Latest News >> 2008-09-29

I read Obie’s most recent post about his intense passion for Loverboy’s quintessential anthem, “Lovin’ Every Minute Of It”. I find the early 1980’s music is inspiring and uplifting and definitely suited to such important things as corporate culture, recruiting, and motivating the troops to do better. Yes, nothing gets a worker working better than a little Loverboy right in their ear.

2008-09-25

Don’t forget folks, the FU NYC show will be in a few hours (7pm-9pm). I’ll be icecasting this one at http://zedshaw.com:8000/fu_nyc and as usual you can use VLC, mplayer or many other players to play the stream.

2008-09-17

I got into music school last week and I’m going to study guitar exclusively for the next year. This is something I’ve always wanted to do, but just never had the chance. Either I wasn’t good enough (being self-taught for so many years) or I just didn’t have the money. After being laid off and getting a small package I decided to practice my ass off on the guitar, do a few live shows to get ready, and then audition for a school in the city.

2008-09-04

The Freehackers Union NYC show went insanely well. I managed to pull off a full live internet feed of the audio to people in FU and the show at the same time. We had about 10 newbies show up to give their first five minutes and 11 listeners on IRC/icecast. Some people showed up just to hang out, so we relaxed the rules and let them stay to build an audience. Overall, there were some cool projects presented and everyone had a good time.

Protocols And Performance

I’m working on a book for Addison/Wesley entitled ” Protocols And Performance: A Web Server In Three Acts (plus supporting cast)”. The book will lead the reader through the history of the HTTP protocol by building three separate web servers: HTTP 0.9-1.0, HTTP 1.1, and HTTP “2.0”. During the process of putting these different servers together the reader will continually evaluate their performance and stability using statistical analysis methods.

As the story unfolds there will also be tales from other HTTP alternatives, internet bodies, and other protocols in development at the time. These will be told from the point of view of HTTP as a player in the story.

A big part of the book is teaching modern protocol design using scientific analysis, reusable libraries, modern techniques, and confirming that these new approaches are valid with evidence. This means taking on existing myths and dogma pushed by many proponents and also looking at other project’s bad code.

Following My Work

My book for Addison/Wesley is in the works and I’ll be posting the source and some chapter sections for review as I work on it. The goal is to put the source for the projects I build in the book here for people to try out and actually use.

Latest News

2007-12-31

Check out what I’ve done in Factor for Idiopidae.

2007-12-26

Signed the contract and started the big work. Have almost everything organized and laid out, but since it’s a big book I’ve been cycling over it and refining things.

Another thing I’ve done is created a new project (soon to be published) called Idiopidae after the trapdoor spider. What this little tool does is allow me to inject parts of actual source code accurately into my LyX document using GNU source-highlight LaTeX translation. It can do whole files or sections partioned by comments.

Yes I know about “noweb” and friends, but their syntax blows and they have the fatal flaw of requiring me to hack my code inside their disgusting syntax. Instead, Idiopidae keeps my prose in one file and my code (fully runnable) in a separate file, then it does the job of putting it all together at the end.

This tool is saving me a ton of work, and for fun I decided to rewrite it in Factor from the hack job I did in Ruby. Once it’s working I’m gonna release it for everyone to play with and hopefully it’ll help other people trying to writ technical books.

Request For Comments

Feel free to review anything I post here and give me comments. The full book source won’t be available, but excepts will be up for people to look at as well as progress announcements.

If you’d like to review chapters of the book and get some credit, then I’m looking for people with the following skills:

  • Statistical analysis, especially of performance.
  • Standards body members and people involved in past internet fiascos.
  • Protocol experts.

Available Materials

  • Protocols And Performance