In Firefox, I have been storing urls to interesting things in a "to blog" folder on my bookmark bar. The hope is always, this would be good to analyze and post about later, but I don't have the time right now. The truth is, they rarely get revisited. So in the interest of sharing, and putting stuff in place more accessible, I will start quick linking.

Found some good Identity Management related resources. Digital ID World online and in print magazine. Interesting Digital Identity Predictions for 2004, in which are mentioned The Laws of Identity, an ongoing discussion to develop the nature of identity in light of desired federation and interoperability. These discussions resulting in the realization of said laws, was initated by Kim Cameron. Which as Doc Searl pointed out, is interesting because Kim Cameron is in charge of Microsoft's Identity Strategy. A good thing that there is a turn from a monolithic identity infrastructure, previously posed by Microsoft, to one that is distributed and diverse, as stated in the Fifth Law of Identity.

In article on Digital ID World, The Great Directory Heresy, Dave Nesbitt asks whether the rising notion that you can throw more metadirectories or suites and federations at bad data end up with a great enterprise directory is heresy. Its like putting lipstick on a pig he says.

Its a great question. Do you cleanse the data you have? Do you make sure you have the perfect directory structure? Or do you forge forward with policy and business logic to populate and push data out to where it needs to go with what you've already got? Will it lead to chaos? Or, as some suggest, is the IdM an interative process, where the idea is more important than one implementation? I do know that its quite easy to end up doing nothing, waiting for the perfect thing.

Clever slogan in the title of a recent article, Authentication - The Power of Who from Campus-Technology Magazine.

Identity Management is all about an organization knowing who its constituents are. I thought the article was a bit random, and incorrectly labeled as all about "athentication" since authorization and provisioning topics are covered. However, it is a good overview of several of the approaches that schools are taking to meet the opportunity. So from a case study perspective its worth a read...

I just ran emerge update world which switched me from Xfree86 to Xorg. Went fairly smooth, except that some fonts weren't anti-aliased afterward. I followed the instructions in Howto Xorg and Fonts which seemed to do the trick. Primarily:

emerge freetype corefonts freefonts artwiz-fonts sharefonts \
  terminus-font ttf-bitstream-vera unifont

I did end up porting my XF86Config to the new xorg.conf based on xorg.conf.example, You can get it here. (however the only real change was the inclusion of more font paths, so it was mostly academic). Still if you have an IBM R40 with the ATI Radeon 7500 and a 1400x1050 display, and want the built in trackpoint to work simultaneous with a standard logitech usb wheelmouse, then the xorg.conf should work well for you.

It appears that keyboard repeat rate is slow, on first start I was asked whether to use X's keyboard startup or Gnomes. I chose Gnome's, so perhaps I just need to tweak settings. I decreased the delay between repeat, and increased the repeat rate to fastest, and it appears to help, but it slows down the repeat after about 5 characters.

I have updated this and other information on my Gentoo R40 Wiki page.

As OpenOffice 2.0 gets closer to being finalized, they have started to release preview release snapshots. Of greater interest to me at this point is a nice list of new features.

So why the jump from 1.x to 2.0? Here are the things that stood out to me:

1. Switch to OpenDoc XML format from the Oasis Open Standards Group
2. Native widgets on Windows XP, Gnome, and KDE
3. Improved MS Office import/export
4. Export XHTML 1.0 Strict from all modules

If you have ever seen the export of html from Microsoft Word, then you will be especially excited about #4. Sure running things through htmltidy works, but think about the joy of having someone post web pages or content snippets using strict xhtml 1.0 from a word processor.

Its a bold move, but the responsible thing to do. If something is causing continual security risks, and increased overhead, both in user productivity and customer support costs, alternatives should be pursued. The Chronicle of Higher Education writes:

Worried about persistent security flaws in Microsoft's Internet Explorer, officials at the Pennsylvania State University system have taken the unusual step of recommending that students, professors, and staff members stop using the popular Web browser. "The threats are real, and alternatives exist," the university said in an announcement posted on its Web site this week.

The school, in this Information Technology Services Bulletin, is promoting the use of alternate browsers such as Firefox and Opera.

