Tales from a Trading Desk

Blogging within Banks

Its interesting to see what some banks are doing with regards blog.  DrKW sound like they are actively using blogs, even from the trading desk. JP Rangaswami (global CIO, DrKW) appears to be champion P2P, OSS, blogs etc.  Shame he doesn't appear to have a public blog.  I wonder what JPMC, DB, Goldman, BNP Paribase etc are doing around blogging?

Why does Microsoft treat C++ as a second class citizen?

Todd Brooks makes a few interesting comments on Don's recent blog.  Visual Studio (VS) Class Designer will support J#, but will not support C++ is setting a president - does anyone use J#? The lack of STL.NET in the final release of VS 2005 is also a bit of a joke, especially given that the release of VS 2005 has already slipped by 6 months or so.  I know VS is a large product, and there are a lot of people working on its shipment (together with .NET 2.0), but surely Microsoft code dedicate a few more resource to actually shipping a product that does C++ the justice it deserves.

Since we are on the subject of C++, it's also worth mentioning that the Microsoft C++ bloggers appear to have gone silent - Andy Rich, Brandon Bray etc - which is a shame since the quality of there previous blog postings was excellent.

Banks and https

Over at Jesse's blog

Is C++ in fashion again?

Looking at JobServer one would have to agree with Herb that C++ does appear to be back in fashion more than it has been over the last 5 years.  AW also appears to have recently added a few new books to their excellent C++ Series.

Update: Chris blogs about Grumps C++.

Update: Quant C++ jobs, if you have the skills, these can pay the bills

Windows 2003 Domain Controller problems continue

Tonight we are getting this error in our New York office:

"Windows cannot access the file gpt.ini for GPO %1. The file must be present at the location <%2>. (%3). Group Policy processing aborted."

Time for another KB

Koders - search Open Source code

Here

XP Developer

One of these days I must go along to the Extreme Tuesday Club over at XP Developer

Update: UK contractors blog - Agile coach, and Rachel Davies.

RpcSS Service failure

Last night one of our Windows 2003 domain controllers decided it was a good time to stop working after a reboot.  The Windows EventLog showed a large number of system services were failing to logon, and thus failing to start.  We tracked the issues back to this EventLog entry:

"The RpcSs service was unable to log on as NT Authority\NetworkService with the currently configured password due to the following error: The security account manager (SAM) or local security authority (LSA) server was in the wrong state to perform the security"

We eventually fixed the ERROR_INVALID_SERVER_STATE (1352) issue using netdom.

HoneyMonkeys

Microsoft take another step to fix its OS security issues - HoneyMonkey. Microsoft Research Systems Management Research Group has more details here.

Finally, 2Mb broadband

I finally got upgraded (with not price increase) from 1Mb to 2Mb broadband last night.  :)