Thank you, twitter

Another reason to like twitter ... or the guys behind twitter: in their announcement/warning of the upcoming downtime, they linked the time to timeanddate.com, so everyone can see it in their own timezone.



Since I receive a lot of event invitations from the US I know that his is quite unusual... totally the exception.
So, thank you, twitter.

Dezentralized Twitter

A couple of recent Gillmor Gang episodes were dedicated to the concept (and necessity) of a decentralized twitter, and/or opening up twitter...

At one point, Marc Canter says:

"But there could be technically 100 Twitters, each controlled by different vendors, and we could have a backend kind of DNS thing to federate users. So if I registered with Pownce or Jaiku, my handle would work on Twitter, or vice-versa. And that’s what I’ve been saying."

More of Marc's reasoning on his blog here.
I don't think this can ever happen - as a DNS like infrastructure.

DNS might be a nice model of decentralization (in probably most ways), but to me it is a very one-way model of propagating data ...
You don't have to push data through DNS... it get's pulled by a host lookup... that's why I say "propagate".

But you have to push tweets. You cannot have every possible Twitter-Clone instance (and there would be hundreds, if you really open it up) pull data from every other clone... no way. And DNS is not a model for pushing data...

To make one thing clear: I agree with Marc that twitter needs to be decentralized in some way... I just don't feel that DNS can be the model for it.

Restore Natural Order

I just noticed that Thunderbird saves the world.
Really.

If you click on the column selection button in one of the table views, e.g. Inbox, or the Lighning event list
you get a "Restore Natural Order" action.

Cool.

If only we had that in the real world.

X.500 ?

Today I saw (quite an expensive) a car with the vanity license plate "X 500" on it.

The owner is most definitely not from IT or any tech business, since no one here in their right mind would choose to associate themselves with "X.500"...

Skype, Google and YouTube for fun and profit

Just noticed that I had some dust on the sensor of my DSLR (Nikon D70). And while I was IM'ing with a friend (Max) on how to get rid of it, I googled for "nikon d70 sensor clean" and the first hit I got was this video on YouTube, showing how to clean the sensor of your D70 from dust.

I then only needed Max to tell me that I could use any straw instead of that blower thingy (provided that I don't spit through it)...

e voila: I followed the instructions, did not spit, and the sensor now is clean again.

Thanks, Skype, Google and YouTube.

Stupid UIs

Another addition to the collection of stupid user interfaces.

This week's award goes to Nokia for replacing a YES/NO dialog with two buttons (green checkbox for YES, red crossy thingy for NO).
Well, it is intuitive, but keyboard shortcuts (Y, N) no longer work.

Well done.
Thank you.

Why OpenID should have relevance for the enterprise

As with federated identities, I thought that OpenID had no space in the enterprise.

The main thought was, that OpenID make me the owner of my identity, and lets me choose where to use it. This is usually not what the enterprise wants. My enterprise identity, i.e. my accounts and profiles with the IT systems of my employer, belongs to my employer, not to me.
So, why should an enterprise care ?
Well, there are people who use their corporate account names and passwords on external sites as well.
They might use it for their email account, or eBay, ... Or they use their corporate email address to register with amazon and others who base an account on a email address. And usually, people tend to use the same password as well.

Bad idea.

But this (mis)concept exists, since there are "external" account, CompuServe, AOL, fidonet, whatever... and of course all those fancy sites on the web. And this behavior could never be eradicated. Because people (and therefore users) are lazy bastards.

Well - you can write and publish policies that forbid this (and all enterprises have those), but frankly, who cares. Who even reads them.

So why not turn 180° and actually allow this... even more: encourage it.

Become an OpenID provider and let users use their corporate account to login at your openid provider site. That way, the can stay lazy, but never give a password to other sites... They only enter it at your site(s).

The only drawback right now is, that there are still not enough openid enabled sites... but they are growing... rapidly actually.

New StarOffice/OOo language feature

Just noticed that OpenOffice 2.4 and (therefore) StarOffice 8 Update 10, have a new faster way to select/change the language for the spell-checker - right down in the status bar (where you actually expect it).

A click on it, and you can change the language.
Fast. Intiutive.

Finally.
Thanks.

A case for Identity Federation for the Enterprise

When it comes to identity management enterprises today tend to only care about user provisioning, compliance and (worst of all) single-sign-on.

Identity Federation - like Liberty - is usually not really considered. And I neglected it, too, since customers were not really interested in it, or asking for it.

However, there is a good use-case for federated identities across within enterprises... I choose to say "within" because the case I'm about to make is when the user should not see enterprise borders:

Consider an outsourced process - like HR in our case at Sun - where your employees have to access an application that is outsourced as well. People then have to sign on to computers that are not being operated by you (your IT).