She cited reports that the new Firefox Web browser, for example, is much less prone than Internet Explorer to download so-called spyware, or programs surreptitiously placed on a computer in order to record confidential information such as passwords.

There is much talk these days regarding Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and the focus is primary geared toward software. In an SOA, modular distributed software provides services which can be aggregated and negotiated on the fly to solve complex problems. But are IT departments ready for an SOA software architecture if they are bogged down with the maintenance of infrastructure, instead of developing maintainable services.

Perhaps I am a bit off with this, but it appears to me that the proliferation of the Personal Computer has much to do with the transition from Information Services to Information Technology. So much time is spent simply providing and maintaining technology devices and the infrastructure that supports them that there is little time left for anything else.

Without architecture, there is little left between strategy and implementation. Some would say projects are between strategy and implementation. But as someone pointed out to me recently, strict project management is about doing the things the right way, not necessarily doing the right things. How do you know what to do and when to do it? And how do you make sure you have enough resources available to do more than catch up with support response?

Architecture is not infrastructure. Infrastructure relates to the maintenance of technology components to provide utility. Architecture is the the mapping of infrastructure to services to business needs; it is the definition of the information supply chain. Where has MIS gone? Who needs what information when? And how do they get it?

In the early days, Data Processing departments housed the data repositories, information was requested centrally, and experts made computers transform data into information; or in some cases only generated enough data for management to turn into useful information. Today, Information Technology departments largely supply the vehicles for users to produce and consume their own data. Somewhere between the two value-add has been lost.

What is the product that modern IT organizations deliver? Should there not be product lines, or services, which are evaluated in a similar portfolio as in a manufacturing or service company? How are those products and services evaluated for success?

Is not the success of a service partially defined as one that meets real customer needs, authenticated by increased use over time, sustained by reduced marginal cost of continued delivery or expansion.

What defines a failing product or service? One which is used by fewer individuals and costs more to maintain each year. Without removing failing products, eventually 100% of IT budgets will go toward maintenance.

So many solutions delivered by IT organizations meet a single need well, and yet shorten the horizon of future opportunities. The primary goal of architecture is to reduce complexity and thereby eliminate the inhibitors to change. Can we draw some lines that allow us to understand how today's decisions affect tomorrows opportunities?

Today IBM made three major announcements relevant to IBM Workplace:

• The release of IBM WebSphere Portal 5.1, one of the primary technologies underlying the IBM Workplace platform
• The availability of new IBM Workplace Solutions aimed at specific horizontal and vertical business problems
• The introduction of IBM Workplace Services Express, an affordable and easy-to-implement offering for deploying IBM Workplace to small-to-medium-sized businesses and departments within larger organizations.

IBM Workplace Announcement Page

Early Analysis

We have all been watching as IBM integrates its previously disperse applications and middleware. It was obvious to many that they would need to break up the monolithic approach to the Lotus Domino product into more of a web services model. Although, I was hard pressed to find detailed technical information or even screen shots, it sounds like with this upcoming release they have succeeded in integrating their products for complete web delivery. However, the success of the workplace still seems dependent on an integrated suite approach...

Well its finally happened, Mozilla Firefox has hit 1.0! Its getting quite a bit of news coverage, so there is probably not a whole lot more to say here. I will say though, it has come a long way... far surpassing its heritage. If you have been along for the Web ride from early on, you will have realized that browsers started off as simple rather efficient tools, but quickly became bloated and yet lacked real innovation. Firefox 1.0 is lean and mean 4.7MB, and a completely different experience from the early Mozilla days, or even the repackaged Netscape 6/7 series. You may remember downloads of the later Netscape series as well surpassing 30MB. Until Firefox, Mozilla's browser code still had fragments of the original Netscape code which was open sourced in 1998...

