Saturday, February 24th

Past week


I am back from a 3 day bender at Edinburgh after attending the Application developer training on which we heard and had a lot of hands on experience on various job submission technologies. There was also an -out of place- talk on ogsa dai that seemed to drag on and eventually sent most delegates home prematurely (myself included) The workshop was neither exciting nor dull but it was educational and I learned quite a lot; most significantly to avoid anything like that for the time being or at least until the portal developers acknowledge the need for HCI analysis on their portals. Having said that D.Meredith's portal implementation and presentation was impressive and can be found (along with the rest of the presentations) on the Nesc website. I also met the coordinator of the NGS and I received positive response when I suggested a potential collaboration between myself/NCL and the NGS for the evaluation of SecPAL. I was reassured that it was definately on the cards. I had a number of one to ones with various colleagues and potential collaborators some of which were more promising than others. Anyway, some meetings were positive and upbeat, some were downbeat, while others awkard. One in particular was all of the above at the same time. big grin
panos on 02.24.07 @ 01:04 PM gmt [link]



New Blog


Elias is blogging.

nuff said...

panos on 02.24.07 @ 12:53 PM gmt [link]


Tuesday, February 20th

Customizable Radio


I found this customizable radio site a good example of reputation based systems.

panos on 02.20.07 @ 11:59 AM gmt [link]


Thursday, February 15th

Fountain


This film was really something, not to be missed.

panos on 02.15.07 @ 01:23 PM gmt [link]


Wednesday, February 14th

GRID workshop


The following Nesc workshop has been pointed out to me and I think I will make an effort to attend it. The overview of GRID technologies is something that will save me a lot of reading. smile
panos on 02.14.07 @ 02:52 PM gmt [link]



A year older


I am returning to Newcastle and back to the office tommorow 15th of Feb (a year older than i was when i left) having taken the last couple of days off to celebrate my birthday. Feelings were mixed as I also saw off an old friend (my last friend from the old gang a.k.a. the college years) who is moving to Japan this week to start a new job. sad

Anyway thanks for the wishes.

panos on 02.14.07 @ 02:01 PM gmt [link]


Friday, February 9th

ESBs and other stuff


I have been looking into ESBs (Enterprise Service Bus) as a way of architecting service oriented systems. It is part of my overall pursue to identify ways of providing security along with other nice things such as (integrity, confidentiallity, etc) without putting too much pressure on the services themselves. I like the idea of alleviating such problems even if the solution requires 3rd trusted parties. We are already using 3rd trusted parties to deal with identities (see federation) so why not push the boundaries further. I am still not 100% convinced and there are a lot of people who disagree with the whole notion of ESBs but experience shows that it is the way to 'really' loosely coupled systems. Wikipedia has a lot on the subject for a brief encounter with the area.

I have also been doing some work on the issue of delegation and delegated credentials. I am in the process of collecting delegation scenarios for the purpose of building a repository of delegation patterns and solutions. Having gone through the almost impossible task of trying to get XACML to understand delegation without totally messing up its semantics, I am hoping delegation patterns for identity credentials will also help me to evaluate other security related technologies.

any pointers, papers would be greatly apppreciated... smile
panos on 02.09.07 @ 10:12 PM gmt [link]