What’s it say?? I can’t read!!

Bacon is all the rage these days. It’s almost…overexposed. Luckily there are still ways to have fun with the subject (other than eating it, of course).

Now, being a big bacon fan myself (we actually wrapped our Thanksgiving turkey in bacon last year), I wondered: what could I possibly add to people’s enjoyment of this savory treat? I know, I could try and convince you it’s healthy!

Searching my new Kindle version of GCBC confirms the contention of the hardcover index that, not counting a whole bunch of references to Francis Bacon, there’s only one real discussion of bacon in the book. It goes a little something like this:

The observation that monounsaturated fats both lower LDL cholesterol and raise HDL also came with an ironic twist: the principal fat in red meat, eggs, and bacon is not saturated fat, but the very same monounsaturated fat as in olive oil. The implications are almost impossible to believe after three decades of public-health recommendations suggesting that any red meat consumed should at least be lean, with any excess fat removed. …. All of this suggests that eating a porterhouse steak in lieu of bread or potatoes would actually reduce heart-disease risk, although virtually no nutritional authority will say so publicly. The same is true for lard and bacon. [GCBC, Ch. 9, pp. 168-9]

So given a chance between “turkey bacon”:

…and actual turkey wrapped in actual bacon:

…why not go for the real yummy thing?

Holy moly, it’s a ProtectServe video library

Last week at IIW8 I convened a ProtectServe session by request, roping in my esteemed colleague Paul Bryan so that we (meaning he!) could dive into protocol details. Unfortunately, we selected area C, which stands for “copious amounts of room noise”. Dave Kearns, who attended our session, even pointed out this little issue in his Network World newsletter yesterday. We soldiered on, trying to speak in loud, clear, bell-like tones (as my high-school history teacher would say…).

A bunch of us also ran sessions to collect use cases for the general area of user-managed access, in breadth-first and depth-first fashion.

With IIW sessions taking place simultaneously in areas A through J, it’s impossible to attend everything you want to. Judi Clark generously recorded a large handful of sessions to help people time-shift, and one of them was the ProtectServe session; many thanks to =judic! You may want to open up the easier-to-read versions of the slides and protocol diagrams alongside.

If you’re curious about all this ProtectServe and relationship management stuff, but you’re coming in fresh and don’t want to start with an out-and-out geekfest, a great place to start is the video from my recent talk at the European Identity Conference.

If you’re curious about octopi and corn, on the other hand, don’t miss Asa Hardcastle’s FUN!!! session on the Wakame open-source library…

Concordian (noun): Busy bee

Okay, so there’s no English word “Concordic”, but that’s the adjective often used to describe the topics and use cases we discuss in Project Concordia. Some call the participants in these discussions “Concordians”, occupying slightly firmer Internet-search-term ground.

Whatever you call us/them, we’ve been keeping busy lately working on them. Now’s a great time to pay close attention if you’ve got stubborn identity issues.

For starters, the Concordia survey on identity federation — our first survey — went splendidly. The survey results are on the Concordia site, and you can also find some nice graphs directly on SurveyMonkey. One hundred and three people completed the survey, with interesting results. It appears that complex federation topologies are no longer a rare beast. Don’t forget to check out all the “other” comments.

We’re now gearing up to do a second survey, on identity assurance this time. If you’re interested in this subject, feel free to add your desired survey questions here.

Of course, we Concordians participated in a huuuge identity workshop prior to the RSA conference a few weeks ago — with over 700 people coming through the doors at one point or another during the day. The presentations are available, and also don’t forget to check out the OSIS “I5″ testing results.

And now we’re in the planning stages for a Concordia workshop to be held at the Burton Catalyst conference in San Diego in late July. Our theme is Use Cases Driving Identity in Enterprise 2.0: The Consumerization of IT, and we’re actively soliciting your problem statements, use cases, solutions, and issues in the form of short position papers. If you’ve got a one-pager — or even a paragraph-sized abstract — that describes an Enterprise 2.0 identity topic you’d like to bring up, please send it along to our intrepid Britta Glade at britta [at] projectliberty.org as soon as you can. The agenda will grow and evolve online, right before your eyes. We’ll conduct this workshop in more of a traditional mold — lots of interactive discussion.

Wouldn’t you like to be a Concordian too?

Schooool’s … on – for – summer

The XML Summer School in Oxford is back! John Chelsom has gotten it started again, and this time it will be held September 20-25 in St. Edmund Hall. Lauren Wood is serving most excellently as Course Director this year.

I’m putting together a one-day Web Services and Identity course with a great lineup of additional lecturers: Paul Downey, Marc Hadley, and Rich Salz, all of whom have taught at the School before. Some of my previous posts (2007, 2006) give the flavor of the event and my series of courses.

You won’t want to miss any part of the week — you’ll sharpen your skills, you’ll hang out with great people, and you’ll get your questions answered about how to apply the hottest tech (check out all the new course subjects!) to your hottest business problems. What are you waiting for? Register already!

