Rob Janssen

Simplicity and Utility, or, Why SOAP Lost

In the middle of 2000, SOAP - an XML-based messaging protocol - started to rise in popularity as a communication protocol for distributed computing. By 2004, there were dozens of SOAP implementations in as many languages, including all of the most popular ones, such as Java, C/C++, .

Real Life Tron on an Apple IIgs

One of my favorite movies as a kid was Tron, the early 1980's film about a computer programmer who gets “digitized” and sucked into a computer world inhabited by personified computer programs.

Jon Skeet's coding blog

Now that the Visual Studio 2015 Preview is available and the C# 6 feature set is a bit more stable, I figured it was time to start updating the Noda Time 2.0 source code to C# 6. The target framework is still .NET 3.

A story about an angry carrot and a floating point fairy

Once upon a time, there was a kind and happy farmer, named Bob. Every year he planted a row of ten thousand carrots, and that would yield a few truckloads of the crunchy vegetables.

The most-viewed YouTube videos

Earlier this week, Google announced that Psy’s insanely viral YouTube music video, Gangnam Style, officially broke the 2,147,483,647 view barrier. What’s significant about that number, you ask? That’s the largest number that can be encoded by a 32-bit integer number.

Dating a Programmer ?

Have you ever dated a programmer ? Creatures indifferent, still different from whole of the world. Check out the Pros and Cons of dating a programmer in the following infographic.

Programming Modern Systems Like It Was 1984

Imagine you were a professional programmer in 1984, then you went to sleep and woke up 30 years later. How would your development habits be changed by the ubiquitous, consumer-level supercomputers of 2014?

The real and complete story - Does Windows defragment your SSD?

There has been a LOT of confusion around Windows, SSDs (hard drives), and whether or not they are getting automatically defragmented by automatic maintenance tasks in Windows. There's a general rule of thumb or statement that "defragging an SSD is always a bad idea.

From 1,000,000 to Graham's Number

Welcome to numbers post #2. Last week, we started at 1 and slowly and steadily worked our way up to 1,000,000. We used dots. It was cute.

Antialiasing: To Splat Or Not

Note: this post is adapted from an answer I wrote for the Computer Graphics StackExchange beta, which was shut down a few months ago. A dump of all the CGSE site data can be found on Area 51.

This Read-It-Later-list is just that, bookmarks of stuff I intend to read or have read. I do not necessarily agree with opinions or statements in the bookmarked articles.

This list is compiled from my Pocket list.