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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Technocracy II

Posted on May 24, 2016 by rlc

In my previous post, I described technocracy as something that is positive in project and product management, and in team organization. In this post, to supply a boundary to my previous text, I will make the case for the opposite.
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Technocracy

Posted on May 21, 2016 by rlc

In a discussion with a “Product Owner” recently, I told him I take a more technocratic approach to project management than they did. We discussed different project management styles for the next hour or so.

TL;DR: I believe that

  • to effectively and efficiently run a large team of developers who are collectively responsible for a product with a large code-base, that team needs to be organized as a network of smaller teams with experts leading each of those smaller teams, and
  • to successfully manage an “agile” development team and create a viable product, one has to have a vision and break it down from there.


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Real-time thirsty

Posted on April 19, 2016 by rlc
The TL;DR:
In this post, I show using a fictitious example why real-time systems are defined by their worst-case timing rather than their average-case timing.

Imagine you’re running a coffee shop — not the kind you find in Amsterdam, but one where they actually serve coffee. Your customers are generally in a hurry, so they just want to get a cup of coffee, pay and leave to catch their plane, train or automobile. To attract more customers and appeal to the Geek crowd, you name your coffee shop “Real-Time Thirsty” and promise an “Average case serving within one minute!”.

While you get many customers, you’re not getting the Geeks-in-a-hurry crowd you were expecting.
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Setting up Cygwin for X forwarding

Posted on April 15, 2016 by rlc

The TL;DR:
This is one of those “recipe” posts that tend to be useful if you happen to want to do exactly what I just did. The end result of this one is a Windows shortcut called “Linux terminal” on the desktop, that opens up an SSH terminal to a Linux box, with X forwarding.

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Shutting down servers

Posted on April 2, 2016 by rlc

I used to have a server with five operating systems, running in VMs, merrily humming away compiling whatever I coded. I say “used to have” because I shut it down a few weeks ago. Now, I have those same operating systems, as well as a large number of others, running on systems I don’t need to worry about.
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Checked output iterator

Posted on March 27, 2016 by rlc

While writing about security — which takes a great deal of my time lately, which is one of the reasons I haven’t updated my blog as often as I usually would — I came to the conclusion that, while I recommend using STL algorithms, iterators and containers for safety purposes that doesn’t solve the problem when the standard algorithms don’t check the validity of their output ranges.
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Schoenmaker, blijf bij je leest (Cobbler, stick to your last)

Posted on March 8, 2016 by rlc

This is an old Dutch saying, which probably has its origins in a village with a particularly opinionated cobbler.

I am not one to stick to my last — but if I were a cobbler, I don’t think I’d be that cobbler: I like to know what I’m doing.
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Interesting modifications to the Lamport queue, part II

Posted on November 7, 2015 by rlc

In the previous installment, on this subject, I described a few modifications to the Lamport queue introduced by Nhat Minh Le et al. to relax operations on shared state as much as possible, while maintaining correctness.

In this article, I will discuss the further optimizations to reduce the number of operations on shared state, thus eliminating the need for memory barriers completely in many cases.
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