Debugging is like . . .

Expiration Saturday is no more

I neglected to mention it at the time, but Expiration Saturday has left us.

The Options Clearing Corporation (OCC) is pursuing the transition of standard option monthly expiration processing from Saturday morning to Friday evening. As result, the expiration date for standard monthly options will be changing from the Saturday following the third Friday of the month to the third Friday of the month.

There is a cut-over date of February 1, 2015. Currently, it is anticipated that all standard monthly options that expire prior to February 1, 2015 will have a Saturday expiration date and all standard monthly options that expire on or after February 1, 2015 will have a Friday expiration date. The anticipated February 1, 2015 cut-over date will not impact existing standard monthly options, including FLEX contracts.

No tears were shed.

Words to live by

Emails at night, coders take fright

For that matter there's no good time to get an email.

Write-only databases

I've been thinking a lot lately about audit trails and running as-of reports. Here's an article about immutable data.

Linux-only mainframes

Might be good?

A little bit about the IBM i.

Despite all of the noise about security, apparently it's still terrible.

The overall lack of monitoring rates as one of Tatam's top three security annoyances, with 22 percent of the systems surveyed did not have an audit journal repository, and more than 50 percent of IBM i systems had no exit programs in place to monitor or control access to network services such as FTP, Telnet, and ODBC.

Oy. But it gets worse. IBM seems very interested in squeezing their customers, instead of giving them value.

A Power E850 is a four-node machine, so in theory it would support twice as many fan out features (48 card slots). That's where it might have impact in the midrange space where I live and work each day. So fret less about the lack of Power E850 support for IBM i, a religious battle, and more about how IBM is driving the cost of computing up for the P20 customer, a total cost of ownership battle.

I would love to develop software for the system, but since my price is zero and my license is GPL, that's hard to do.

Windows 10 for free

If you test, of course.

The Old New Market Structure

Seems like a good plan to me.

The article has a creative solution to the equity market structure problem of fragmentation: only allow stocks to trade on one exchange but have multiple exchanges compete for listings. The authors propose:

“The remedy is to create multiple trading venues and then limit trading in a particular security to one of them. There could be 10 licensed stock exchanges, and they could split among them the approximately 8,000 companies whose shares trade publicly in the U.S.”

As opposed to now, when we have companies all under essentially identical exchanges due to, I think, the consolidation of regulation under FINRA, and the exchanges compete to get the most volume.

Windows Server DNS and the loopback address

I did not know that the loopback address was supposed to be listed last in the DNS server settings on DCs. Fascinating. It seems there is a Best Practices Analyzer tool that tells you all of these things.

Want to analyze your .NET managed memory issues?

Here are some useful links.

WinDBG!

Leaky handles

More WinDBG

Tess's blog

Rule 606 woes

And more crazy issues with market structure.

With all the yelling about order types and the complexity of the markets, you would think that there would be an angry mob calling for transparency. But that doesn't seem to be the case, despite 606, the existing disclosure rule, being hopelessly outdated and failing to require the disclosure of most routed orders.

The importance of data backups

As explained by dinosaurs. Or God, actually.

Invest in people, not ideas

As PG points out.

Betting on people over ideas saved me countless times as an investor. We thought Airbnb was a bad idea, for example. But we could tell the founders were earnest, energetic, and independent-minded. (Indeed, almost pathologically so.) So we suspended disbelief and funded them.

Patents and innovation in China

They have a more flexible system, as Bunnie points out., and it allows them to do all sorts of neat things, like innovate on cell phones at a rate unimaginable in the US.