AWG - WorkBlog

Confirm the Work of Our Hands

Fri, 05 Aug 2005 15:07:03 -0700

For my evaluation this year, I was asked to perform a self evaluation, a reflection of the lessons learned from the last year. Sometimes I think that an exercise such as this would have been easier if I had kept a journal or had been more open and honest on my work blog. With that in mind, I am posting it for what it is.... maybe by writing down my lessons, I won't forget them, or perhaps they may be of some use to others.

Lessons Learned at APU during 2004/2005

I think most of the lessons that I have learned in the last year have had to do with things that were necessary to learn about myself. It is apparent that this better understanding of the way in which I am motivated, the times in which I am successful and those which I am not, is necessary in order to be effective in my unique position at APU.

Portlet Gems

Thu, 09 Jun 2005 11:02:57 -0700

JSR-168 is a portlet standard that allows any compliant portal to make use of these mini-applications. The potential for providing a mix of applications produced external to an organization, yet consumed internally is great.

There are many companies providing such services in a-la-carte ASP fashion, I thought it would be good to start collecting resources for free portlets. As uPortal is JSR-168 compliant it is likely that we will be consuming such portlets in the future for our University Portal.

Gems - A Collection small JSR-168 compliant Portlets
http://community.java.net/portlet/
http://www.jsr168.org/
http://portlets.blogspot.com/

World of Warcraft uses CAS

Thu, 19 May 2005 19:37:26 -0700

I had suspected for a while that Blizzard's hugely successful MMORPG, World of Warcraft used JA-SIG/Yale CAS. As a WoW gamer myself, I had noticed the familiar service ticket string in the url when logging into the forums etc.

Well I finally found more confirmation, a Tomcat stack trace is included on this CAS in the wild!, yale blog post.

Talk about scalability.

update: oops, had a bad link to the blog

The IdM space has some forward thinkers

Mon, 10 Jan 2005 14:15:04 -0800

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.

The Power of Who

Mon, 10 Jan 2005 10:12:21 -0800

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...

Xorg Gentoo Update - Fixing Fonts

Sun, 09 Jan 2005 13:12:36 -0800

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.

Blogging for the EDU Enterprise?

Thu, 21 Oct 2004 17:12:03 -0700

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.

Desktop Search from Google

Fri, 15 Oct 2004 13:49:56 -0700

Today, I was talking to a friend, and he told me about this new Beta utility from Google, and I thought, wow, these guys come up with new cool stuff everyday! This one is called Google Desktop at http://desktop.google.com. Basically, it indexes your whole computer including your files, email, web history (including secure web content), and makes them available in a snap through a "localhost" website on your machine. I haven't had it on my laptop for too long yet, so not everything is indexed, but from what I've seen so far, you can search for ANYTHING on your computer in snap ... (literally).

The Slowdown Problem: TCP Window Scaling and Linux 2.6.8

Wed, 15 Sep 2004 16:28:39 -0700

About the same time as students came back to campus this year, I noticed that my internet connection speed was extremely slow on my gentoo linux notebook. Some websites wouldn't load, and ftp and http downloads never exceded 5KB/s and often were in a measurement not often seen anymore, bits/s. I thought, I know this is a heavy usage period on campus, but this is rediculous.

Well, after our network administrator reported that utilization was was not maxed on our campus partial ds3, I thought perhaps it was a router issue. I started trying different locations, other hosts on campus did not have this problem. I switched to wired, same problem. When others in the building also running linux, were not having the problem I began to suspect by box. But I get full speed at home? Whats the problem?

I did a dslreports speed test which came out rather bizarre, 3434 kbps up and 36 kbps down. :-? Thats two T1's upload speed and a pre 56K modem download speed folks. To which dslreports stated "Your upload speed is much faster than down.. have you tweaked?"

Since the problem was occuring regardless of interface, I began to suspect my kernel. I rebooted with an older 2.6.7 and whamo, the same file that was downloading at 5K/s completed at 200K/s. After the latest gentoo development-sources linux-2.6.8.1, didn't solve the problem I decided to google and found the answer.

The recent 2.6.8 kernels have enabled TCP Window Scaling by default. Window Scaling has been a technique used by cat burglars and the IETF since 1992, see RFC 1323. Basically, it allows for the dynamic setting of tcp window sizes beyond their early fixed limit of 64K to increase performance on the Internet with modern equipment. So why doesn't it work with Linux? Well the problem is not with Linux at all, other than the fact that they turned it on by default. Apparently many routers and packet firewalls are rewriting the window scaling factor during a transmission, instead of only during the initial handshake (SYN). This means that the sending and receiving side are assuming a different TCP window size. The result of this misnegotiation of protocol, is very slow successful traffic if at all.

