Kodak-con

Normally I wouldn't post this on a finance blog but I picked this up on Only VIX, one of my favorite finance Blogger blogs. The big picture doesn't look good.

On the corporate side of the con, we have Kodak Chairman and CEO Jim Continenza, who picked up 3 million shares and cheap options over the past 4-6 months. It’s Kodak board member George Karfunkel of the private equity and banking Zyskind-Karfunkel family, with his 6.4 million shares. It’s Kodak board member Philippe Katz, who owns about 4.3 million shares through at least five shell companies. Of these shares, they were also each granted tens of thousands of shares in Kodak just over the past 60 days.

And so on. It's good for insiders, good for politicians, terrible for everyone else.

Ground Truth Document

Not a spec, but a statement. Positive, not normative. I like it. Can't get to where you want to go unless you know where you are.

The practice that goes with this term is simple: always put your ground-truth document together before you start on production code (test tools to reverse-engineer the device are not production code). Maintain it with the code, treat it as the authority for how the code should behave, and when the code doesn’t behave that way treat the divergence as a bug. When your knowledge about how the device behaves changes, change the code second; change the ground-truth document first. (Of course you have it under version control, so you also have a history of your knowledge of the device.)

Indirect object notation going byebye in Perl 7

Long awaited and I hate it but still bittersweet somehow - the old way of doing things reminds me of a simpler time, when code was code and filehandles were . . . I still don't really understand what filehandles are.

Trust Binding in Security

Professor Bellovin with excellent insight as usual, starting with a comment on Zoom's dubious security but getting to the root of the issue.

I call this the "trust binding" problem. That is, at a certain point, you decide whether to trust something. In the the two scenarios I described at the start, the trust decision has to be made every time you interact with the service. Maybe today, the provider is honest and competent; tomorrow, it might not be, whether due to negligence or compulsion by some government. By contrast, when the essential security properties are implemented by code that you download once, you only have to make your decision once—and if you were right to trust the provider, you will not suddenly be in trouble if they later turn incompetent or dishonest, or are compelled by a government to act against your interests.

Grouping in MS SQL Server

I did not realize how many options there were to basically build pivot tables in SQL. Very cool.

Happy Birthday Java!

It's been a long and sometimes painful 25 years. Back when I started coding seriously in 2002, Java was my main language - and I'm still writing in it. The more things change . . . Anyway, here's a bit about Java GC for the curious.

Dark Themes in Sql Server Management Studio

Handy, or just be lazy and swap your background color to black, text to white, and keywords to cyan.