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I did something fun and useful today, taking a jaunt down to LA for lunch with an old friend (adding in the meeting of an industry celebrity in the process). I went down to visit long time friend Brian Yoder who I hadn't seen in quite some time and get some idea what uWink is all about.
As a result, I got to meet Nolan Bushnell, which was quite a treat. We had a short conversation which somehow covered a wide variety of things including his participation in creating Chuck E. Cheese (I'd somehow missed that part). Also a quick discussion about FORTH and our seemingly shared view that the language is great for rapid development, but that customization (if you've seen one FORTH, you've seen one FORTH) made it very difficult to bring in new people (not to mention that the growing system memory sizes made FORTH less necessary). He also mentioned involvement in something I can't seem to find a reference to, an early eighties geographical database. I have a big thing about maps and such (I once thought I'd be a Physical Oceanographer, essentially a deep sea cartographer) and this stuff still fascinates me.
Our lunch (at some unnamed Thai joint -- we went in through the back door) was pretty good. Lemon grass soup with shrimp (a lemony broth with mushrooms, various floating green stuff, chunks of ginger and shrimp) and a very mild yellow curry and chicken. We spent most of the time talking about current and future mobile platforms including SK-EarthLink. We wound up in a weird conversation where Brian was worried about things his phone makes impossible (or nearly so) from an interface perspective, while I was concerned about things I feel all phones make impossible from a cost or interoperability perspective. Identity management and user control are a big part of the missing picture. We have a long, long way to go.
It was a useful discussion and it was also nice to see that part of LA again, it's been quite some time since I was down there. Then again, I'd love to sit in on an after hours conversation between Brian and Nolan. I know how Brian tends to wander, and the results can often be quite interesting (Brian is at heart a philosopher who does engineering). One quick five minute view of Nolan Bushnell is not enough. I want to see them together, bouncing off one another. Adding my own spin of course.
It was a lot of fun and I hope to do it again.
Thanks to George Girton, (a colleague from many years ago with a penchant for revision control systems, long before they were generally popular), I've learned that the Huntington Library (map) is hosting an exhibit about Newton through June 12.
This is really interesting and I think Jon will really enjoy it.
Even at his age, he's been exposed to so much of classical (Newtonian) physics. I think we can spend a bit of time poking around, discussing how revolutionary his ideas were and how significant and long term the effects were. Observation becomes revelation becomes mathematical proof.
And a little later, I can suggest the impossible, that Sir Issac wasn't entirely correct and a whole new way to describe the world was created in the last century. Because we haven't found a way to describe it to kids (or existing adults), we don't really talk about it. We're working on math for the non functional rather than trying to make Quantum Mechanics concepts easy for kids.
And in some ways, it's so darned easy. Make the kids familiar with boolean concepts and many of the ideas of quantum math are obvious. The hard part is jamming it into a world of analog observation.
We don't really grow flowers as much as allow them to exist by the nature of our benign neglect.
The worst thing that can happen to a plant, tree or flower (basically, anything that isn't a weed... but perhaps we can apply our talents there) is to get noticed. We supply attention, love, food, etc. and the growing thing promptly keels over and dies. Somehow, perhaps simply to spite us, our roses keep growing like crazy and running all kinds of directions (a few weeks ago I noticed that a spur of the vine had popped through the burner of the grill and rerouted it elsewhere).
I decided to take pictures of our wonderful Rib Eye's this evening (someday I need to post the marinate recipe) but while looking around, I was inspired by many other wonderful shots of roses I've seen recently.
Unfortunately, it was moving toward darkness and the flash went off. The one shot I got head on (mostly upside down) was significantly over color saturated and basically useless. It's not a bad shot, but I'll have to work on getting some a good picture with daylight on the flowers. They really are beautiful.
We attended an auction and dinner for our youngest son's school on Friday at the Renaissance Hotel in Agoura Hills. It was a very pleasant evening and I had my camera with me for a change, thinking I might actually get around to taking some pictures inside. Didn't happen.
