Rob Janssen (RobIII)

Two Responsibilities in the .NET TPL Scheduler Class

I like parallel programming.  Most of my experience comes from developing on Windows in C/C++ and C#.  I haven’t yet had the pleasure of doing so functionally (which I plan to correct).

Not Flash! The (Still) Angsty Zeitgeist Of HTML5 Technology Burnout

(Note: I published this a couple months ago on 8bitrocket.com, but after a conversation I had earlier this week I realized that it still true today, so I'm reprinting it here). More than two years ago we (at 8bitrocket.com) started taking a close look at HTML5.

Things That Turbo Pascal is Smaller Than

The entire Turbo Pascal 3.02 executable--the compiler and IDE--was 39,731 bytes. How does that stack up in 2011 terms? Here are some things that Turbo Pascal is smaller than, as of October 30, 2011: The minified version of jquery 1.6 (90,518 bytes).

Code Janitor: nobody's dream, everyone's job (and how Erlang can help)

My first programming job was being a web developer on a decade-old dating site that still went strong. It was bad on many points: dead code, things nobody knew how they worked or if they even worked at all, no idea why things were built the way they were, and so on.

Announcing the Cassandra Storage Engine

We’re pleased to announce the first preview version of the Cassandra Storage Engine! The Cassandra Storage Engine (SE) allows access to Cassandra databases from MariaDB/MySQL, and to provide data integration between the SQL and NoSQL worlds.

Celebrating 30 Years of the ZX Spectrum

Well this is going to be a *slight* departure.

Dynamic Huffman

The adaptive Huffman algorithm as described by Vitter had three constraints that were compelling to relax. The first is the size of the table.

W.T.F.M: Write The Freaking Manual

I will take this moment to reflect on what has been an epic exercise in utter frustration: Sifting through poorly written documentation or tutorials for an otherwise excellent programming language, framework, project, etc. It seems that nowadays, the original phrase R.T.F.M.

Learning Redis

This post is part of my weekly tech learning series, where I take one hour each week to try out a piece of technology that I’d like to learn. Make sure to read to the end, where I have a screencast overview of the final application. This week I decided to learn a bit more about Redis.

Digging Out from Years of Homogeneous Computing

Since then, all functional languages have gotten impressively fast. The top-end PC in 1998 was a 350MHz Pentium II. The passage of time has solved all non-algorithmic speed issues. But at the same time, there was a push for native code generation, for better compilers, for more optimization.