(If you’re the hesitant type, you can just follow along on Twitter at @xmlsummerschool for now, but make sure not to miss any registration deadlines…)

OpenSSO and “Geneva” Server: two great tastes…

In case you haven’t heard, Sun and Microsoft have published a paper showing ways in which our respective identity federation solutions — OpenSSO Enterprise and “Geneva” Server Beta 2 — have been tested to work together. It’s been quite a satisfying project, focusing on real-world use cases involving SAML2, and I hope we’ll get more testing opportunities in future as “Geneva” matures.

Seeing as how I’m late to the blogging party, I’ll just do a link roundup here:

• Download the whitepaper itself: Microsoft “Geneva” Server and Sun OpenSSO – Enabling Unprecedented Collaboration Across Heterogeneous IT Environments

• Check out the Smoking Monkey’s post, BFF . . . OpenSSO and Microsoft “GENEVA” Server Interoperate — it’s silly and yet it gives important context to the scenarios and technologies we chose to test

• Take a look at Jacki DeCoster’s entry on the official Sun “On the Record” blog noting the news

• Go visit Mike Jones’s blog for lots of “Geneva”-related links

• Get the official word on “Geneva” Beta 2 straight from the Microsoft Forefront team blog

• And, of course, check out OpenSSO.org for all sorts of OpenSSO news

A big thank-you to the Microsoft and Sun team members, who worked in close coordination to turn around the testing and the paper so quickly. Naming a few names (please forgive me if I left you out): Mike Jones and Caleb Baker from Microsoft and Sidharth Mishra and Julie Costello from Sun really pulled out all the stops. Let’s do it again sometime soon, shall we??

Heady days at EIC in Munich

What a week… Along with lots of other people in the identosphere, I had a great opportunity to attend the Kuppinger Cole European Identity Conference in Munich all last week. Here are some stories, impressions, and links.

This was third in an annual series, but I was a newbie. I’d assumed that “IAM and GRC” was the traditional focus here and that the consumer side of things was the outlier. But Bavo DeRidder, a tireless commenter during the event and an old EIC hand, noted that the greater emphasis on GRC this time around lent a serious business atmosphere to the proceedings. The attendance seemed quite healthy — despite the down economy — so perhaps GRC was the turn-on for lots of the delegates?

Because of the business-y feeling, I was surprised and delighted to see all the tweeting going on. Tim Cole provided witty running commentary during the talks, and then found his emcee duties greatly eased by reading all the relevant tweets out loud after each talk. :-)

Before the conference started, quite a few folks came to the Munich OpenSSO Community Day. Lots of community members shared their activities, questions, and use cases; slide decks and related materials are being posted on the OpenSSO wiki. (The cherry on top, later in the week, was a “best innovation” award won by the OpenSSO Fedlet. Whoo-hoo!)

Also before the conference started, a handful of my Sun colleagues (you know who you are) put in some quality beer-drinking practice time. Oh, my goodness. I know I’m a lightweight (figuratively speaking) when it comes to alcohol, but their performance was impressive. Everyone had slowed down by the time we got to the famous Hofbräuhaus on the third night, but even so, those liter-sized beer mugs made me feel like a little kid at the grownups’ table. (I mostly had wasser mit gas.)

Keynotes were sprinkled throughout the conference, giving a good balance between broader and more focused topics. I gave a keynote on the first day. Ever wondered what it’s like to give a talk in an IMAX theater? Intimidating, that’s what. My colleague Ludo Poitou (pictured on the left above) took some great photos during the week, and somehow managed to fit my huge slide projection, huge podium self, and tiny (only by comparison) real self into this one.

My talk was on The Care and Feeding of Online Relationships — a subject I’ve spoken on before, but I feel like my understanding has come much further since my first explorations on the topic a year ago. This time I presented what I hoped was a tightly argued case for the “permissioned data sharing” problem space, along with — for the first time on a public stage — a brief case for the ProtectServe/relationship manager paradigm as the solution space, and even as suggestive of what Enterprise 2.0 entitlement management might look like. I’ve posted the slides, and video is available to attendees (log in to see video links in the agenda). [UPDATE: They've made the talk available on YouTube; see the comments below for more info.] I had fun doing a video interview with Felix Gaehtgens about my talk right afterwards; anyone can view that. Next step for this work: discussing use cases at IIW8, a mere handful of days from now.

One last quick story: An important theme of my talk was the way in which OAuth helps to meet some of the requirements I’ve laid out for permissioned sharing. So it was a real delight to learn that OAuth won one of the Kuppinger Cole EIC awards this year for “best new/improved standard”. I knew it was up for an award ahead of time, and through coordination with Chris Messina and Eran Hammer-Lahav on behalf of the community, I agreed to go up and accept/retrieve the physical artifacts associated with this honor. Chris has written up the story here. (Come on down to IIW8 to see the little statuette and certificate in the “flesh”.) Sincere congrats to the entire OAuth community!

And one last photo: I saw this near one of the entrances to the Rosenheimer Platz bahn station. What does it all mean?

(Thanks to all the folks at Kuppinger Cole + Partner for putting on one heck of a show. Now to get on with the recovery process…)