Rob Janssen

All | English | Nederlands

A TimerWheel implementation in C# with flexible rescheduling

Recently we started a project that, among a lot of other stuff, required many objects to be scheduled (and rescheduled) for processing. Each of these objects could, potentially, require it's own interval; for example object A could be required to process each 10 seconds, object B could need an interval of 3600 seconds and object C could need to be processed each second. As long as there's a handful of objects, instantiating a timer for each object would be an option. But since our collection could grow to contain more than thousands of objects I felt that having a timer hanging around for each of those objects wasn't the best idea ever. This was just a gut-feel until I later stumbled upon a blog-post from one of my all-time favorite bloggers Raymond Chen. Although, apparently, it's okay to have many timers lying around I felt there had to be a more efficient way to solve my problem. Read more »

Taboo: Nathaniel Newman and Treacher Collins Syndrome

So I got home after a hard day of work and after putting the kids to bed and having a belated dinner I finally hit the couch and turned on the TV to stare at it mindlessly to clear my mind a little and give it some rest. So zapping through the channels I happened to tune in to National Geographic's taboo . The episode today was titled ' ugly '. I haven't been able to find the full episode on nationalgeographic.com yet but it might be available online later. Read more »

My problem with pagination

I recently got into a discussion about a comment I made on a blog post two years ago. Granted; my comment might have come out a bit harsh (for which I apologize) but there was a point to be made. In this blog post I'll try to explain what I was (and am) talking about and what my issues were (and are) with the proposed solution to the problem at hand: pagination of large chunks of data / resultsets. Read more »

Ah, another CAPTCHA for me to answer!

"A CAPTCHA is a program that can tell whether its user is a human or a computer. You've probably seen them — colorful images with distorted text at the bottom of Web registration forms. CAPTCHAs are used by many websites to prevent abuse from "bots," or automated programs usually written to generate spam. No computer program can read distorted text as well as humans can, so bots cannot navigate sites protected by CAPTCHAs." Source: http://www.google.com/recaptcha/learnmore Read more »

Are you using DNSStuff.com? You shouldn't!

I have been using LastPass for a while now and I was very happy to find out they now also offer two-factor authentication . This has, as far as I know, been available since ages but you had to use a Yubikey . I don't know when they added support for Google Authenticator but they did. And since I have been using this for a while for my GMail and Google Apps accounts I was glad to find out Lastpass supports it too. Read more »