I got some nice shots of what was a relatively typical spring evening for this part of Southern California. The green lower level vegetation with the browning of the hillsides is particularly common, but with all the rain this year we still have a lot of green in places that last year were already scorched.
Anyway, I'm not here to talk about my mundane shots of SoCal, even if I like them. What caught my attention later in the evening as I was dragging out a bit of our booty was a sign in the parking lot (I looked around and found several of them) with an interesting disclaimer (my apologies for the fact that I still don't seem to be able to shoot vertical when I want to — being in a hurry is no excuse):
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THE HOTEL IS NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR LOSS OR DAMAGE TO VEHICLES, EQUIP- MENT OR CONTENTS. PLEASE REMOVE ALL LAPTOPS AND VALUABLES FROM VEHICLE. |
Was there some sort of massive crime outbreak in Agoura Hills that I missed? Is the Marriott chain putting up these disclaimers all over in the hope that they'll fend off some law suits? Or is this some weird local phenomena?
The whole thing just struck me as being very odd and given the location, quite unexpected and out of place.
It's been an unusual and not very productive weekend but I've finally dealt with the one task I really wanted to finish up. Everything is now on a single partition and it all appears to be working with the exception of some fink X11 stuff.
After attending an auction and dinner for our local elementary school on Friday, I started the process of cloning and rearranging everything which took most of yesterday to get all the kinks worked out. Along the way I had a scare for about half an hour yesterday when I thought I was going to need to resurrect ten years of mail from various pieces of backup data. In the end, it was the bizarre behavior of Eudora and my own sloppiness while moving everything that caused the problems.
Today I just had to shove everything back onto the internal drive where things once again seem to be working properly (and a heck a lot more quietly; the external drive may be big and fast but the noise was getting to me this morning when the rest of the house was quiet).
All that's left is fink. If I can figure out how to force a rebuild of everything I should be done with this project and ready to move to a larger drive on the AlBook soon.
One of the problems that comes with proper management of federated identity is providing unique tokens (which implies storing and associating for later use) for use with each of the millions (billions) of destination services where a user (or device) might need to establish an identity interchange.
The best (most easily observable) negative example, is the use of a single token for identity representation by our federal government. I'm talking about Social Security Numbers. Because we have a widely available, unique token it's quite common these days to see identity driven systems require a SSN, even if it makes no sense. Everyone wants your SSN, and once they have it, all kinds of fun and games are possible.
In a future I think we can help grow, why should a business (Joe's Wrenches) really require a SSN? What they need is a connection between between the employee they know as Barb Jones and the representation the federal government has for 010-010-1010. Ms. Jones should be able to perform the association between the big G and her employer in a way that makes her SSN transparent and leaves her in control (Joe's will dismiss her if things go badly wrong). Ultimately, Joe's Wrenches gets a token to represent Barb Jones to the G for income purposes. Where the model gets a little sticky is with revenue collecting states. What needs to happen here is that Joe's Wrenches needs to let the state (S) know that they have a negotiated ID token with the big G. Once again, Barb Jones will need to enter some information; certainly some company information, perhaps her G ID as well (her SSN: 010-010-1010). Once again, the G has to issue a new token for Barb Jones, this time to the State. Because the State requires Joe's Wrenches to report financial data, they'll be given a new token for Barb Jones, this one from the State, verified by the G.
The three legged identity cooperation in the previous example isn't going to be the bulk of the identity problem (we're definitely in the 20% category), but it's far from unique. Especially if we want to model devices and a whole host of other entities we haven't considered. One can easily see a not too far distant future, when considering even simple device based authentication will require such a three way ID exchange (device identity, user identity and network provider). Add another layer (roaming via WiFi perhaps?) and things get exponentially more complicated (that's just the way things work).
Outside of finally getting the examples above written down, I think they help to describe a problem that we'll need to wrestle with in the coming identity management world. We've got lot's of experience that demonstrates that using the same unique token (pick your poison, SSN is the easiest to make fun of) everywhere is bad thing. The solution is to use completely unique identifier's (tokens) for each external system. Before Barb has ever done anything with another system that Joe's Wrenches needs to work with from a business perspective, they've already accumulated three representations of her... their internal representation, the negotiated token used for the G and another used for the S. Over a period of a few years working for Joe's, it's quite likely that she will accumulate many hundreds (perhaps thousands) of these tokens.