I have been using Live CD's for various repair and recovery tasks for some time. In the old days, we would build custom DOS floppy disks to install, repair and recover our PC's. As network and other such drivers grew in size, it became increasingly difficult to squeeze in the needed tools. I remember having to make the most difficult choice between a edit.exe and a network driver, fearing the days of using edlin, or even worse "copy con" to create/edit config files. Ahem... now that I have thoroughly dated myself, I will get on to the point. When DOS went away (I mean really went away, NT not Win9x which we all know was still DOS with a new face), it became all but impossible to boot into a windows environment to repair/recover windows. Linux Live CD's have filled the gap, offering several powerful tools. I needed to resize a partition for a new os install, and didn't have access to Partition Magic, a dynamic partition manipulation tool who's original purpose was making room on Windows PC's for OS/2. I found SystemRescueCD, which has a completely free graphical parititioning tool named QTParted. A couple months ago, I had used a small 50MB Linux Live CD named austrumi to reset a lost administrator password on a Windows 2000 machine. Worked like a charm. Recently, however, I ran into another password recovery situation where austrumi wouldn't work. It probably could have with some work, but would have required some customization because the machine was configured with psueduo hardware raid 0 (High Point controller). I found out that High Point controllers are not really hardware raid in the true sense, they are bios assist, and do not present a single drive to the operating system. A driver is required for the operating to properly see the logical drive. Thanks to my friend, jeffgus, I found an amazingly useful tool. A Windows Live CD creator, named BartPE. The reason why Windows Live CD's have not existed is because it would be illigal to distribute windows software. Microsoft has a solution they call Windows Preinstallation Environment (Win PE), and some OEM vendors have licensed similar technology. The author of BartPE got around the problem by requiring the user to supply a licensed copy of windows and generating the Live CD themself. The added benefit is a build environment allowing customization of the environment through plugins, so that specific hardware drivers and or utility software could be added to the image. The end result is a copy of Windows 2K/XP/2003 that will run completely off a CD/DVD. Add the High Point driver and I should be able to gain access to the elusive raid volume, find the SAM and do the necessary dirty work. BartPE can be built with plenty of useful utilities such as TightVNC, Putty, Remote Desktop and many more. Anyway, it was a great find, so I thought I would pass it along.

When reading posts relating to the latest 4.5 release of drupal, I came across an interesting post exploring the use of drupal for university wide blogging. Drupal for the EDU Enterprise (40K users?) I was immediately curious as to which University was pursuing this venture. Seeing that the post was from lhl, I followed his profile to his personal blog, the about in turn leading me to his USC personal page. I knew that USC was involved in internet2 and the middleware iniative, on the grid computing front, but had not made contact with anyone from USC participating in the WebISO and directory areas. USC also has a nice installation of [uPortal], http://my.usc.edu/. Apparently they are using Pubcookie instead of Yale CAS. David C., you may run into Leonard Lin at JA-SIG Summer 2004. Anyway, it would be good to follow up with him, about JA-Sig, WebISO, university blogging etc, since we don't have too many local contacts with uPortal and I2 Middleware. Anyway, I am quite interested in blogging as a feature for simple ad-hoc web publishing for our constituents. Students specifically would I think latch on to a blogging service if we were to offer one through Cougars' Den. There are some sites focused on the blogging and such in the classroom, such as kairosnews.org, also a drupal site btw. One drupal contributer, also a teacher, is using technical writing courses at his university to produce open source software documentation. I have seen anything that lends toward collaborative book writing, as easy as a blog, in eCollege. Of course blogging among Faculty and Staff within a university could generate more categorical knowledge sharing than any other currenlty available medium. The truth is, blogging is just the name for the simple publishing, sharing, and conversing of information. Its knowledge management in the most organic sense. Blogging brings something traditionally difficult, web publishing, to just about anybody. I don't think people care about having "home pages" beyond a simple blog with a customizable theme, links, their thoughts, and a simple way to attach images or files. Perhaps its time to start thinking of Enterprise Content Management is more than a three letter accronymn with a large vendor pricetag. Certainly blogging doesn't solve workflow, imaging and archiving and other advanced ECM topics, but I doubt one monolithic solution will do the trick. Worth a thought. Speaking of easy web publishing, I need to write about a next generation Wiki, Jotspot. Here's a great writeup about jotspot from social software expert Christopher Allen. I watched half of the flash demo, and will need to spend some more time with it before sharing my thoughts. It may not be "it", but something as simple as it, could take over the collaborative, workgroup, workflow, knowledge management software landscape easily.