Github falling further into Microsoft's clutches

Microsoft seems to be falling into the bad habit of disappearing any project they find economically or politically inconvenient. Self hosting and/or free software focused hosting is the way to go.

Rumblings at the Free Software Foundation

I was surprised to learn recently, though I guess I should have not been, of further issues at the FSF. If you recall, RMS was forced to depart a few years ago. Well, Alex Olivia points out that there has also been some rewriting of history and some very curious decisions made since then. But regardless urges people to resubscribe, and write that they are resubscribing based on RMS's recommendation.

But, besides recognizing the work the FSF keeps on doing, I am also hopeful because I perceive some things turning for the better. Because of this hope, there is something else that I am reasonably comfortable recommending and asking of those who'd trust the FSF better with Richard Stallman back in the board of directors:

Would you make a pledge to become a new member, or to renew your membership, if the FSF gets Richard back in the board of directors? Please email it to the FSF contact address (info), copying myself (oliva, at fsf or gnu).

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.