This also explains why the problem is visible on some sending and receiving sites, because only devices behind the path of broken routers are affected. For instance, why my notebook worked fine from my house, or why I was able to get to some sites from on campus at full speed. Also apparently some routers are only mangling in one direction, which would explain that crazy speed test above.

The solution? Well, some of the linux developers are hoping that leaving the option enabled will force the issue, so that vendors will fix their routers. As for me, I was able to follow David S. Miller's suggestion to turn off the feature dynamically in the kernel.

The following command will disable the win scaling feature for the running kernel:

sysctl -w net.ipv4.tcp_default_win_scale=0

And the following command will make sure it gets set next reboot:

echo "net.ipv4.tcp_default_win_scale=0" >> /etc/sysctl.conf

In case you hadn't picked up on it, this is not a gentoo specific issue. Redhat fedora users, you might be affected as well, along with any other distribution using the recent stock 2.6.8 kernels. This LWN article is the only press I have seen about the problem. For a more complete discussion of the topic, here's the start of the thread on the Linux Kernel Mailing List. It would be nice if someone had a complete list of affected routers, some have mentioned openbsd and cisco.

Firefox 1.0 Coming (some missing features)

Tue, 24 Aug 2004 13:23:03 -0700

Looks like Mozilla Firefox will be hitting 1.0 really soon. In preparation, some of the really great features are being removed for instability and or support reasons. They will no doubt be added back later, but there is one in particular that I will sorely miss. The alternate stylesheet tool, allows you to switch between alternate stylesheets for websites that offer multiples. It seems to work well for me, but a discussion in the developers bugtracking software lead to its removal from the nightly builds. Fortunately, someone has already stepped in to offer an enhancement to his style sheet chooser extension to offer similar functionality. It won't be handled as a graphical element in the bottom left corner of the browser, but I am sure someone else will do that at some point as well. According to the dicsussion the goal would be to add back the functionality in 1.5. The other element that many notebook users enjoy, is offline browsing. This feature allows you to save websites for offline viewing. Apparently there are some issues with it, and it has been removed for 1.0 as well. While these are unfortunate, I am very excited about Firefox hitting 1.0. I have been very pleased to see its progress as I have used it over the last 8 months or so. It is lean and fast, and has some very compelling innovative features. Thunderbird, the mail client, is coming along nicely as well. Recent versions seem more stable. Recently I have switched to it from Evolution, after getting frustrated with a few bugs (hangs etc) and feature deficiencies (SSL LDAP support). So far the only thing I miss is the shortcut bar, to make it easy to switch between inboxes, or important imap folders.

7i server running on a VM for the first time

Fri, 20 Aug 2004 10:46:40 -0700

The request for having the 7i server running on VMware GSX server has finally been completed. The network part of it that I thought would be a problem was actually a very easy deal. the server was setup the same way as any other server. I have to say, GSX is a pretty sweet application. the newest version allows OS access control by assigning permissions to the filesystem on the VM, which allows us to control access to it via AD Auth. if I'm not mistaken, this is a new feature on GSX 3.1 Unrelated to the host OS, and not that this is new, but I find it very odd that SBI never included SSL support for the 7i server until version 7.4.

Moldova Missionary Trip

Wed, 02 Jun 2004 16:52:53 -0700

Well, I'll be out of the office for the next few weeks going on a short term missions trip to the former Soviet Republic of Moldova, returning Monday, June 21st. Its been a good first half the year, and I am glad to see that many of my realistic goals have been accomplished. I am quite excited about movement in the architecture space. When I come back I look forward to refining and finalizing the ETA Model. I am pleased with the positive response so far. Next on the plate is a Enterprise Applications Architecture, a map of what software we have would be a good start. Then of course some kind of alignment with the technical architecture and business needs. Also would like to look into the "Solution Patterns" concept of technical architecture. Combining a set of technical solutions into a "product" to match needs as they come up in project designs. Here is our "n-tier" solution set, for example. Its based on a Meta presentation at the Enterprise Architectures conference. Really good way to produce some reusable architectures, rather than working from scratch each time. La Revedere (Romanian for Goodbye)

Friday Ramblings

Wed, 25 May 2005 11:53:23 -0700

Well this ends my first week back after the EAC conference. As I might have expected I didn't feel like blogging from the hotel in the evenings last week. Too much input during the day to spend any cycles outputing at night.

