“Design depends largely on constraints.” — Charles Eames
Hi, I’m Mark Nottingham. I currently chair the IETF HTTPbis Working Group. I usually write here about the Web, protocol design, HTTP, and caching. Once in a while, I’ll write about economics, travel or living in Australia. Find out more.
Sunday, 20 January 2013
In 2001, Charlie was born, and (understandably) we were freaking out a bit, having a new child and all. However, at about the same time, I met this really remarkable kid at the W3C, and I asked him what advice he could give me, from his perspective. The response was that school was rubbish ;) and a recommendation for a book (which I still have, somewhere). Over the years, we e-mailed a bit, especially about RSS and some Web-related software...
Sunday, 28 October 2012
I’ve (finally) moved this server to another Rackspace cloud server; same (small) size, but with a fresh OS. In the process, I’ve also changed the way I bring the box up into a known state from using shell scripts to Ansible (after an unsuccessful dalliance with Puppet). So, if you have any problems with mnot.net, redbot.org or isitrestful.com, please drop me a line. The only noticeable change should be that Twitter sign-in to this blog now works, thanks to Mark Carey....
Thursday, 13 September 2012
I’ve spent the last year working at Rackspace, and it’s been quite a ride. However, I joined there thinking that our work on HTTP was winding down. Turns out, that couldn’t be further from the truth. Not only is HTTP/2.0 happening, but there’s a lot of exciting new work on HTTP “APIs” to do. “The Rack” was very supportive of my work, but I’ve felt conflicted about spending so much time working on HTTP when it’s not part of the...
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Thursday, 25 August 2011
Today is my last day at Yahoo!, after five and a half years (yes, I got a gumball machine). It’s been a lot of fun and I wish all of the folks there that I’ve worked with over those years well; I’ve learned and done a lot, and Y! has given me a lot of room (both metaphorical as well as physical, given that for most of it, I’ve been more than 7,500 miles from my boss), which is much...
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Wednesday, 3 January 2007
I say “Victoria,” not Melbourne, because we’re currently staying in Forest Hill, courtesy of Roger and Marg, who are on holiday. The good news is that today we signed a six-month lease for a flat in Kia Ora on St Kilda Road, right next to Inger and Luke (as well as Fawkner Park), which will serve as a base of operations while we look for somewhere more permanent. Once we spend an absurd amount of money for appliances (e.g.,...
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Sunday, 24 December 2006
It’s Christmas Eve, and Charlie and I have been on the ground in Melbourne for a week. So far, we’ve got a new mobile phone (sweet), checked in with his school, and looked at a lot of apartments, trying to find somewhere to live for a few months while we house-hunt. Not quite as fast as I’d like, but not too shabby. Meanwhile, most of our possessions are about two months behind us, somewhere between San Francisco and Singapore....
Wednesday, 15 November 2006
In a nutshell: After a lot of angst, back-and-forth, and false starts, we’re moving back to Melbourne next month, seven years and a few days after we arrived in San Francisco. This shouldn’t surprise anyone who knows us well, although many of our Australian friends have expressed that they won’t really believe it until we step off the plane. The Long Story In late 1999, Anitra and I were living in Australia, and I was working for Merrill Lynch...
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Sunday, 3 September 2006
A while back, I mentioned that I was considering changing my hosting setup. In the end, I decided to outsource, for a few reasons; Administration — There’s always an overhead to running your own box. Security — Keeping systems up-to-date is challenging; somebody doing it full-time is always going to be better than me. This used to not be such a problem, because I did it full-time, but it’s been a while. Stability — Every time I move, I...
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Tuesday, 18 April 2006
I’m quickly coming up on three months as a Yahoo, and a bunch of people have been asking me how things are going, as well as what I’m doing. In a nutshell, I’m having more fun than should be legal. My biggest problem is prioritising cool things to do! Anitra thinks I’m still in the honeymoon, but I’ve seen enough companies in Silicon Valley to know a good one when I see it. It is incredibly liberating to be...
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Friday, 27 January 2006
For the past three and a half years, I’ve learned a lot, had a tremendous amount of fun, and made some really good friends working at BEA Systems in the Office of the CTO. I’ve also enjoyed working with the great people at WS-I and in the W3C’s Web Services Working Groups (particularly, the folks in Web Services Addressing). However, all good things must come to an end, and I want to get my hands a little dirtier than...
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Thursday, 22 December 2005
One thing I detest about many technology companies is their tendency to treat employees like overgrown 15-year-olds with no social skills. This was most evident at Java One’s “Social Event” as previously discussed, but you also tend to see it in Silicon Valley holiday* parties. So, here’s a tip for people who do these things for tech companies; treat your employees like adults. You’ll be surprised at how they’ll rise to the occasion, and thank you for doing it....
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Friday, 25 March 2005
After a deeply wounding comment about this site’s design from SOMEONE WHO KNOWS WHO THEY ARE last week, I’ve refreshed the mnot.net stylesheets and front page design. OK, truth be told I was working on it anyway. Still, the comment was noted — NOTED, my friend — and I’m taking names. Tweaking is still taking place; IE/Win doesn’t quite work right (but I’m not too motivated to fix it) and colours were never my strong suit, so I’m getting...
Sunday, 19 September 2004
If you're wondering where the promised travel stories from Melbourne got to, you'll have to wait a bit longer. Right after I got there, Anitra was bit by a spider (a supreme irony, really) and had to go to the emergency room, because all sorts of unpleasant things were happening.
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Wednesday, 8 September 2004
I'm typing this from the Red Carpet Club in San Francisco International Airport, about to disembark on a snap vacation to Australia. By 'snap vacation,' I mean that I didn't have a gleam in my eye about this trip two weeks ago, but thanks to generous fares from United ($650 round trip!)... Anitra and Charlie are staying behind for this one; she couldn't get away from work, and will be going to Australia to hear some wedding bells (shhh, big secret) in January.
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Sunday, 25 July 2004
Baileys Irish Cream Kahlúa Macadamia nut liquor, or dark rum (e.g., Myer’s) Coconut Juice Cream Banana Ice The labs will be working on the exact proportions; stay tuned....
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Saturday, 13 December 2003
Anitra turned me on to what happened to Steve from Blue’s Clues. As he would say, “Cool!”...
Sunday, 9 November 2003
I've done some adjustment to this Web log; you may or may not notice the differences. Most of is is cosmetic and tightening up of the templates, but I've also changed the URI layout (thanks, Mark), and as a result RSS aggregators may act strangely before they settle down. Or not; mine, Shrook - a very fine aggregator for OSX indeed - doesn't get tripped up. P.S. The old archive pages (which were laid out according to MT's default, in...
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Tuesday, 7 October 2003
Saute Wednesday has exposed one of our vices... ashed goat's cheese is like nothing else on earth. These days it's Humboldt Fog (from the Mollie Stone's around the corner; hell, there are the remnants of a $4.69 chunk in the refrigerator as I type this), but in Australia the Milawa Cheese Company does a pretty credible ashed goat's cheese as well (and that's just off the top of my head; country Victoria is fairly littered with high-quality cheesemakers). They also...
Thursday, 24 April 2003
OK, here's the deal. As previously reported, we got the nifty Ericsson phones that come with free cameras. They're Internet-capable. The next obvious step is to hook it up to a blog, and presto! You've got photoblog! You get to see people I meet, places I go and the mediocrity of daily life (as well as my struggles with predictive text input) in near-real time! Very exciting. From the technical side, I'm using an RSS feed with mod_image; it allows...
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