Update

Posted on May 22, 2018 by rlc

Readers of this site may wonder what I’ve been doing for last six months, which is an unusually long hiatus for me to not write anything. The answer is: I’ve been busy.
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The Logging “problem”

Posted on October 15, 2017 by rlc

A recurring problem in real-time industrial devices is logging: you want to log all the information you need to diagnose a problem, but you don’t want to slow down your system and miss timing constraints, or unnecessarily burden your system when there are no problems. On the other hand, you often don’t know that there is a problem to be diagnosed (and therefore logged) before there is an actual problem, in which case you may be too late to start your logs.

The solution seems obvious: just look a minute or so into the future and, if any trouble is brewing, start logging. But as a wise person once said: “Always in motion the future is.”
In the real world, we need real solutions.
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The Equifax data breach: what we know, what you can do, what’s next

Posted on September 11, 2017 by rlc

The TL;DR:
TL;DR mindmap

TL;DR mindmap



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The problem with making things too easy

Posted on July 21, 2017 by rlc

The TL;DR:



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Posted in Anecdotes, Software Development, Software Engineering | Tagged , | 1 Comment

“Police hack PGP server” — really?

Posted on March 23, 2017 by rlc

This afternoon, this headline caught my attention: “Police hack PGP server with 3.6 million messages from organized crime BlackBerrys“. When I read it, I thought: “either the journalist/title writer got it wrong, or PGP is broken”.
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Writing unmaintainable code in five easy steps

Posted on March 4, 2017 by rlc

I have recently had to modify some code that, to say the least, was very hard to maintain — or refactor, for that matter.

The following are a few, firmly tongue-in-cheek, steps to make sure your code is thoroughly frustrating to whoever needs to maintain it after you.
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Meetings, meetings, and more meetings

Posted on November 16, 2016 by rlc

Recently, I spent a significant part of the day in a meeting reviewing the year’s progress on several projects, including the introduction of an agile methodology — Scrum. The approach in the meeting was simple: write on a sticky note what we did well, and on another what we should not repeat or how we should improve. The subject was “Scrum/agile”. I only wrote one sticky note: “get rid of Scrum”.

The TL;DR:
Scrum, in my opinion, is (moderately) useful for small teams with a single, short-term project — something like a web application. The overhead it imposes vastly outweighs the benefits for larger teams and larger projects.

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Debugging — or: what I do for a living

Posted on September 12, 2016 by rlc

I am often asked by friends and acquaintances of various backgrounds, what I do for a living. Depending on my mood at the time, I can answer in any number of ways, but invariably my answers are met with blank stares, questions that clearly demonstrate that I have once again failed to make myself understood and an eventual change of subject.
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Really, Twitterverse?

Posted on September 10, 2016 by rlc
Felicia, our cat, relaxing

This gallery contains 1 photo.

The Twitterverse has spoken, quietly, with a single vote — a cat it is…

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Setting up a Xubuntu-based kiosk

Posted on July 27, 2016 by rlc

This is another “HOWTO” post — setting up a Xubuntu-based kiosk, which I did to make a new “TV” for my kids.

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