Accumulating tokens for every user (which would normally be used as a reverse lookup process) isn't a big deal initially, regardless of how big your identity group is. It's a hassle if you've got 100,000 employees with a typical turn over of five years. It's a huge problem if you deal with hundreds of millions of identities and intend to keep them as customers for decades. The problem is expiration of tokens which are no longer needed; services which no longer exist, bank accounts which have been closed, cards which no longer exist... the list could go on and on.
And if you're the G, with the need to track 300 million plus identities over at least eighty years, this concept is going to cause a brain hemorrhage.
Toss in revocation and expiration? Things get really fun.
Before I completely forget to mention it, GeoURL is back (in beta). Many thanks to Ask Bjørn Hansen reviving this.
BuzzMachine mentioned something interesting earlier this week about the future of classifieds and now that I've finally taken a look, Indeed is a big change for job listings.
At the top level, they're a job search engine (you can search by job type or location) but they also offer tools like the Jobroll (they've also got a a blog and use it to show off their own jobroll), an API and search RSS feeds that will appeal to job seekers. The one thing that's missing is an easy way to add your jobs to their listings. I assume they've done this to limit the amount of junk they wind up with and they do have a manual process in place.
The JobTrends page is an interesting combination of aggregated data and DIY Maps. I was a little surprised when the click action zoomed (that part I expected) and then jumped into city search, but it makes sense.
A comment on Jeff's story pointed out This Disruption Will Be Syndicated which led me to the Feedster job search. The search looks familiar but the results are full of junk (including the blog worlds latest plaque, poker related comment and trackback spam).
Does this spell doom for Dice, Monster, HotJobs and maybe even CraigsList? Not immediately, but there are going to be implications. If job search aggregation gets big enough and it becomes easy to join the fray, why deal with the costs associated with the middle men?
Finally, the subject of specialized (vertical) search was discussed and Tom Evslin argues that it doesn't make any sense (more here). Long term, I'm not sure I disagree with Tom, but as the Feedster search showed me, specialized search can allow us to work around a lot of issues that the general engines can't deal with today.
As I climb out of my hole (I'm beginning to think I should rename this place the weekend blog) I did manage to wander onto two things that somehow are connected, or related, or something. I think.
Doc Searls wanders off into some interesting territory around linux and open source and how it relates to Tom Friedman's new book The World is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century and last weeks commentary on the subject. Despite my initial misgivings, Doc makes the case for reading what initially seemed like a pretty obvious observation.
The other item that seized my imagination was Jay Rosen's Are You Ready for a Brand New Beat? While the world is growing appreciably flatter all the time, these new bumps (pockets perhaps?) of online communities centered around real physical locations are popping up regularly. Follow the links and you'll see several approaches being taken (none of which covers what's happening in North Carolina, which has somehow become ground zero for a lot of the activity around inclusive community news reporting). I'm not quite sure why I'm so fascinated by the concept, but I surely am.
Regular expressions in python are for the most part pretty straight forward if you know how regular expressions work in general. I've used them quite often and had only a few little issues.
This time around I'm doing something different; loading a whole bunch of regular expressions from a file and building a list of compiled regex's for later use. The problem is that the string data either needs to be escaped to death or treated as a raw string. I tried several different approaches, none of which seemed to work and eventually settled on using the fragment below where I build a new raw string using substitution.
lineData = parseLine( aLine )
if lineData :
regexData = r'%s' % lineData
searchList.append( re.compile( regexData ))
It's probably not the most efficient way to do this (or perhaps it is) but I couldn't seem to find any examples and this works. Hopefully this will save someone else a couple hours flailing around in circles.
While checking my referral logs, I noticed a hit from Ventura County Star Blogs, the Star's blog directory page. I don't remember signing up (it seemed like a pain and I'm form adverse) but I don't mind being there and it looks like they've greatly expanded the number of blogs listed.
Something else to explore when I get a chance.
