Latest News >> 2008-04-29

UPDATE: There seems to be some interest in Idiopidae too and I’ve been neglecting the Idiopidae project page while working on Vellum. I’ve updated that page with information and updated install procedures, so please check it out again if nothing worked for you.

2008-04-26

UPDATE: I forgot to mention that this is my first LaTeX text ever and that it’s based on one of my first Python projects and that I wrote what you find below in about 3 days while dorking around on Vellum and Idiopidae. Since I’m both a Python and LaTeX newb please feel free to school me. Better yet, if you think the typesetting sucks, then show me your samples. See if you can beat this one sent to me by Kashif Rasul. I still consider what he’s created as the bar to get over.

2008-04-18

While working on a more complex build I decided to make recursive imports work and clean up the syntax for imports in Vellum

2008-04-15

I worked on Vellum today after waking up from jetlag and Poland. I feel like it’s near ready for actual use by people. I even managed to polish it off with a nice little command line option for dumping the commands a build spec uses including their documentation. Check out this Pastie clip that shows it off.

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