Hello. Welcome to my underdeveloped homepage, now newly updated, although that statement itself will no doubt seem quaintly amusing when I forget to update it again for another two years.
This page aims to provide some vaguely useful information about me, in order to help people survive the fact that Wikipædia doesn't have a page on me.
My name's Dave Cridland, a sufficiently unusual name that there are virtually no hits for "Dave Cridland" on Google that aren't me, which is useful for fueling my ego, which is otherwise in tatters due to the aforementioned lack of wikipædia page.
As of the beginning of August, 2006, I work for Isode Ltd. I work mostly (but not totally) on internet messaging, and I have a side-order of SNMP. "Internet Messaging" mostly means IMAP and XMPP.
Currently, this is mostly XMPP, and I have the amusing job title of "XMPP Team Lead", although I lied to O'Reilly and said "XMPP Lead", because I think "Team Lead" sounds like I work in a supermarket. I don't actually have a Team, anyway, but in fairness, I don't really Lead anything either. In reality, I coordinate various aspects of the Isode XMPP strategy, which is mostly M-Link, some internal XMPP related stuff in other projects, and some external projects.
Some people are curious about my work with ACAP and Lemonade (or low-bandwidth email for constrained environments). There's a Wiki and things on my Trac site, or the old pages starting here. The two major pieces of software - Infotrope Polymer and the Infotrope ACAP Server, are both available under the GPL.
I also serve on the XMPP Council of the XSF. We meet once every now and then, and use our Powers to Do Stuff with XEPs. I'm not really sure what goes on, to be honest, I'm only really there to make the tea. But it is, frankly, excellent tea.
Finally, I'm a member of the IETF Security Directorate, which is basically a glorified review team. My job there is (or will be - as I write, I've done precisely nothing), like everyone else, to review documents from a security perspective. I got this job because I claimed it fell neatly in line with my plans to take over the world.
I have one wife, two children, and two cats, and live in Carmarthen, which is in the Wild West of Wales, in a area where there's a high percentage of Welsh speakers, but I'm actually English. [Note to Amercian readers: I do not live in England.]
Both of my children are in a Welsh-speaking primary school. Some fathers claim they don't understand their children - in my case this is literally true. My wife has a part-time job working for a charity, and turned the school's PTA into a fully-fledged charity as well, which she now rules with an iron fist. (Recently, she read this, and complained about that. I feel obliged to point out that she's done rather well, and everyone rather likes her doing this.)
The eye I use for my avatar in various places is actually my younger child's eye, from a picture taken when said child was a few months old. It's not actually entirely blue, but you need to look carefully.
I've been called subversive by members of the British Intelligence community. To be fair, I think it was a joke, but this may be wishful thinking.
I rarely use smilies, preferring to assume that the people reading are intelligent enough to know a joke when they see one. If you are not, please tell me, and I shall laugh at you.
I use capitalization and punctuation, even when using Instant Messaging. This is largely because when I started using "instant" messaging, it was over character-by-character remote echo with lag in excess of thirty seconds, and quite frankly there is no excuse for poor typing now.
I accept being proven wrong, being insufficiently egotistical to think I'm always right. Please also accept it when I prove you wrong, since I am egotistical enough to think I'm sometimes right.
Ownership of your own data is far more important than ownership of the program used to handle it. Meaning I consider open standards and open formats to be far, far more important than open-source. That said, I'm far from against open-source - which is why I'm one of the few people who turn up to various events with a Linux laptop instead of an OS X posing-pouch.
Currently, my blog (and other stuff) is all offline. Nobody seems to miss these, so although I'll eventually get them all back up, for the moment, many of these links don't work.
More inane and occasional ramblings can be found on my blog, should anyone want to read them, and I also use the snark broadcast facility at identi.ca.
SmokePing, a rather old and tatty MRTG, and a swish and exciting Cacti also run here, monitoring stuff that probably isn't interesting to anyone else - this is mostly (but not completely) related to my work.