes were disseminated to the general public. Customers had no way of getting wide exposure for their limit orders and competing with the dealers. The result was a bid-ask spread so wide you could drive an IPO through it.

The wide spreads that we thought were a scandal did have one redeeming social benefit: They motivated the industry to market smaller companies to investors.

CBOE Wins!

CHICAGO, IL - May 13, 2013 -- The Chicago Board Options Exchange (CBOE) announced today that the Supreme Court of the United States denied the International Securities Exchange's (ISE) petition to review the Illinois Appellate Court's decision that permanently restrained and enjoined ISE from listing or providing an exchange market for the trading of S&P 500 Index (SPX) and Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJX) options and enjoined OCC from issuing, clearing or settling the exercise of such ISE options. This brings to a close over six years of litigation.

Not sure why this excites me so much . . . perhaps just because I find the ISE difficult to deal with.

Redbooks!

If you use them, click on the link and show your love. It would be a pain and a shame if IBM stopped making them.

Computer programming in a nutshell

As explained by dinosaurs.

Behold the ETMF

If approved by the Securities and Exchange Commission, the investment vehicle could make it unnecessary to disclose portfolio holdings every day -- and in so doing potentially reshape the mutual fund industry, which has relied on infrequent disclosure of holdings to protect the ability of managers to achieve above-average returns and avoid front running.

It does seem challenging to maintain a market in something that you don't know the value of:

But Ben Johnson, director of passive funds research at Morningstar, said that the lack of portfolio transparency might prevent market makers from buying into the idea of EMTFs and participating. “We’ll have to see what this looks like in practice once you get these products in a live trading environment,” he said

But maybe no worse than making a market in IBM, a feat that always amazes me.

Mismatched socks

Had a little situation at work today. I can't get into the details, but basically, an upstream data provider decided that this was how they were going to populate their data file. Close enough.

Programmers or businesscritters?

Good programmers don’t usually make good business leaders. Programmers are typically introverted, have awkward social skills, and often aren’t very good about paying their own bills, much less fighting to close deals and get customers to pay up. This ability to be so good at one thing and so bad at another stems mainly, I think, from the fact that programming is an individual sport, where the best work is done, more often than not, just to prove that it can be done rather than to meet any corporate goal.

From Accidental Empires, chapter 6.

Depending on what you value in life, it's important to make sure that you're aiming at the right goal.

Cleaning up your CPAN directory

The Perl Monks speak

You can always delete .cpan/build and .cpan/sources, which is where the bulk lives.

I have been wondering this for weeks! Good thing I remembered about Google existing and searched for the answer.

Some wisdom about multithreading

If you've spent years learning tricks to make your MT code work at all, let alone rapidly, with locks and semaphores and critical sections, you will be disgusted when you realize it was all for nothing. If there's one lesson we've learned from 30+ years of concurrent programming it is: just don't share state. It's like two drunkards trying to share a beer. It doesn't matter if they're good buddies. Sooner or later they're going to get into a fight. And the more drunkards you add to the table, the more they fight each other over the beer. The tragic majority of MT applications look like drunken bar fights.

From the ØMQ guide. It looks like a fine product, and I hope to become a pro with it soon.

The SEC and market structure problems

The most pernicious rule is Regulation NMS, approved in 2005, which forced the New York Stock Exchange to accept automated executions of trades. That led to today's all-electronic marketplace, complete with high frequency trading, overly complex order types, flash crashes, and botched initial public offerings, according to Wunsch.

"The SEC destroyed the greatest market in the world for capital raising and investing and replaced it with a casino of rapid fire trading," Wunsch wrote. The old models of the New York Stock Exchange auction and the Nasdaq dealer market were best, but vanished due to SEC meddling, according to Wunsch.

Pretty much what my impression of the situation is. Though it doesn't mean I'm right - fools seldom differ, as the saying goes.

Want to learn a little about Go?

Check out this video from a Go developer. As a plus, he uses Acme as a text editor in some of his other videos.