Pushing String

At this year’s RSA Security conference in San Francisco, OASIS will once again be running an interoperability lab showcasing SAML:

OASIS Federated Identity Interoperability Lab will feature companies from around the globe demonstrating interoperability using the OASIS Security Assertion Markup Language Standard (SAML) v2.0 specification. SAML enables secure exchange of authentication, attribute, and authorization information between disparate security domains, which makes vendor-independent web single sign-on and secure e-business transactions possible.

This will be the fourth public interop event ever held for SAML, the first two having been done at Burton Group Catalyst conferences in previous years. SAML V2.0 is expected to enter balloting in pursuit of OASIS Standard status soon (V1.0 and V1.1 are already Standards), so this is good timing. If you’ll be at the conference, stop by to get a look at lots of vendors doing identity federation in perfect harmony!

One of my comrades-in-standards-work, a networking expert from way back, is also a devoted knitter. We have had many a pleasant conversation about crafts when we were supposed to be contributing to technical design work. I’ve just discovered that she blogs! She discusses her knitting projects and opinions about knitting machines over at the KnitBot blog. I have added her to my blogroll, and hope that she will add her thoughts on networking to her posting mix so that I won’t be the only weird hybrid out there.

Because of her shining example, I promise to rededicate myself to documenting my current cross-stitching projects (and to assign them the right category so that non-stitchers can studiously avoid them :-).

By the way, if my plug here has caused you to look at the “craft links” in my blogroll, note the nsfw designation on the Subversive Cross-Stitch link. Their stuff is cute but overpriced; it would be trivial to design similar projects using PCstitch. (It occurs to me that one of my favorite phrases often seen in the blogosphere, “WTF?”, would make an excellent sampler.)

UPDATE: KnitBot points me to another weird hybrid blog. Very cool! And I even found a reference there to Hofstadter’s Le Ton Beau de Marot, one of my favorites. She provides a Babelfish translation of the Marot poem made famous by the book. It’s got that “huh?” Babelfish feel, but also manages to convey the feel of a French person speaking in broken English.

At a restaurant the other night, I heard the waitstaff sing several lovely renditions of the “Happy Birthday to You” song, in four-part harmony no less — it was one of those places where the waitrons are all talented singers, and they frequently take a turn at the microphone to piano accompaniment. I’ve noticed that more restaurants have been using the real birthday song lately, rather than those godawful made-up ditties with lots of clapping. (Actually, the newfangled ditties have the advantage of being unruinable if they’re sung in three different keys simultaneously.)

I had been guessing that the famous HBTY copyright had finally expired. But a quick check of Snopes shows I was wrong: The Copyright Act of 1976 and the later “Mickey Mouse Protection Act” had the effect of extending the copyright on this song until at least 2030.

So I guess these restaurants are going to have to either start paying some royalties, or change their tune…

I tend to fly American Airlines these days, and the “Road Warrior” award issue of their American Way magazine just came out. I scanned the names of the winners on the off-chance that I would recognize one. Bingo! (Not that he knows me, but I sure know his name.) Bruce Schneier, cryptographer extraordinaire, won third place and has what I think is the best story. Read the whole thing, but here’s one, um, taste:

The woman brought three orange things and three brown things and proceeded to clean them. She set two bowls of water out in front of her: a green one and a white one. She cut open the orange things and put the orange insides in the green bowl, and the orange outsides in the white bowl. Then she cut open the brown things and put the brown outsides in the green bowl with the orange insides, and the brown insides in the white bowl with the orange outsides. I didn’t have the foggiest idea which bowl was for eating and which was for throwing away.

(No, I haven’t gotten tired of blogging already! I’ve been moving cross-country, and had to go without net access for several days. It was rough, I tell you…)

A fellow named Robin Sloan has done a flash movie that’s sort of a future-history documentary on the growth of “EPIC”, the Evolving Personalized Information Construct, and the corresponding death of the mainstream media. A snippet from the transcript:

2006 – Google combines all of its services - TiVo, Blogger, GMail, GoogleNews and all of its searches into the Google Grid, a universal platform that provides a functionally limitless amount of storage space and bandwidth to store and share media of all kinds. Always online, accessible from anywhere. Each user selects her own level of privacy. She can store her content securely on the Google Grid, or publish it for all to see. It has never been easier for anyone, everyone to create as well as consume media.

