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[warning: you won't find any useful identity related info in this post] I recently moved to a new apartment, and while unboxing the books I had to decide on a criteria for shelving them in our wonderful black billy . Hierarchies sucks, because they force you to choose a single criteria for slicing your data: but with physical objects, it's hard to use tagging :-) I decided to dedicate one shelf to the books that had the most influence on my past & recent development: and I'm going to spend some of this Saturday night writing it down here. I excluded all the classics from school time, you won't find " The Prince " or " The Divine Comedy " in this list but that doesn't mean that I didn't metabolize them; the same goes for pure-entertainment novels & poets, no Hyperion or Montale here; the same goes for scholastic programming, no Knuth , Sliberschatz or Code Complete ; or for the books that I have but I didn't find the time to read yet, like The Long Tail (bought from Anderson himself when he came to present it @ campus) or " Surely you're joking, Mr. Feynman "; we have to draw a line somewhere :-) Godel Escher Bach - Douglas Hofstadter Simply fantastic. Should be mandatory reading for orientation courses pre-computer science. I didn't really understand recursion until I read GEB; the godelization is one of the most useful concepts ever; messages/codes/meaning, 'nuff said. The Mind's I - Hofstadter & Dennett A great book. Read More...
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[I suggest my usual readers to skip this post altogether, you won't find anything useful here :-)] Romeo tagged me with this "How did you get started in software development?" quest. I was already feeling guilty, because given how swamped I am I knew I was not going to have time to reply to the tag: OTOH right now my main PC is unusable, since I am repaving a new HD on it, hence while the network install goes I can write this up. How old were you when you started programming? A quale età hai cominciato a programmare? I was 12. One Christmas parents & siblings joined forces and got me a Commodore16 : it was just *fantastic*. How did you get started in programming? Come hai cominciato a programmare? With the reference manual of the basic 3.5. What was your first language? Qual’è stato il tuo primo linguaggio di programmazione? Basic, the one that came with the Commodore16. What was the first real program you wrote? Qual’è stato il primo programma vero che hai scritto? Hard to define "real" here. I would say that the first program I have wrote for a purpose different than pure enjoyment was a control routine for a Siemens PLC. It was for a shop class, we had those PLC working in AWL-step5. Not very structured, but hey... certainly software! What languages have you used since you started programming? Quali linguaggi hai usato da quando hai cominciato a programmare? Ah, hard to remember them all. Already mentioned Basic and AWL-Step5. At the University it was mainly Pascal, C and Read More...
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I am sure you already fell in love with Live Mesh : I know I did. Today I did a little experiment, which probably shows how desperately I need to go in vacation ASAP: I wanted to do a mega-remote session that would go through pretty much all the physical machines I am using there days. The sequence is as follows: laptop in the living room --> Media Center in the den -->laptop on my desk at work -->UMPC in the living room -->desktop at work Apart from the first leg, done via remote desktop, all the connections were done via live mesh. That's 5 PC deep: can you do better? I dare you, I'm sure there's people working on more PCs out there :-) Believe it or not, the last step in the chain (the tiny miniature of my desktop at work) was still fairly responsive! Picture follows: All those nested realities reminded of Hofstadter and his discussions about recursion in GEB : and pronto, here's there's the integrated cam in the UMPC put to good use for giving some recursive depth :-) Read More...
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2:35AM. I landed few hours ago in Seattle, back from a successful week in Kuala Lumpur & Singapore , and of course I am totally jetlagged and I can't sleep at all. Hence I'll kill some time writing the customarily post I do every April for this feed's birthday (former installments: 2004 , 2005 , 2006 , 2007 ). Five years is quite a long time in the IT timescale. It always amazes me to see the readership stats: given the specificity of the topics I write about, coupled with my regrettable tendency to tangents & severe verbal incontinence, one would never expect a yearly total of views well in the six digits and yet.. thanks everybody for your attention & patience :-) Here there's a selection of some of the most popular's posts since last April. Considering that in the past year I've also worked on the book and spoke at many events, besides the usual customer engagements, I am surprised I managed to write almost 100 entries. Some musings The Tao of Claims The Tao of Authentication series ( I , II & III ) The Authorization Continuum Omnidirectional Identities On R-STS On ProofTokens On DisplayTokens Cloud Computing & Identity Some samples & tutorials Sample usage of CardSpace & WF's new Send/Receive WCF activities Sample usage of CardSpace & WCF's new REST style services Sample usage of CardSpace & Excel Sample usage of CardSpace on non-HTTPS websites Sample usage of managed cards for accessing a biztalk.net RP The Teched EMEA STS demo series ( Read More...
