A similar arrogance is happening in CEP-land, where, it seems, each and every financial services event processing application is now a “CEP application” just because someone in capital markets puts “CEP” in the same paragraph. I find it ridiculous that the same market of folks who have helped destroy the global economy are now the world’s self-proclaimed authorities on complex event processing. Amazing, if you really think about it, isn’t it?

I read many posts these days by folks in the capital markets trading world, claiming their message routing application is “CEP,” or their algo trading application is “CEP,” - feeds and speed, typical of what “turns on” the financial services folks. As an editorial note: I recall when I worked for a software company, folks on the same team who worked on Wall Street would look down on folks with many years of IT experience outside of financial services. Some would say “he is only a security guy” in their attempt to put down anyone who does not have trading floor IT experience on their resume. I found it all quite ridiculous and foolish.

My resume, for what it is worth, has a number of financial services companies, including either assessing, architecting or building large scale security systems for S.W.I.F.T, Chase or SBC. This experience does not seem to “count” with the trading floor folks, since security is more about getting things right, not just supporting a form of gaming or gambling with other peoples money, with more feeds and speeds the better.

Of late, as I have watched the CEP/EP space evolve, and unfortunately, I see a similar type of “capital markets virus” spreading into CEP-land. Folks on the trading side of financial services seem to think that whatever they say or do is right, and whatever others outside of the trading side do is wrong. These folks are quick to ridicule others who have far more experience than they do, outside of the trading floor of capital markets.

After all, mostly what they do on the trading side is route orders - and if a little old lady in a small town in Iowa loses her life savings because of a bad investment decision, it means little to the folks on the trading floor, the market folks are into feeds and speed - just keep the beast alive. Place your bet on this market or that one! Away we go, faster and faster!!!!

I am sometimes a little sad to observe the same audacity in the CEP world. Instead of focusing on the hard complex problems that require accuracy, the original set of problems defined when the phrase “complex event processing” was minted, the capital market folks have hijacked the term for their marketing purposes in algo trading and order managment systems. These same people ridicule others who are working to solve the (originally stated) complex event processing problems, problems the capital market traders seemingly cannot understand, since they have never worked on complex network or security management problems.

Nevermind, that these “ultra low latency” systems cannot accurately detect a complex money laundering scheme or an elaborate fraud. Nevermind that these “CEP engines” cannot accuracy insure that Average Joe does not lose his hard earned money in a fraud scheme.

I have no problem with folks in capital markets using the term CEP, but they should not ridicule those in technical areas that are not focused on keeping the “trading beast” alive so people can lose their life savings in a blink of an eye; but instead focused on solving complex problems such as the class of problems called out when the three letter acronym “CEP” was created.

When you use a declarative data source to perform a parameterized update that contains string parameters, consider setting ConvertEmptyStringToNull='false' on your <asp:Parameter> elements, because it's true by default! In other words, if a text field contains an empty string, it'll be sent to your declarative data source not as string.Empty, but as null.

Now I don't know about you, but I don't like dealing with nulls if I can avoid it. Especially strings. Unless there's a clear need to have a null state, I avoid them like the plague not only in my database designs but also in my XML schema designs. Hopefully this helps somebody out!

ISO 27001 is recognized internationally as a structured methodology for information security. Companies that choose to adopt ISO 27001 demonstrate their commitment to high levels of information security, however it does not mandate specific procedures nor define the implementation techniques for gaining certification. Thus, companies being audited for ISO 27001 compliance deal with the same issues that plague companies facing regulatory audits: how to effectively achieve compliance and, following an audit, cost-effectively maintain it.

The Tripwire Enterprise solution provides organizations with powerful configuration control through its configuration assessment and change auditing capabilities. In this white paper, learn how with Tripwire Enterprise, organizations can quickly achieve IT configuration integrity by proactively assessing how their current configurations measure up to specifications as given in ISO 27001. This provides immediate visibility into the state of their systems, and through automating the process, saves time and effort over a manual efforts.