About open-mike
Author
open-mike is the personal blog of me, Mike Hanson, a software architect living in Silicon Valley.
I work in Mozilla Labs, the research and new product development arm of Mozilla, the company that makes the Firefox web browser. My primary focus there is on the integration of online services into the web browser, with a special interest on identity systems.
Before joining Mozilla, I was a principal engineer at Cisco, in the Data Center Technology Group. I came to that position by way of the acquisition of Reactivity, a network device company that I co-founded. Reactivity made a deep-packet inspection network appliance with a particular focus on XML. At Cisco, I worked on the XML Gateway product, load balancers, WAN optimization, and the Unified Computing server platform. I was particularly interested in the idea of "dynamic infrastructure", and worked with partners from all over Cisco and the broader technical community to explain how a datacenter could reconfigure itself to respond to application-level needs.
Prior to Reactivity's incarnation as a network device company, it was an incubator for startups, and I was the director of new ventures. I developed technology for the launch of Zaplet, which was an "interactive mail" company; and CenterRun, a datacenter automation company. Zaplet is no more, but some of the intellectual property lives on in Xobni. CenterRun was acquired by Sun Microsystems in 2003.
I have worked on several other small Internet firms in the meantime. Jux2, which compares the results of the major search engines, is still running.
In an earlier phase of my life, I was a scientist-engineer in Apple's Advanced Technology Group. During that time, I wrote the first version of Sherlock, an Internet search tool integrated into the operating system's utilities. Sherlock shipped with System 8.5, and the Internet "search plugin" format that I developed for that application grew, mostly under Netscape's care, to become a de facto standard. My other work at Apple was around contextual learning and virtual worlds; the latter area in particular has since spawned dozens of products of which I am only a consumer.
I studied computer science at Stanford in the early 90's. My graduate work was in the Digital Libraries group.
During college, I was also involved with game development for the MacOS. I wrote Asterax, a Mac shareware game that had a small but intense fanbase in the Asteroids-clone community, and wrote the Physics Model Editor for Marathon, the Mac-only first-person shooter written by Bungie before they went on to Halo greatness. This editor, later productized as Anvil, was a fun little hack that enabled some very creative community-constructed levels.
The opinions expressed on open-mike are mine. My employer, and no other party, necessarily agrees with them.
Should you wish to contact me, send mail to mhanson at mozilla.com