Web, Internet, Computing

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Some interesting readings in Computer Science

Friday, January 21st, 2011

I’ve just posted on the  main Arcane Domain Web site a short bibliography of Computer Science papers that I have found to be particularly worthwhile.  There’s no attempt here to be comprehensive or balanced. Rather, it’s a list of papers that I think are interesting, well written, of unusual historical significance, or just under-appreciated. A […]

The Web is 20 Years Old Today

Saturday, December 25th, 2010

Twenty years ago today, on December 25th, 1990, Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau first successfully connected a browser to a Web server — the Web as an operational system is 20 years old today.

Norm Walsh on XML and JSON

Wednesday, November 17th, 2010

There’s been a lot of fuss lately about the widespread adoption of JSON for Web APIs, and a sense in some quarters that this represents a failure for XML.  Norm Walsh has a new post summarizing the pros and cons of JSON vs. XML,  and as usual, Norm has it exactly right: (somewhat rearranging Norm’s […]

Doug Crockford: Go slow on HTML5 until security concerns are addressed

Wednesday, September 29th, 2010

There’s a very interesting article in the Web Security Journal quoting Javascript expert Doug Crockford on HTML 5 and security.  Doug’s point is basically:  we had bad security problems with HTML and the Web before HTML5 was proposed.  What should have been done was to focus on getting a good, clean, secure architecture for core […]

James Gosling Interview

Tuesday, September 28th, 2010

There’s a transcript of a terrific interview with James Gosling available at http://www.basementcoders.com/transcripts/James_Gosling_Transcript.html.  Lots of irreverent, insightful comments on Java, Oracle, open source, Google and the Android suit, etc.

Type too fast, melt your processor?

Saturday, September 25th, 2010

Not really, of course, but there’s a nice ASPLOS XV paper from Mesa-Martínez et. al. titled Characterizing Processor Thermal Behavior which explains, among other things: “…each [Emacs] keystroke generates around 1â—¦ C thermal spike…” Who knew?  In their tests, the startup phase of Emacs raised the processor temperature in the area being measured (simulated) by […]

Interesting History of Java & thoughts on the Oracle/Google Android lawsuit

Wednesday, August 18th, 2010

Charles Nutter has an interesting post titled  My Thoughts on Oracle v. Google.  It gives a quite detailed history of the Java platform, and some thoughts on the recent lawsuit by Oracle against Google.   I’m not in a position to comment on the accuracy of all the details, but I found it to be thought-provoking, […]

Excellent “What’s new in HTML5?” cheat sheet

Wednesday, August 18th, 2010

From Mark Pilgrim by way of DaveO:   HTML5 Peeks, Pokes and Pointers, an excellent quick guide to new syntax and Javascript APIs in HTML5.  See also Mark’s Dive into HTML5.

Worldwide celebration of Dan Connolly’s contributions to the Web

Monday, July 12th, 2010

Few people have contributed more to the development of the World Wide Web than my good friend Dan Connolly. After many years at the W3C, Dan is moving on the University of Kansas Medical Center.  To thank Dan for his unique contributions to the Web, Tim Berners-Lee has organized a worldwide celebration for this Wed, […]

Sanjiva on 10 Years of SOAP

Thursday, June 24th, 2010

I just noticed that in April, Sanjiva Weerawarana posted his own thoughts on 10 years of SOAP, with a somewhat more positive perspective than mine.  I also see that his posting predates mine, so it seems we each noted the anniversary independently.  For those who don’t know, Sanjiva has been one of the most important […]

Audio Web applications

Wednesday, May 26th, 2010

By way of Slashdot, it looks like the folks who are building the experimental audio support in Firefox are making really fine progress.  You get to manipulate the raw audio data using Javascript, more or less in real time.  They’ve even had some success with doing the FFT’s in Javascript (I didn’t expect that would […]

Ten Years of SOAP

Monday, May 17th, 2010

Ten years ago today, at the 9th International Web Conference in Amsterdam, we held a panel discussion to introduce the SOAP networking protocol to the Web community.   Just a week before, the SOAP 1.1 specification had been posted as a W3C Note.   Many legitimate criticisms have been aimed at SOAP in the years since, but […]

Retiring from IBM

Wednesday, April 7th, 2010

Today, April 7th 2010, I retired from my position as a Distinguished Engineer at IBM.

A nice little tutorial on modern trends in processor architecture

Wednesday, March 3rd, 2010

Greg Pfister at Perils of Parallel has a nice little tutorial up on the tradeoffs among superscalar, VLIW, and “Simple Multicore”.   I guess you’ve got to care a bit about hardware for this to be worthwhile, but I’d encourage anyone with an interest in modern computer systems to take a look.  It’s reasonably accessible even […]

Neil McAllister responds to my response

Thursday, February 25th, 2010

A few weeks ago I posted A Response to Neil McAllister on the Mobile Web.  Neil noticed my posting and he has now responded with a comment of his own; I have in turn posted a brief reply. A response to Neil McAllister on the Mobile Web

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