Interesting things, mid-May edition

The mini heat wave is over, for now...

• Google I/O: June 25–26, 2014

  Explore the themes of design, develop and distribute during Google’s annual technology conference, as we share new product ideas and interactive experiences.

• A Riddle Wrapped In a Mystery Inside an Enigma

  Yeah, Godwin's law, whatever, whatever. My point is NOT that the NSA is the same as the Nazi party (in fact, my argument has the NSA on the opposite side). My point is that the government now treats ordinary civilians as worthy of the same sort of tactics that they once used against the Nazis.

• Vernam, Mauborgne, and Friedman: The One-Time Pad and the Index of Coincidence

  It is most likely that Vernam came up with the need for non-repetition; Mauborgne, though, apparently contributed materially to the invention of the two-tape variant. Furthermore, there is reason to suspect that he suggested the need for randomness to Vernam. However, neither Mauborgne, Herbert Yardley, nor anyone at AT&T really understood the security advantages of the true one-time tape. Col. Parker Hitt may have; William Friedman definitely did.

• Quite a good list, actually: 10 Articles Every Programmer Must Read

  Since most of these post are actually driven by practical knowledge, beginner and intermediate programmers can take a lot from it.

• I guess I need to learn the difference between "Market on Close", and "Market" orders: Stock Markets Had a Rough Second Yesterday

  All of the weird trades occurred at about the same time, just over 10 minutes before the close, and that explanation makes sense. There you are at 3:49 p.m., entering your market-on-close order to buy and sell a bunch of shares in the closing auction. You enter the number of shares you want, you go to the drop-down box on your computer system, you pick "Market on Close," your mouse slips, you actually click on "Market," and whoosh, off your order goes to be filled in the market.

• Definition of Market on Close Order

  A "market on close" order is a market order that is to be executed as close to the closing price as humanly possible.

• Trading FAQs: Order Types

  On the close

  A time-in-force limitation that can be placed on the execution of an order. This limitation requires that the order is executed as close as possible to the closing price for a security. All or any part of the order that cannot be executed at the closing price is canceled.

• Scaling Feature Flags With Zookeeper

  For those not in the know, feature flags are a way of adding a conditional to your code that lets a configurable number of users or requests through, originally designed for restricting new features to internal users before rolling them out to the rest of the userbase.

• rollout: Feature flippers.

  You might want to let a specific user into a beta test or something. If that user isn't part of an existing group, you can let them in specifically.

• Guide to Cassandra Thread Pools

  Each like task is grouped into a stage having a queue and thread pool (ScheduledThreadPoolExecutor more specifically for the Java folks). Some stages skip the messaging service and queue tasks immediately on a different stage if it exists on the same node. Each of these queues can be backed up if execution at a stage is being over run.

• Symas Lightning Memory-Mapped Database (LMDB)

  LMDB is an ultra-fast, ultra-compact key-value embedded data store developed by Symas for the OpenLDAP Project. It uses memory-mapped files, so it has the read performance of a pure in-memory database while still offering the persistence of standard disk-based databases, and is only limited to the size of the virtual address space, (it is not limited to the size of physical RAM).