Luke ‘n’ Bill

First I heard about this story from my dad and then later on in the day I got an e-mail from Ross about it.

A few days back (September 8th) a news article in the archive a Florida newspaper started getting an unexpectedly large amount of hits for some reason. This would usually not be a big deal, however it was an article about United Airlines filing for bankruptcy from a couple months back. So now it’s a big deal.

The large amount of hits caused it to go the the “Popular News” section of the web site. Because of that, it was picked up by the Google News crawler. The news crawler puts the article on the Google News site with the current date on it and the article itself doesn’t have a date with it.

This eventually got itself onto the financial news service of a stock research firm that publishes reports on the Bloomberg L.P. Now we’ve really got a problem.

Here is an excerpt from an informative writeup by Steven J Klein @ mac.com:

8. On Monday, September 8, at approximately 10:45AM, a headline from the report flashed across Bloomberg screens.

9. In the next 15 minutes, UAL shares in UAL dropped from almost $12.50/share to just $3, before trading was halted. At least one block of 100 shares traded at 1 cent per share, though that trade was later voided.

He also brings up a good point that this could very easily be a form of market manipulation. All spammers would have to do is send out millions of e-mails with the link to a story like this in the body, if just a small fraction clicks on the story, bam…it’s on the front page and everyone freaks.

Ok, so my fiance just looked at me like I told her “Guess what, 2+2=4!!!!” but I swear this just blew my mind.

I’ve been reading Herbert Schildt’s complete reference to C# and I am currently in inheritance where you learn about method virtualization/abstraction and they were quickly explaining how boxing/unboxing allows C#’s type system to be fully unified and to do so they gave this quick example as part of it:

using System;

class MethOnValue
{
public static void Main()
{
Console.WriteLine(10.ToString());
}
}

Maybe have never thought about the use of objects in C# deep enough, or maybe I’m thinking about the complexity of it way too much now, but that really just made me step back and say, “what the…?”  I could be making it more complex than what it is, but it just seems crazy that you can take a value and make it an object out of the blue.

By the way - The comment here refers to the fact I had “fiance” mispelled as “finance” originally.

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I was working with Reid lately on some CSS issues he was having with a new blog he was creating.  It took a few days but we got through most of the issues that he wasn’t readily able to resolve.  The design is one of my favorite kinds…very simple, clean but very nice looking.  However, what struck me about working with Reid on this site was how complex CSS can really get.  We didn’t touch on any of the really advanced “concepts” you can get into, but there was still a descent amount of training on CSS and Reid was in no way a newbie to css or web development.

Coming from the application development side of Computer Science has always made me think that CSS and html for that matter were really not “programming languages”.  However, after this last week of work and just thinking about the amount of training skill it takes to go from zero to efficient with CSS, I’ve gained a new sense of respect for complexity of CSS.