Rowland Watkins rowlandwatkins

Introduction

At DICOM Grid, we recently made the decision to use Haskell for some of our newer projects, mostly small, independent web services. This isn't the first time I've had the opportunity to use Haskell at work - I had previously used Haskell to write tools to automate some processes like generation of documentation for TypeScript code - but this is the first time we will be deploying Haskell code into production.

Over the past few months, I have been working on two Haskell services:

A reimplementation of an existing socket.io service, previously written for NodeJS using TypeScript.
A new service, which would interact with third-party components using standard data formats from the medical industry.

I will write here mostly about the first project, since it is a self-contained project which provides a good example of the power of Haskell. Moreover, the proces

Spurred by recent events (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8244700), this is a quick set of jotted-down thoughts about the state of "Semantic" Versioning, and why we should be fighting the good fight against it.

For a long time in the history of software, version numbers indicated the relative progress and change in a given piece of software. A major release (1.x.x) was major, a minor release (x.1.x) was minor, and a patch release was just a small patch. You could evaluate a given piece of software by name + version, and get a feeling for how far away version 2.0.1 was from version 2.8.0.

But Semantic Versioning (henceforth, SemVer), as specified at http://semver.org/, changes this to prioritize a mechanistic understanding of a codebase over a human one. Any "breaking" change to the software must be accompanied with a new major version number. It's alright for robots, but bad for us.

SemVer tries to compress a huge amount of information — the nature of the change, the percentage of users that wil

The introduction to Reactive Programming you've been missing

(by @andrestaltz)

This tutorial as a series of videos

If you prefer to watch video tutorials with live-coding, then check out this series I recorded with the same contents as in this article: Egghead.io - Introduction to Reactive Programming.

THIS GIST WAS MOVED TO TERMSTANDARD/COLORS REPOSITORY.

PLEASE ASK YOUR QUESTIONS OR ADD ANY SUGGESTIONS AS A REPOSITORY ISSUES OR PULL REQUESTS INSTEAD!

Dual EC, The Saga Continues: BUT MAYBE I’M BIASED

Bla bla bla this is my personal opinion bla bla bla.

Patents. Can’t live with violating them, can’t live without violating them. The entire concept of patented cryptography is a bit beyond what I have the energy to deal with right now. Whatever. We’re going in.

It didn’t click with me yesterday, reading the crypto news, that I had already quoted one Dan Brown with whom we are now concerned. No, not the one who wrote the novels. One of the other ones. I cited him in my timeline of trying to reconstruct where and when exactly Dual EC DRBG went so wrong. Specifically, the paper has a casual mention (bottom of page 7) that the proof of security relies on initialization value Q being random, because if it is not random, an adversary in-the-know can recover the prestates and everything’s downhill from there. Therefore – and I quote – it is generally preferable for Q to be c

Sorry, RSA, I'm just not buying it

I want to be extremely clear about three things. First, this is my personal opinion – insert full standard disclaimer. Second, this is not a condemnation of everyone at RSA, present and past. I assume most of them are pretty okay, and that the problem is confined to a few specific points in the company. However, “unknown problem people making major decisions at RSA” is a bit unwieldy, so I will just say RSA. Third, I'm not calling for a total boycott on RSA. I work almost literally across the street from them and I don’t want to get beat up by roving gangs of cryptographers at the local Chipotle.

RSA's denial published last night is utter codswallop that denies pretty much everything in the world except the actual allegations put forth by Reuters and hinted at for months by [other sources](http://li

a simple git branching model (written in 2013)

This is a very simple git workflow. It (and variants) is in use by many people. I settled on it after using it very effectively at Athena. GitHub does something similar; Zach Holman mentioned it in this talk.

Update: Woah, thanks for all the attention. Didn't expect this simple rant to get popular.

	#!/bin/bash

	#set -e
	#set -x

	fail() {
	echo $1
	[ -e ${EBS_DEVICE} ] && [ "$VOLUME_ID" != "" ] && [ $REGION != "" ] && {
	ec2-detach-volume --region $REGION $VOLUME_ID
	ec2-delete-volume --region $REGION $VOLUME_ID

	package controllers

	import play.api.mvc._
	import scala.concurrent._
	import akka.actor.{Props, Actor}
	import play.api.Play.current
	import play.api.libs.concurrent.Akka
	import scala.concurrent.ExecutionContext.Implicits._

	object Application extends Controller {

	/*
	* Copyright (c) 2013 Plausible Labs Cooperative, Inc.
	* All rights reserved.
	*
	* Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person
	* obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation
	* files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without
	* restriction, including without limitation the rights to use,
	* copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell
	* copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the