Thursday, February 28th

Discount for space flights


I received an email today from Virgin (the airline i use most frequently) advertising their Virgin Galactic trips that take passengers willing to pay the cost, on a 5 hour journey outside earth's atmosphere at 63 miles high. The cost is a bit steep at 200000dollars but they give you 10% off if you have enough miles. I have the miles more or less, just another 180000dollars to go.


"Dear Panagiotis,

Virgin Galactic is delighted to announce a new destination...space. Climb to 360,000ft. at a cruising speed of almost three times the speed of sound, in unprecedented levels of safety and comfort. See our beautiful planet from 63 miles up and experience the magic of weightlessness.

Redeem 200,000 miles to receive 10% off the cost of a spaceflight, that's an incredible $20,000 saving!* Join our future astronauts and book your place in history. "
panos on 02.28.08 @ 03:27 PM gmt [link]

Sunday, February 24th

Stevens University


I am in the states this week for the OGF22 conference. It is bound to be good as there are a number of interesting security related talks. I landed at Boston Logan airport and after a good nights sleep I took the train to NJ HOboken to attend a meeting/workshop and several talks about the new concept of virual workspace. I took the chance to meet some old colleagues and catch on their research. I was also exposed to the work people are doing in the area of online courses. These are courses that target professionals and student alike with the aim of informing people about new technologies and their applications. I think it is a good way to diseminate research and awareness of one's work. Needless to say that I promoted my book. I will try to get involved more with online courses specially in the area of web services and security.

I dont have many news about NY. It has been snowing heavily while i was here. Flatiron reconstruction is complete...CBGBs closed down. smile

I am going to Boston tonight for the OGF. I will keep people posted.
panos on 02.24.08 @ 05:35 PM gmt [link]

Friday, February 15th

XACML Implementation


At last!...An alternative implementation to the sunxacml.jar API for XACML 2.0. Τhe alternative spec has been implemented by Google and it supports 2.0 check it out here. If i was google i would get into XACML 3.0 straight away because the semantics introduced in v3.0 radically change XACML policies. Still it is an implementaion I welcome.

Exctract from the announcement: "The 'enterprise-java-xacml' Google Code Project provides a high performance XACML 2.0 implementation that can used in the enterprise environment. A first release has been announced; the software is made available under the Apache License 2.0. Enterprise Java XACML intends to fully implement OASIS XACML 2.0 and will support XACML 3.0 in the future. It is a totally independent implementation. It fully implements XACML 2.0 core standard and has passed all conformance tests. It provides PDP that can accept XACML requests and returns XACML responses."

panos on 02.15.08 @ 03:43 PM gmt [link]

Friday, February 8th

LSIDs


They stand for life science resource identifiers, they are an OMG based standard, they offer nothing novel whatsoever while making the developers work a nightmare and apparently they are here to stay. I spent most of the week trying to educate security illiterate people about the dangers of LSID identifiers. For those readers that do not know what LSIDs are, it suffices to say they are location independent identifiers. URIs they say poses a problem in that they idenfity location dependent resources whereas LSIDs along with the related infrastructure alleviates 'supposedly' this problem. It was really made up by computationally challenged bioinformaticians who spend no time trying to understand W3C specs and by rediscovering the wheel, they came up with the LSID spec. In all their grief they had a point. I remember doing some data mining for a bioinformatics projects and it was unbelievable how many different names a protein in a database would have. LSIDs propose a univeral persistent name for such data. This is not new however nor novel. URI variations such as XRIs and IRIs do the exact same thing and they are alot older specs. But why make our life easier when we can make it harder; hence another spec saying the exact same thing. I started thinking that maybe the W3C standards and more importantly their names may repell scientints and as such they feel the need to come up with their own specs. Who can blame them for trying to support it?

I spent most of the week trying to explain to people that you cannot carry out 'location independent' security, or provenance, or auditing for that matter because each domain has by definition its own gatekeeper. I must have writen about 2000 words in emails for this matter alone. I ended up explaining tokens, time spamps and the like unitl I got bored since I realised it was falling on deaf ears.

Hoping to a more intellectually stimulating week. Another 12 days to go until the Boston conference trip.

panos on 02.08.08 @ 07:42 PM gmt [link]

Wednesday, February 6th

Nostalgia


..and here is another blog which is very very cool.

32bitos

enjoy..


panos on 02.06.08 @ 12:02 AM gmt [link]


Behavioral Economics


This is a very interesting blog I was pointed to by a colleague.

Behavioral Economics

panos on 02.06.08 @ 12:00 AM gmt [link]