HTML5: What kind of standard is this, anyway?

I haven’t written much HTML since 1996. Back in those wild west days before CSS existed, we used <font> tags and <table>-based layouts to control how websites were presented to end-users. Although these ugly hacks limited the sophistication of web sites and later proved to be a barrier to the development of rich Internet applications, they were at least part of a standard: HTML 2.0.

Today, however, I think the state of markup on the Internet is far worse, despite the existence of this beast we call HTML5. To my utter shock, I discovered that HTML5 isn’t even what one could call a standard. On the contrary, HTML5 represents standards committees (and there are two — I’ll get into this later) throwing in the towel because of internecine fighting, to the enormous detriment of web, application and browser developers everywhere. The most poignant illustration of the problem is that there is no DTD for HTML5: you merely write <!DOCTYPE html> and you’re on your way. Nothing says “anything goes” better than “don’t even bother mechanically validating this because who the hell knows what’s valid?” Continue reading

World IPv6 Launch Day: Where are the cloud providers?

WORLD IPV6 LAUNCH is 6 June 2012 – The Future is ForeverIPv6, the next version of the Internet’s addressing scheme, is back — and this time it’s here to stay.

Following up on last year’s World IPv6 Day, the Internet Society has organized World IPv6 Launch Day for June 6th. On this day, many major ISPs and corporations will permanently launch their IPv6 presence, in recognition of the fact that the world has now exhausted the IPv4 address space and must urgently migrate to IPv6. Participating companies include Google, FaceBook, Yahoo! and CDNs like Akamai and LimeLight Networks. My question is: where on the list are the cloud infrastructure providers? Continue reading

What’s it like to interview at Google?

I recently had the opportunity to interview at Google for a position in their New York office as a Technical Program Manager (TPM). I found out today that I didn’t make the cut. But in the process of interviewing, I found out a lot more about the company, how it does its work, and ultimately concluded that the role was probably not a good fit for me anyway. Here’s some information about what my experience was like, and also what I found out about the company while I was there. Continue reading

Best iPhone apps for New York City Transit

Being both a transit nerd and an iPhone user, I’ve tried out a bunch of iPhone apps to help me make the best of my New York City transit experience. There are 51 iPhone apps listed on the MTA’s website, but there’s little indication which ones are good and which are bad.

Keep in mind that I’m strictly a subway user, so I haven’t had occasion to test any of the bus-related apps.

Continue reading

No post tomorrow: SOPA strike

In support of the Stop American Censorship movement against SOPA & PIPA, this site will go dark tomorrow. If you need a quick introduction to why these pieces of legislation are harmful to the future of the Internet, this video is a great:

I’ll be at the NY Tech Meetup rally in front of Senators Schumer and Gillibrand’s offices at 12:30 p.m. If you’re in New York and concerned about the future of the Internet, I’d encourage you to join me there.

Chef, devops, and the death of system administration

Opscode Chef logoLast night, at a meeting of NYLUG, the New York City Linux Users’ Group, I watched Sean O’Meara whip through a presentation about Chef, the system configuration management (CM) tool. I was impressed. The last time(s) I tried to play with automation tools like cfengine and Puppet I got very frustrated at their complexity. The folks at Opscode have definitely succeeded at bringing simplicity (as much as can be had) to the CM space.

But what struck me after hearing Sean had nothing to do with Chef. Instead, I came to the conclusion that pure systems administration is eventually going to die out as a profession. The developer is now king (or queen), and that’s not a bad thing. Continue reading

Verizon Wireless is killing me

I’m stuck in Verizon bureaucratic hell.

When I moved to the United States in August, the iPhone 4 was nearing the end of its product lifecycle.  I wasn’t about to spend $400 for a device that was going to be replaced by what we thought was the iPhone 5 (but turned out to be the 4S). Instead, I decided to get the cheapest device I could get until the new iPhone was released: a Verizon Wireless prepaid phone. I obtained a hand-me-down device, and activated it with a new number.

When the iPhone 4S was finally released in October, I went to the store and plunked down my money for a pre-order (a stupid term if I ever heard one, by the way; “pre-order” is the state I was in before I ordered the phone). Naturally, due to my special circumstances as a) a customer switching from a prepaid to a contract plan, and b) my Canadian citizenship, I caused our local Verizon store representative no end of trouble. Moreover, he couldn’t migrate my prepaid number to the new iPhone because it hadn’t arrived yet – it was out of stock for weeks. So he assigned me a dummy phone number and told me I could migrate the number once the device arrived. Continue reading

Tuning CBC.ca with Cache Optimization

My colleague Blake Crosby has just posted a presentation about the performance and scalability tuning we do for CBC.ca.

We’d originally prepared this for the 2010 Akamai Global Customer Conference, but it wasn’t accepted there. We are now making the information publicly available in the hopes that it will help other high-volume news sites optimize their content delivery.