Anyway, I was fully emersed into the broad area of enterprise architecture. From theories on how to engineer an enterprise, to practical methods of defining solution patterns for re-useable technical architectures. I have many personal notes, and presentation slides from all the sessions that I need to parse through and synthesize into some sort of actionable material.

I think the most interesting facet was examples of how organizations are integrating the function of EA into their functional areas. Such as the important relationship with the project process, as well as with executive steering committees. Certainly the architects field is a difficult one, but I think if I would have dived into the industry material a year ago (such as the book, "Practical Enterprise Architecture" from Prentice Hall I am reading), I would have been more productive in my first year in the position.

How does an organization create blueprints for the who, what, how, when, where and why of the enterprise, when its busy moving from project to project. Projects are the executing arm of our service industry, and we all need to be involved in them. In fact, early in the EA maturity model, it is the means by which architecture is reviewed. However, unless time is spent creating models and re-usable patterns, then each project will require signifigant investment individually enginering a solution. We need to get to that place.

Besides getting re-aquainted with my desk this week, I spent a bit of time on a few projects. Created a process diagram for the "Policies on the Web" project, and also have been reviewing a Benefits ASP web offering HR is looking into. I don't know much about the HR module for IFAS, but there really isn't any functionality in the area of self-service benefits administration. There is double entry data input going on, and we all know the manual process we go through to select insurance cariers etc, so there is a real need here. We'll be meeting with HR again to understand their business process and how it relates existing systems. Any movement toward a solution will need to integrate with something, and we need to make sure the bridges can be made. I look at it as a great way to develop some understanding of existing architecture in a functional area I haven't spent much time in.

And thats how we do it. One area at a time, answering the basic questions of what, how etc. According to the EA maturity model (there are several flavors of course), many organizations start out knowing they need architecture, so it starts with a person or a few persons providing input to decision making processes. Then standards are defined, usually an overly specific list of which products/protocols you will and won't use (sound familiar?), then realizing thats too narrow, a principled based architecture is approached. So whats next? A broader framework, an EA template with great questions that we need to find the answers for. These are questions that are being answered each day, in different ways by different folks.... we need a blueprint for how each part of our components work together to provide services.

Eventually I hope that we can have a SOA (Service Oriented Architecture), where processes and functionality are more important than the specific widgets that deliver the results. Mix and match.... flexibility because of good design and some slack. To steal an analogy... you know those little plastic puzzles that we all played with as a kid, with the little squares you could slide around until you got the pattern correct? Well the most important piece of the puzzle was the slack, the empty space. Without the empty space you cannot rearrange the pieces in order to achieve your goal.

I don't blog enough. Sometimes we desire to create the perfect post every time. Spending time and breaking continuous thought by linking to sources and messing with formatting. But blogging is useful not for publishing finished work, but for getting out thoughts quickly to develop over time. Its the process that is more important than the result in this case. So thus, my ramblings for this work week.

New Orleans this week

Mon, 22 Mar 2004 00:10:28 -0800

I'll be attending the Enterprise Architectures Conference in New Orleans this week. As this is my first EA conference I hope to learn much. The hotel I'll be staying at supposedly has wireless Internet access, not sure about the conference. I'll be in APUIM as I can, and hopefully update my workblog as well as my personal blog with the experience.

Approaching Identity Management

Tue, 16 Mar 2004 13:27:01 -0800

The latest Information Week (March 15, 2004), has a significant article on The Need For Identity Management. The article inspired me to start documenting APU's need for further pursuing an Identity Management (IdM) strategy. However, the article in Information Week had some intersting points of dicussion.

The promise of Identity Management is to improve security, boost worker productivity, cut costs, and reduce the "integration friction" usually connected with giving employees, business partners, customers, and suppliers access to internal systems. The process starts internally, but the long-term objective is clear: Build a series of interconnected systems so an employee logged on to his company's intranet can access a business partner's systems and have those systems automatically trust the employee's digital credentials. The way to do this is through standards. This perspective of cross organizational authorization is called Federated Identity Management. Dan Blum, of the Burton Group has a good definition for federation, "standards and agreements that make identity and entitlements portable across autonomous domains".