Tuesday, January 24th

'Are we going to make it to California Mr. Homer?'


Just had my booking confirmed. I am off to California in about 2 weeks time for 10 days (had to cut it short due to unforeseen circumstances). I will be staying in sunny Santa Monica (after a colleague's reccomendation) which I suspect will be a bit of a shock given that I have never been anywhere sunny in Februrary. I am currently experiencing temperatures in the minus here in Newcastle. I will be mostly spending my time siteseeing. I also plan to do a short trip to Las Vegas as I have some turning 32 to do. sniff

Dante's Equation turned out to be a great read but it didnt fully satisfy my cravings for sci-fi. Im re-starting the new Arthur C. Clarke series called time odyssey. The new Rex Mundi is also out (copy to Chris on its way) which marks the halfway point into the story. Great series.
panos on 01.24.06 @ 03:16 PM gmt [link]


XACML RBAC (?) and other news


Following my post a couple of weeks ago we (myself and a couple of my colleagues) continued on the implementation of Role based access control using the XACML standard. In fact we made use of the XAMCL RBAC profile (oasis specification Feb 2005) that allows one to define Roles, Permissions, References from roles to permissions (hence hierarchies) and roles enabling and assigning files. The whole process although verbose (in terms of XML) seems quite smooth. So we are ready to put it to the test using real examples from our domain (GOLD). The only real obstactle is that once again we need to write our own code as the current sun xacml api does not fully support what we want to do. Seth promised it would shortly.

My paper to the security conference in Vienna was accepted and therefore I'll be heading to Vienna along with my colleague to present our paper on authorisation and authentication requirements. I will add a link to this blog with details of how we implemented RBAC on XACML.

panos on 01.24.06 @ 03:01 PM gmt [link]

Monday, January 16th

Peer2Peer Workshop


I have just been informed by a colleague that this year's Agents and P2P systems workshop takes place in Japan. I am sure this is a rather attractive proposition for most people including myself. The deadline for abstracts/proposals is at the end of this month.
panos on 01.16.06 @ 05:29 PM gmt [link]

Wednesday, January 11th

News


Book dissemination is progressing well. I sent out a few more personal invitation this week from which I hope to get some positive responses. Still no word from either SEworld or Isworld mailing lists….still celebrating new years, I guess.

Next week I am expecting the results of 2 papers which I submitted 3 months ago, in a special issue journal and a conference. I am optimistic about both although obviously I would score a lot more points with a journal publication.

Since my colleague informed me about them, I have been very-very tempted to buy the new iMac. Its just so much faster and the fact that the dual processor is intel means that my software will be able to run without having to go through the process of recompiling.

I may be going to see my good mate Elias A. sometime in March–April, so this is something great to look forward to. Here is a little something for the gamblers out there

more soon
panos on 01.11.06 @ 01:51 PM gmt [link]

Monday, January 2nd

2006 Resolutions


First day back to work tommorow and Im a bit freaked out the holidays went past so quickly. I have made a number of resolutions this year spanning across both my professional and personal life. but i wont go into detail about that.

There is a deadline for a conference paper I need to make for the 6th and my book report due to my editor on the 7th. I also have to prepare for my trip to Los Angeles on the 10 of February which seems to be approaching fast.Have to take my car to a garage tommorow as well, after severely damaging the exhaust. I guess Fords aren't build for repeatedly skidding on snow! yeah Im really still 18 at heart....

I started reading Dante's Equation after all the good comments I heard about this book. It was writen by a Computer Scientist so I uess it is my kind of thing. Looks promising so far. Heard from my old pal Haris G. yesterday too, which cheered me up. I will hopefully see him soon in the new year. Happy new year...
panos on 01.02.06 @ 07:23 PM gmt [link]