Friday, July 21st

Recent Trip


Although I cannot reveal too many details, my recent trip to the SAP research centre in Belfast was successfull and as such I am quietly optimistic about the prospects of future collaborations with those guys. I met several people one of whom I'd met before and we talked a lot about technologies, distributed computing, security, GOLD and other projects.

I feel proud when I talk about the work we have been doing in NCL and people take an interest in it by asking many interesting questions. I invited "unofficially" the SAP people to pay us a visit when we next demonstrate our software (or years of research rather) put into practice at the EPSRC booth in the AHM2006 conference. They made me feel very welcome so I am thankful for that.

The week was a bit hectic with the travelling so I look forward to the weekend...partying of course.

more soon.
panos on 07.21.06 @ 07:40 PM gmt [link]

Thursday, July 20th

Awesome


I just got back from the best concert I have ever been. I saw Guns 'n' Roses play in Newcastle in a packed arena. It was awesome, I never expected it to be that good. They played all the old songs and a couple form their forthcoming album...

It featured an 8 piece band! as well as guest appearences from older band members. The only downside is that the geordies erm... being geordies .. decided to show their disatisfaction at the show being 1hour late by throwing various things on the stage. Late on, a pound coin hit Axl on the face at which pointed he called it a night and walked off. Nonetheless by that time he had played all the classics. But there was obviously no encore.

Coincidently it was exactly 16 years ago (I was half the age I am now..only 16) when I went to my first concert in Athens. It is July 19th again that I see one of my favorite bands..Unfortunately photography was strictly prohibited so I didnt get any pictures...anyway sorry to go off topic, but i just felt like posting.... LOL

long live rock 'n' roll

panos on 07.20.06 @ 12:43 AM gmt [link]

Monday, July 17th

My Away Week


Iam attending a workshop this week on Portal and Portlet related technologies at the NESC centre in Edinburgh. I was kinda hoping it would be more hands on but in fact it is just people presenting their work in the area. it seems that there is no quick and dirty way to get the portal technologies working for GOLD and i get the feeling that the learning curve is a lot steeper than i had anticipated. Have to look into this issue more when I get back to NCL.

This week alos marks the deadline for the chapters of the WS -Security book. Several people have asked for short extensions so Im hoping to collect all chapters by the end of the month.

Edinburgh is nice and sunny, so the early moring train journey was almost worth it. Unfortunately I wont have time to enjoy it. I am back in NCL on wednesday before I travel to Belfast at the end of the week on personal business. At the end of last week another one of my colleagues left the university. Most of the people i started working with at the beginning of the year have now moved to bigger and better things.

On other news, I am trying to finish as quickly as I can my GOLD related work so that I can take August off for holidays.
panos on 07.17.06 @ 06:38 PM gmt [link]

Wednesday, July 12th

Summer Holidays...


The AHM 2006 conference is about 2 months away and we are the process of finalizing our Demonstrations. We will occupy the main eScience booth for 2 half days and as such we need to promote our work and impress our colleagues as much as possible. On the security front I aim to have the entire suite of RBAC tools including verification ready. The question on everyone's lips at the momment is "How can one demonstrate Middleware?". The rule of thimb about middleware is that if you notice its there then it does not do its job properly. So how can we demosntrate something that is supposed to be invisible. The PIs idea is to demonstrate an application of the GOLD suite to carry out a real working scenario and then focus on the computing bits as we go along. I am trying to employ all my artistic talent (which is not much) to design some screens for the main GUI, although i am sure other people in the group can do better. If you are one of them please come forth. Im taking a seminar next week for this very reason. Im going to attend the portlets and portals workshop in Edinburgh for 2 days before I go to Belfast for day trip on personal business.

Although we are in the middle of summer the prospect of holidays is moving further and further away. At least I have my priorities clearly marked for the next 2 months and I have managed to finish all administrative work up unitl then. I still hope i can to leave Newcastle temporarily for one last time before i leave for good. ;-)

so long....

panos on 07.12.06 @ 06:23 PM gmt [link]

Thursday, July 6th

XACML to VDM API


Sometime ago we decided amongst our group within NCL (and within the scope of the GOLD project) to do something about the potential inconsistencies that would most certainly rise by allowing all participants of a VO to submit their own access control policies to protect their resources. One can imagine the problems that could arise by having a distributed authorisation policy based on the number of participants within a VO. We therefore built a service which is capable of parsing XACML RBAC policies and translating those to VDM. The resulting document is a VDM formal model which can be validated against such logical inconsinstencies.

The API parses any given number of XACML policies and produces a single VDM document representing the combined set of policies and policy rules as extracted from the XACML files. It is wrapped as a policy verification service that can used for verifying policies prior to placing them in the database. Furthermore, it can be used to verify access control policies against entire workflow descriptions. A BPEL description for example of a workflow would certainly contain information about resource access by some user or role as part of a particular task. Our service enables automatic notification of inconsistencies between policies in domains where processing as well as control of processes is distributed. Using our service runtime problems of workflows could potentially be avoided.

A collague has taken the lead in submitting our experiences in this years FAST conference

panos on 07.06.06 @ 09:34 AM gmt [link]