Big deal... those application can easily access my directory (LDAP or AD)... so why should I need identity federation there?
And you might even trust those external application to securely access your directory this way.

But you don't want your users to enter their corporate userid and password at any remote site - even if you trust that company.

If you do, you open up big potential for fishing... By using federation you keep the input mask for your userids and password within your IT, operated by your staff, transported only over your network. There is no chance that the password can get intercepted... or at least the risk is not higher than within your own network.
That's the point.

SourceForge.net supports OpenID

Just read on SourceForge.net: Community Blog that they now support OpenID for login.

Excellent !!

StarOffice 8 Update 10

StarOffice 8 Update 10 has finally been released as patch 120187-14 for Windows.

Contrary to previous patches, this one was quite troublesome to install: on both of my Windows machines (both with SO8 U9 already installed) the installation failed quit at the end with a failure to read the source .MSI file (claimed to be a network error, but that was just a crappy error message, all install sources were local). It then removed the whole U9 update, but StarOffice refused to load afterwards (incl reboot) because of missing DLLs and/or DLL entry points.

I had to repair SO8 base, then re-apply U10...

As I said, happened twice for me – cost me 2hrs each time ... so be careful.

Xing now shows contact map on Google Maps

Xing just added great (beta) feature to the Contacts page.
You can now view your contacts as a map using - of course - Google Maps.

Here's my map (you might want to click to enlarge)



Works surprisingly well, i.e. most of the people seem to have meaningful addresses in their profile.
And the visualization - as often - adds information.

(shell) History meme

Just stumbled upon this nice piece of not-so-useful tricks... but fun.
via Tim Bray ongoing � History

history | tr -s ' ' | cut -d ' ' -f 3 | sort | uniq -c | sort -rn | head -n 10
92 tarantella
69 ls
26 cd
13 clear
12 tail
11 rm
11 exec
11 cat
 8 date
 7 man

I must have been doing a lot of SGD/tarantella stuff lately. Can't explain the date, though ;-)

Dopplr and city data - no progress

I ranted about this earlier, but there is still no improvement.
Dopplr does a lousy job regarding its 'catalog' of city data.
Sad.

Citrix Rumors...

I heard a lot of rumors during the last year or so about Microsoft buying Citrix... now IBM and Cisco joined the list...

Rumors of IBM or Cisco buying Citrix?, from Brian Madden on BrianMadden.com

MacBook Air

I had the chance to "lift" an MacBook Air recently, because a co-worker got himself such a beast.
Boy... great device... really.

One can argue about the lack of ports and connectivity.
E.g. only one USB port and no ethernet, only WiFi.
Not the perfect enterprise laptop, therefore.

But to me it is the iPhone of laptops... gets people hungry for Apple.
Drags them into the stores and to the Apple brand.
Any maybe get a more "enterprisy" device.

Surely a plus for Apple.

docs.sun.com

Whoever changed the application or infrastructure behind docs.sun.com...


Thank you.

Performance and responsiveness is now on a level where you can actually work with it.

Java Conference in Austria

Finally, Sun talks Java again in Austria. [1]

On June 19th there will be a one day Java Conference called JavaDeus[2] in St. Pölten.
Free admission of course.

Topics will cover Java 7, Netbeans, openESB... as well as some not-so-directly-Java-related stuff like MySql and Solaris Dtrace... stuff for developers, if you will.
Details can be found here at www.sun.at/javadeus08



[1] Not only do I work for Sun, but I'm also involved in organizing this event.
[2] don't blame me for the name.

Speed Dial killed my Firefox

Strange... I have been using the Speed Dial extension for Firefox for quite some while now, and a couple of days it started to kill my Firefox after startup...
First I though it was the Norton §$%&/() product.... but then I played around with
firefox.exe -safe-mode
and voila it worked again.

Disabling extension by extension revealed that Speed Dial 0.7.0.8 was the culprit.

So it had to let it go.

Got rid of my printer

A couple of days ago I got rid of my printer at home... and old Lexmark [1] ink printer.
First of all because it was broken.
Secondly because it has been broken for about half a year... and I never really did mind... because I did not even want to print anything.
So now was a good time to discard it.[2]

Boy, did I suddenly gain space on my desk.

And I'm one more step closer to the paperless (home) office.
If that will ever work.

Reminds me of the decade old saying "We'll have the paperless toilet before we have the paperless office."

Still true today.


[1] well exIBMers just have to buy Lexmark, don't they.
[2] actual trigger was windowcleaning... and I had to move the printer to the side to get access to the window.