Web, Internet, Computing

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10 years ago today I left IBM

Tuesday, April 7th, 2020

Ten years ago on April 7, 2010 I left IBM, a company where I had worked on and off since 1974. The post I made 5 years ago on this anniversary pretty well sums up how I got to that point and what I set off to do in the time afterwards. There’s not much […]

Tim Bray posts on the 20th anniversary of XML

Sunday, February 11th, 2018

Tim Bray has a nice post on the 20th anniversary of XML.

5 years

Tuesday, April 7th, 2015

Seems hard to believe, but exactly 5 years ago I was signing the papers to retire from IBM after a career that had spanned 36 years. I said in my post that day that I hoped to “take an extended break to play music, read, travel, work on our house, spend time with my children, […]

IBM 360 is 50 years old today

Monday, April 7th, 2014

It’s been way too long since I posted here, but the 50th anniversary of the announcement of the IBM 360 seems like a good excuse. Of course, the 360 was to its era what the Intel architecture is today, and in fact even more. Not only was its instruction set the code of choice for […]

Excellent post from Mark Nottingham on HTTP 2.0

Wednesday, July 10th, 2013

Geekpage has  a terrific interview with HTTP 2.0 WG chair Mark Nottingham on recent developments relating to HTTP 2.o. The newly released IETF draft is at http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-httpbis-http2-04.

Moving on from the W3C TAG

Thursday, May 2nd, 2013

A few minutes ago, Tim Berners-Lee announced that as of June 1, Daniel Appelquist and Peter Linss will take over as chairs of the W3C Technical Architecture Group. I have been a member of the TAG since 2004 and chair since early 2009. Serving on and chairing the TAG has been one of the most […]

Professor of the Practice

Tuesday, February 12th, 2013

I’m pleased to announce that I have accepted a position as Professor of the Practice in the Tufts University Department of Computer Science. I expect to be teaching a course each term and advising students. As I said in my previous post, I’ve been having a wonderful time at Tufts, and I’m thrilled to have […]

A great first term at Tufts

Wednesday, December 19th, 2012

If you’re wondering why I haven’t posted since September, it’s because I’ve been working nonstop on teaching my distributed systems course at Tufts. I’ve had a terrific time, and we had a wonderful group of students. Though he’d probably be surprised to hear it, the original inspiration for this course came from Tim Bray. We […]

Tufts COMP 150-IDS starts this week

Saturday, September 1st, 2012

After spending all summer preparing, my new Tufts course on Internet-scale Distributed systems starts this week. I’m excited! There’s still plenty of work to do on the details, but the course Web page is now up, and I expect that course notes, slides etc. will start appearing there as things unfold.

Teaching at Tufts

Wednesday, July 4th, 2012

I’m delighted to announce that I have accepted a position as a Visiting Scholar in the Computer Science Department at Tufts University, and in fall of 2012, I will be teaching a new course titled: Internet-Scale Distributed Systems: Lessons from the World Wide Web. The course description is: The World Wide Web, one of the […]

Does the New York Times paywall misuse HTTP?

Thursday, December 1st, 2011

Many people have commented on the pros and cons of the New York Times paywall. Most of these comments debate the effectiveness of the paywall in meeting the Times’ financial goals, discuss ways in which users will circumvent the paywall, etc. Here I’d like to explore a different issue: it seems to me that the […]

Detecting ISPs that violate network neutrality

Sunday, August 21st, 2011

Dan Kaminsky has a really interesting talk at Chaos Communication Camp 2011 showing how to quite reliably detect ISPs that artificially delay traffic to particular sites (video of Dan’s talk). Note that the first 2/3 of the talk is a very interesting exploration of the security characteristics of Bitcoin, also showing how the Bitcoin database […]

Documents in applications

Tuesday, March 8th, 2011

It has become fashionable to divide Web resources into two broad categories: each resource is either a document, rendered primarily in HTML, or an AJAX-style  Web application that uses Javascript to facilitate very dynamic interaction, navigation and information retrieval.  My purpose here is to argue that we need to be more careful, that many AJAX […]

Jeni Tennison appointed to the TAG

Monday, March 7th, 2011

When I said all those nice things about Jeni Tennison yesterday I was not yet aware that she had been appointed to join our W3C Technical Architecture Group. Well, now she has been. Terrific news for us and for the Web!

Jeni’s terrific post on #!

Monday, March 7th, 2011

There are excellent introductions to the !# controversy available from Tim Bray (Broken links) and Mike Davies (Breaking the Web with hasb-bangs), but Jeni Tennison last night posted a truly remarkable, detailed and insightful analysis. Very, very highly recommended. I confess that I’m not entirely comfortable with her conclusion that “hash-bang URIs are an important […]

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