As I continue slogging through a lot of disjointed writing and thoughts about identity and a meta description for identity I was looking for something online which described LDAP fairly clearly, contained some information about it from a big picture point of view and delved into a bit of arcane information (schemas and the like). I actually found something which meets those needs.
LDAP for Rocket Scientists isn't, but that's quite alright. While not perfect, it does seem to be a terrific overview with a lot of nuts and bolts information relating to OpenLDAP and many external links and references.
I might actually have to pitch in and help on the protocol level should the time ever arrive. I still need to find some more use of multibyte byte encoding rules (one afternoon I figured out the one [and most of the two] byte BER rules by inspection, the docs and code made a whole lot more sense afterward) to make sure I know what's going on but the rest is straight forward enough.
This seems to be one of those under cover of darkness changes Apple makes from time to time and since I haven't been paying too much attention to Tiger, I missed it entirely.
It's a shame in some respects because rendezvous was a much more appropriate name for the technology than 'hello' in any language (although that's the basic idea of the beacon, the technology equivalent of Arnold Horshack).
They might as well just call it ZeroConf, but I suppose that's not cute enough. Either way, it seems the fancy name in the bullet points is changing.
After getting beat up a bit last week after the InfoCard announcements, I really like Kim Cameron's statement of intent regarding InfoCard, open identity and the identity metasystem he's been discussing during the last few months.
Does a common system to describe user identities in a widely agreed upon fashion really hold the promise to be a big bang? Without a doubt. This has been a painful issue for such a long time. That wide recognition was probably behind the press hype and insanity when Passport and Hailstorm were announced a few years ago. Everyone knew they needed something like this, but it took a while for the message about the odious data model to get out to the world.
This direction (largely implied from what Kim has said in recent months coupled with the Laws of Identity) seems to keep in mind the all important concept of user (owner, business, etc.) control and reenforces the notion that few (driving toward none) of us need everything about an identity.
I also noticed that Kim now has his i-name up as another linking/mail mechanism. I think I'll do that as well.
Update: Doc had a good reminder that it's a conversation and pointed to Nah- its not war or heartbreak which points out the obvious (and that isn't always a bad thing) .If you spend a lot of time working on a computer, you will eventually develop preferences when it comes to keyboards. It's all personal and highly subjective. It's not like I needed April 1st to learn this, but it appears that my favorite keyboard maker has gone the way of the dodo. Micro Connectors seems to be no more. And as of yesterday (when the 'a' key finally up and really died), I'm on my last one here at home (I've got a couple more at work, so I can steal from the server if my primary keyboard goes south).
It would be ridiculous to describe this as tragic, but it sure seems that way. Although cheap (they were always sub $50), the feel of the keys and the audible feedback were perfect for me. Perhaps a bit distracting for others on a conference call while I was typing, but I try to mute myself where possible. Over the years, I did convert a few people, although most seem to prefer to a mushier, quieter key entry system.
Like Michael Tsai, I stumbled onto the Micro Connectors shortly after the Mac conversation to USB. We randomly ordered about a few keyboards for the Mac group I was running at the time and I hated them all, even when compared to the Extended Keyboard II except for the Micro Connectors (which someone else got and hated; we swapped and everyone was more or less happy). It's been six months since Michael wrote the review of the Tactile Pro and mentioned the demise of MC (not that I noticed) and the number of vendors still carrying them is dwindling. The question is: can I live with a grape or strawberry version? Ugh. Not sure about that. I guess I need to see if the grape version is the SMK-8112U (better USB compatibility with my bizarre USB daisy chain) or the SMK-8112JU (a later version with even better feel and a wee bit lighter action). It's interesting that this comment on a MacSlash story about the Tactile Pro also brings forward some lovers of the now departed MC. I guess there were just too few of us.
In the end, I guess I'll give the Tactile Pro a shot. If anyone is interested, the keyboard I loved the best was the original Apple Extended Keyboard (code name Saratoga because it was so darned big and heavy) and I would gladly pay $100 for a USB keyboard that felt that way. In comparison, the Extended Keyboard II was a light, cheesy knock off.