I had a few random thoughts about all this:

#1: Hmm, I guess this has nothing to do with the Robin Sloan I know at Arbortext who does application development on their Epic product! (Now it’s called simply Arbortext 5, I gather.)

#2: The future painted here isn’t very distant; some uses of today’s technologies look an awful lot like what’s described.

#3: I’m reminded of Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age, in which dynamically created newspapers are tailored to a reader’s social stratum.

#4: I’d think the EPIC vision would need a strong notion of identity (traits, attributes, and preferences of people and other entities) and a framework for accessing and manipulating identity information like that offered in Liberty.

(Thanks to JeffH for the pointer.)

Speaking of having disclipline in creating content… Before the dawn of blogs, back when we were at Arbortext, Norm Walsh and I had online columns on the Arbortext website; his was Standard Deviations from Norm (heh) and mine was Eve’s Advisory (affectionately known as Ask Eve). I was supposed to write something monthly on XML for a managerial audience. The only columns I ever managed to produce are still online but have been stripped of their “personality” for understandable reasons. (I also had a more formal white paper on SGML exceptions vs. XML that they still offer.) For your amusement, I present my old column logo here:

Old Eve’s Advisory logo from Arbortext

(The column links should also probably carry a “for your amusement” warning!)

UPDATE: Thanks, Tim, especially for the hair comments. :-) I’m glad I was having a relatively good hair day when they came around to take the picture for the logo…

M. David Peterson kindly welcomes me into the blogosphere and notes many meanings that could be behind “Pushing String” — in particular, one based on drug culture (”Hey man, I’ve got some primo uncut string here, wanna buy some?”). This wasn’t the primary meaning I had in mind! However, it’s got some appeal. (Have you noticed that “pusher” still gets used a bit, but “narc” has disappeared as a locution?)

I did intend for there to be a faint whiff of “pushing” since blogging requires a certain confidence (arrogance?) — I’m perpetrating prose. And, of course, people who read it by means of an RSS feed are using a push model to get this particular string.

The name also taps into the idea that we XMLers had to fight the bias towards fixed-length fields; variable-length “strings” in XML were inconvenient for the database crowd. This is why I thought Lauren’s XML 2004 artwork was so cool — she made mirrored “artwork” tags and they could be moved around to accommodate any length of display.

This is getting pretty far afield, but a concern often paired with the fixed-length one in the old days was the perception that XML was anti-object-oriented, because it was data-revealing rather than data-hiding. Would this be “pushing” XML content down the metaphorical throat of an application? Pushing a string on the stack whether it wants it or not?

(As an aside, I collect pairs of phrases that differ in one seemingly harmless way but have opposite or wildly different meanings. I guess pushing string / pushing a string is one of them. Another is out of the box / outside the box.)

And finally, for me, writing is in fact like pushing string, whereas editing is the activity I naturally gravitate towards. Hey, it’s more fun to improve someone else’s stuff than come up with new material on my own! So this entire venture is an experiment in applying enough discipline to come up with content. I’m trying to follow Ann Althouse’s advice to novice bloggers to “Be concise and write a lot.” I guess I have work to do on that first bit, but I’m hoping the second will cause me to “push string” on a relatively frequent basis.

UPDATE: Thanks, Norm! Uh, I’m not sure I should really take credit for that much richness/sophistication in DocBook, though I’m happy to be fingered as responsible for the removal of the old “onion”-style parameter entities and moving towards “building blocks”… I suppose I’ll have to post about that topic at some point.

UPDATE on 9 Feb 2005: Corrected my apparent dyslexia around fixed- vs. variable-length fields.