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Back in October 2005, few weeks after I moved to the US, I wrote a blog post in which I introduced the idea of a collective name for the federated resources accessible to a company. One of the names I proposed was federnet . At the time I made a quick search on the Internet to see if anybody was already using the term for something of the sort, but nobody appeared to. Well, I actually used the term in the book ; I don't know how I managed to get it past the severe reviewers of AW, but I did! :-) Now: since it appears on a publication, with its nice ISBN & classification according to the Library of Congress, I am tempted to say that it made a further step in the long road toward inclusion. We are still far from Merriam Webster or even just wikipedia , of course, but hey... you never know ;-) Before writing this post I made a short search on the term, just to see if it enjoyed any uptake, and I was pretty surprised to find an article on the CIO Magazine website that mentions the term federnet! The article, with a date almost a year after my blog post (the website says September the 13th, 2006), takes the consumer angle and a way more centralized approach, but its results are not too different from mine after all (use of standards, benefits of federation). It even mentions intranet and Internet vs federnet (though they are mentioned for assonance reasons, rather than conceptual kinship). I am sure that at the time a query for "federnet" on any search engine would have brought Read More...
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...here there's the best approximation I found (short of a printout, of course, but that would be cheating:-) ). My wife just got a Sony ebook reader ; once we discovered it reads SD cards, we wanted to test it with a prerelease PDF of the book . Looks pretty good, though it's a tad too small with the format used in this particular PDF (and it would appear there's only one level of zoom available). Still, it's pretty readable: see below for one of the most complex figures. Nice! BTW, the hard copy should come real soon now... :-) Read More...
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On the Paris-Seattle flight, coming back after 2 weeks spent stuffing myself with all sorts of food with the excuse "after all, you can't find this in USA" :) Before hurling myself back in the vortex of daily work, and celebrate the end of the year with something crazy, I want to take some time writing down some hallucinatory (=vision without execution) thoughts about omnidirectional identities . Be warned, this may be just pointless rambling at this point. Few weeks ago I chatted about this in front of a microphone with John Udell , digressing along a crazy tangent instead of answering his questions about the book (I eventually came back to Earth and answered properly :)). I don't know if he'll deem those fragments publication worthy, but just in case I'll make a brain dump here. It's not that there's much more to do in this small seat anyway (just finished the latest Eco . He didn't mention underbite at all, I'm happy). Looking back at the activities related to identity in the past year, I am glad to report that amazing progress has been done. Something that makes 2007 very different from 2006 is the kind of work that was made: in 2007 the accent was on execution. The vision behind the metasystem is still being explored, sure, like Kim's series on linkage or the discussions about display token and first law demonstrate; and I feel that conjugating the metasystem and claims in enterprise environment is an area that still need focus (especially in fighting old forma mentis that Read More...
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[warning: this post does not feature any identity related content, and it's probably useless] I feel for the UMPCs an unhealthy (walletwise) attraction, since the very moment they came out. In fact, if you dig in the early years of this blog you'll see I am a gadget freak: I am still proudly going around with my JasJar , even if it means having a fanny pack around my waist for the delight of my mocking colleagues (one day I'll give them proper grief about all the fashion mistakes they make according to Italian tastes, but that's another story :-)). During the black Friday I went, like many fellow geeks, in the annual pilgrimage to Fry's . Here, among unbelievably long lines and empty shelves, I saw the U810 : an exquisitely small convertible laptop, small enough to literally fit in the pockets of my jacket but with a keyboard big enough to support the parody of 3-fingers touchtyping I do. I have already seen it on engadget , but having it right there, with all the Vista icons so tiny in the 5.6" 1024x600 WSGA Crystal View... that day the line was too long, but the day after i just had to go buy it :) And here it is, shown together with my wife's 30" monitor: Tiny,eh? As soon as I got home I flattened the sad, sad Vista Basic that was on by default, for a more proper Vista Ultimate: promptly followed by Visual Studio 2008, Office, ArtRage , Live Writer , ZoomIt (especially zoomit, this thing is minuscule) Messenger, Paint.NET ... you get the picture. Below there's a screenshot Read More...
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