Rob Janssen (RobIII)

Dear Startups: Stop Asking Me Math Puzzles to Figure Out If I Can Code

I’ve always been pretty good at math.

Brennan Moore

We all have stories, as engineers, of fixing some crazy thing at the last minute right before the demo goes up. We have all encountered situations where we needed to fix something that was our fault and we needed to fix it now.

The trouble with timestamps

Some folks have asked whether Cassandra or Riak in last-write-wins mode are monotonically consistent, or whether they can guarantee read-your-writes, and so on. This is a fascinating question, and leads to all sorts of interesting properties about clocks and causality.

Thoughts on RDRAND in Linux

This has been brewing since I read Linus’ response to the petition to remove RDRAND from /dev/random. For those of you who don’t know, RDRAND is a CPU instruction introduced by Intel on recent CPUs.

Sorry Samsung, That’s a Computer - Not a Watch.

With the Galaxy Gear Watch, Samsung just proved that the industry doesn’t understand wearables. Sorry, it’s not enough to stick a computer to a strap and call it a day. So, what’s wrong with the Galaxy Gear? It’s not cohesive.

Visual Studio 2013 available for download

I’m excited to announce that the final releases of Visual Studio 2013, .NET 4.5.1, and Team Foundation Server 2013 are now available for download! MSDN subscribers can download from the MSDN Subscriber Downloads page.

Code at 30,000 feet

A week ago, the post ”I wrote FAT on an airplane, for heaven’s sake”, on Raymond Chen’s popular blog The Old New Thing was making the rounds on the interwebs.

The code documentation fallacy

Say you start work on a new code base. Would you, as a user, rather have 90% or 10% of its API functions commented with Doxygen or something similar? Using my psychic powers I suspect that you chose 90%.

The best career advice I’ve received

I recently had an interesting discussion with a colleague. We were recounting our job histories and how our, shall we say colorful personalities, could have negatively impacted us long term.

Is my RSA signed data secure?

So with all of the FUDD (fear/uncertainty/doubt/disinformation) going around about RSA in light of Snowden leaks and other discoveries about backdoors into PRNG, I'm uncertain what this means to me... I'm currently working with many systems that use RSA to digitally sign things...