Pieter Hintjens is dying

Cancer. A sad day.

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.

Windows 10 for free

If you test, of course.

Looking to log in to SourceForge via OpenID

Looks like they're trying to phase out support, but for now go to https://sourceforge.net/account/login.php?openid

Also posted this on Webapps.SE in case anyone knows more.

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.

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.

The importance of implementation details

Today, after years of odd threading bugs, I learned that creating a DataView and various other reads on a DataTable are actually write operations. E.g. from the first link

However, creating a DataView on a DataTable is a write operation on a DataTable. Most people don't know this, and its not very intuitive so I don't blame them for not knowing this. What happens when you create a DataView on a DataTable is the DataView will create an index on the DataTable and this index is stored in the DataTable. The reason for this is performance, for example if you create a DataView saying "F1=1" as the criteria, this creates an internal index on the DataTable to locate this information. Later on if you create another DataView with the same criteria, the index is reused, so this improves performance. However the fact that these indexes are stored inside the DataTable means that these are write operations to the DataTable and thus they are not thread safe.

Just goes to show you, when an object doesn't say it's threadsafe, don't assume that it's threadsafe, even if it's "just a read".

Test your email client

See how much valuable personal data you are leaking. The Email Privacy Tester is revamped and rereleased, and reGPLd. Well, GPLd at least.

RIP JT

Modern Perl version 2 is out

A fine book.

New version of Qt for OS/2

Exciting times indeed. This will go great with my new HP TouchPad.

Raymond Chen has a Stack Overflow account

Game over.

O RLY?

O'Reilly 3 for 2 sale, woot.

Oracle screws customers

To get at HP, of course. Looks like IBM may be the winner here. Oracle is a devouring monster, I'd be afraid to build too much in their ecosystem.

Previously I offered my thoughts on Oracle's announcement that it is terminating all its development for HP Itanium platforms. This announcement has understandably caused great anxiety and concern within HP's enterprise server community.

RIP Ken Olsen

IPv4 addresses all gone

From IANA, at least. I welcome our new IPv6 overlords.

Are your favorite web sites up?

Quite a neat site.

The Paypal Screwjob

Now imagine my surprise when I got an email from PayPal last Wednesday with the subject "PayPal appeal denied". Because I never had to appeal anything with my PayPal account. Reading through that email I discovered that my account was blocked because they've decided that I'm not allowed to receive donations.

This had me puzzled. Because I know that if a big company like Geeknet Inc., the owner of sourceforge.net offers to their users to use PayPal to receive donations, something had to be wrong with PayPals decision to block my account. So I asked for clarification and of course how I could get all the money I have in my PayPal account back. All I got was some lame default answer.

Classic PayPal move - they freeze your account for "suspicious activity" and you're done. Best to set up with a real back that can't arbitrarily take your funds.

DeLaTeX

Good for when you see a LaTeX symbol in a paper and you can't figure out how to make it.

CPAN 2.0

Greatest announcement since Perl 5.12 GA.