Rob’s Rants

  1. Although I didn’t write this death threat, I almost wish I had. This is authentic internet tinfoil hattery at its crumpled and shining best!
  2. A rant on government and healthcare. Written in August 2009, it reflects my dissatisfaction with the entire political discourse regarding healthcare: everyone talks about either its fierce moral urgency or its incipient economic catastrophe, but no one talks about the deeper Constitutional issues.
  3. Standards, Professionalism, the Web and You. Now sadly out of date, given that I wrote it in 1998, but some of it is still appropriate today. If I could, I’d go back in time and shake myself vigorously while shouting “push for standards, you cretinous sop!”
  4. The continuing relevance of C. Like it or hate it (I fall heavily into the latter camp), C is going to be with us for a long while to come — and with very good reason. This article was picked up by Y Combinator’s Hacker News in 2008. This essay, too, is quite old — it dates to late 2000 or early 2001 — but it has aged quite well.
  5. My dot–bomb saga is worse than your dot–bomb saga! Don’t believe me? Read the saga of Yomu.
  6. This howto for the gnu Privacy Guard is badly out of date, but people still link to it.
  7. An open letter to the American public regarding the Space Shuttle.
  8. A rant on Microsoft's .net. This was originally written in 2001, during the worst of the .net hype, and received a major revision in late 2003. In the years since, I think my predictions have come true — it hasn’t changed the way we think of software, it hasn’t been widely adopted, and it hasn’t displaced Java. However, it’s been invaluable in motivating Sun Microsystems to improve Java.
  9. In years past I did some work with the mathematical side of cryptography. I don’t do that so much anymore, but I still wind up getting asked a lot of general crypto questions. My Crypto faq answers a lot of them.
  10. Some reflections on my thirtieth birthday.
  11. Notes from January 19, 2005's Computer Security class.
  12. The Care and Feeding of a Guru.
  13. I also wrote a custom error page for people who are using non–xhtml–aware browsers. If you’re reading this, then the custom error page does not apply to you.
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