Hal O'Brien

This week, we watched the DVDs for Series 1 of the BBC's Hustle. Very enjoyable, and I keep being dumbfounded they actually got Robert Vaughn for it.

But most amusing to me, though: The first episode has our con artists dangle out "a sure thing" as bait to their less than scrupulous victims/marks... The exact same plot/scheme Goldman Sachs has been accused of employing Sergey Aleynikov to do for them!

For those who don't know: Aleynikov is currently in hot water for allegedly trying to steal proprietary Goldman Sachs software that he wrote for them. Not so well covered (although the link above goes into it) is what the software was intended to do: Trap stock transactions, allow GS to make counter trades (either buy or short as appropriate), allow the original transaction to go through, and then execute the cash-out. All in less than a second. "(T)rading algorithms with low latency requirements responsive to changes in market conditions," said Aleynikov's LinkedIn profile.

The first episode of Hustle was broadcast on BBC One on 24 February 2004. Aleynikov was arrested in 2009.

Fascinating.

Only pecunium may fully appreciate this, but there it is.

I just wrote the following earlier tonight to James Fallows (longtime editor at The Atlantic, and author of many books, including National Defense, Breaking the News, and Looking At the Sun):

*^*^*

I was recently writing a letter to the editor of my local paper. Like many papers, they have a word limit -- 200 words. In the past, I'd used Microsoft Word's Word Count feature off whichever menu. But this time I was using Word 2007, and I noticed a dynamic word count ticking away on the left-hand side of the status bar. I thought to myself, "That's a handy feature for a working writer---"

Which is when I caught myself short, and was reminded of your piece in The Atlantic years ago about working for Microsoft on Word. Specifically, about you trying to add in features you thought would be useful to writers.

So, I have to ask -- Was this one of yours? Did it really take that long to make it into a released product?

Congratulations, if so.

*^*^*

Jim wrote back right away, and was kind enough to confirm that, yes, that was one of his features. Also, he's working on a piece for The Atlantic on the Giant Panda reserve in Wolong.

But this is about as cool as when I put together the meaning of the reference in The West Wing where someone from Indonesia was a Portuguese speaker.

So, I was looking at something, which reminded me of Mitch Kapor's Open Source Applications Foundation and their project to make an open source PIM that'll be both a challenger to MS Outlook and a modern-day follow-on to Lotus' late, lamented Agenda. And I was reading Mitch's blog, and I saw his entry about how he's converted over to Mozilla for his browser, and I thought about the good press Mozilla's been getting lately...

So I gave it a try.

{phht!}

I am less than whelmed.

Plug-ins don't install automatically. That's a nuisance, but I know some developers think IE's ability to use (programs from other {gasp!} developers) ActiveX controls to just seamlessly install plug-ins is Pure Evil from Planet 10. This strikes me as the usual programmer way of disdaining things that make life easier for the customer while adding any effort at all for the programmer.

But, even so... I went to CNN's web site. Saw the headline story, the derailment down in Commerce, Calif., on the very tracks I used to walk down between the Commerce train platform and Gallo Wine's LA distributorship when I worked there. Saw a link to a video clip. Cliquez-ici. Got told I needed to re-install RealPlayer, because it didn't "see" the copy already installed for IE. Downloaded, re-installed, re-loaded the page.

RealPlayer freezes.

I go to Task Manager. Kill off RealPlayer.

Things are still moving like slush in liquid helium.

Call up Task Manager again. Take a look at the Processes tab.

It's not RealPlayer that's hogging the CPU as a runaway process -- it's Mozilla, at 95% of a CPU locked at 100%.

I shut down Mozilla.

Still sludge.

Mozilla-the-app is gone, but Mozilla-the-process is still 95%+.

{le sigh}

Kill the process, uninstall Mozilla. I'm sorry, an app that refuses to actually stop when I tell it to just offends me.

Slogan of the day: "Open Source: Still Worth Every Penny You Pay!"