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Thursday December 01, 2005

Er... Hello World!?

Since Robin was blogging about his Hawaii blog reader (what is the proper term for someone who reads a blog? Blogee? Blogette? How about Blogerator? Perhaps not;-).... I thought I would take a look at my clustermap...well!

Hello this week to Northern New Zealand, Japan, The West Indies, The Canary Isles, Iceland, Jakarta, Borneo and most interestingly of all, some tiny island in the Polynesian chain in the middle of the pacific which I can't quite make out...(no Hawaii for me though!). Nice to have you all aboard though and thanks for reading!

Is there a closet steam train fanatic out there in the pacific? ;-)

( Dec 01 2005, 11:37:35 AM GMT / Dec 01 2005, 11:33:06 AM GMT ) Permalink Comments [0]
Trackback: http://blogs.sun.com/Drew/entry/er_hello_world

Swearing at the Radio... Nuclear Power

I'm usually a very placid sort of chap, I have the patience of a saint, and a generally laid back attitude to life in general, in short, it takes a lot to get me riled.

Radio 4's PM programme, however, often manages this.

This is not a complaint against them though, as it's actually pretty good. However, the subject matter Tuesday gone was about the UK's burgeoning power crisis. As my web services counterpart Steve is fond of saying... "We're doomed!"

Residents of California will doubtless be nodding knowledgably at this point.

The solution is, of course, nuclear power, and anyone who disagrees is wrong. (You can see I'm not a diplomat).

Now this isn't a popular position obviously, but I counter it with a few facts.

1. Nuclear power stations (as opposed to bombs) have killed far less people than any other type of power station over their working lives. Why is everyone terrified of nuclear power anyway when far more people die from car crashes, alcoholism and eating rubbish food?

2. Nuclear power stations don't produce CO2, enough reason on its own if you believe all the loony global warming stuff.

3. Nuclear power is safe provided it is well funded and well managed. Ahem, well, we've hopefully learn't some lessons there!

4. Nuclear power stations aren't threatened by terrorism. If you don't understand why then you don't understand nuclear power.

I've already been asked... "Ah yes, but what would you say if one was built near to you then?"

1. I already have one near me and it's been there my entire life. Dungeness nuclear power station is here, about 15 miles from my house. Curiously, it is also at the end of that little railway I was on a couple of weeks ago. I havent got three arms or six eyes.

Here is what it look like...

Can you spot the huge tracks of glowing red devastated land, disfigured radiation soaked inhabitants drawing their last breaths?(For my American readers, that was indeed a piece of 'irony')

2. I've stood on top of the Dungeness nuclear reactor when it was operating at full power with a Geiger counter, the same Geiger counter registered more radiation in my garden due to granite rocks. It's safe, got that?

Of course all the loonies like Greenpeace came out with the all the usual tripe about Chernobel and three mile island, well they would wouldn't they. But when a when a 'Minister' started chuntering the same stuff, I'm afraid that got me swearing at the radio, I don't suffer fools gladly. Fortunately, for once, old Tony is talking a bit of sense though. The UK will be at the mercy of gas and oil prices if we don't act now.

I'm all for cutting down on power usage where appropriate, I use economy bulbs and switch off stuff when it's not being used. I have cavity wall insulation etc etc etc. We all know that wind farms and wave power are about as much use as a chocolate tea pot when there isn't any wind, alongside the damage they do to the landscape. Nuclear power stations are small (relatively), clean and efficient. Yes, we need to give thought to the waste problem, but lets stop mucking about with everything else and get serious on this. What we need is a big, deep hole in the ground.

And we need to spend as much money as possible on fusion research. Then I won't have to worry about switching anything off ever again.

( Dec 01 2005, 11:14:48 AM GMT / Dec 01 2005, 10:59:25 AM GMT ) Permalink Comments [4]
Trackback: http://blogs.sun.com/Drew/entry/swearing_at_the_radio

Entire-ID : Launching today!

I've been dropping enough hints about this for the past few weeks, and since we're about to go public with it (infact it just went live on the main Sun UK site as we speak - direct link here!), I think it's about time that you all got a low down on the monster that has been consuming my time for the last few months. (Other than the normal day job of course!)

Here it is...ta da!

So what is Entire ID? Well, it's a pre-integrated and pre-tested system designed to provide the complete backbone infrastructure of an Identity control system. I will introduce it today and then go through some of the details section by section in future entries.

The first issue it addresses is 'Registration'. How do you strongly associate an individual (citizen, employee, user or customer) with an electronic credential? Consider, if you can't guarantee the authenticity of the users who sign up to your system, any security you apply down the road is meaningless regardless of how good it is. Registration is key... and talking of 'keys', the (ahem) key output of the registration process is a digital certificate strongly bound to a registree. We also force the registration process itself to comply with E-Gov level 3 (Beyond reasonable doubt) legal requirements along with a whole bunch of other UK and EU legislation.

Next up is provisioning. Once we've got a user, we need to propogate and manage that user across all the systems and services they need to access. We need to do this in a way that is easy to manage, scalable and compatible with a huge variety of technologies. We also need to 'provision' the user with a Card...

Which brings us to Card Management. That digital certificate needs to be managed and placed on a card automatically (along with optional stuff like biometrics, photo/images and data). We also need to manage issuance, renewal, lost/stolen process etc etc...

We also need to use that card. Thus we provide authentication and authorisation services against that digital certificate, and in our demo example, create SSO tokens as a result of successful authentication (but you could do all sorts of interesting stuff - building access, car park spaces, online authentication...). There is also a whole bunch of federated stuff in here too...

Finally, we need to wrap an auditing function around all this, so we can provide and end to end view of the lifecycle of identies through the system.

It looks like this.

What you have in essence, is a pre-built, pre-integrated and pre-tested PKI authentication mechanism that manages sign-up, user provisioning, access and card management, using open standards and federation as guiding principles.

Can you think of anyone who might need one of these? ;-)

We've been partnering with a few companies to provide this solution as you can see. It's worth pointing out at this stage some top techie dudes here as well: Patrick (Objectsoft), Pascal(ActivCard - now ActivIdentity) and Marc (Isosec) who are the brains behind much of this. There is also the extended sales team (Brian, Les, Nigel, Giovanni, Robert and the other Les ;-) and our marketing lady, Suzie , who has been instrumental in bring all the stuff together for shows and events. (She still can't spell 'compatible' right though ;-)

The website is a bit sparse at the moment, you know how it is when you're playing with technology, documentation is so... tomorrow. One other thing though, I designed the entire logo myself using a copy of paintbrush on my laptop and used the official sun colours... it got all the way through marketing without being altered. How cool is that? LOL!

( Dec 01 2005, 10:29:14 AM GMT / Dec 01 2005, 10:06:23 AM GMT ) Permalink Comments [0]
Trackback: http://blogs.sun.com/Drew/entry/entire_id_launching_today

Reality meets the blogosphere

I haven't had much time to update the blogs on account of a lot of conference and demo work recently. However, during the Manchester conference we all attended last week a handful of people who have been reading my blog actually took the trouble to come and visit us.

Quite cool when you realise that real people are reading what you write! :-) So special thanks to Stuart, Mike and Phil for emerging from the blogosphere into the real world!

And not a mention of trains either!

( Dec 01 2005, 09:13:44 AM GMT / Dec 01 2005, 09:13:44 AM GMT ) Permalink Comments [0]
Trackback: http://blogs.sun.com/Drew/entry/reality_meets_the_blogosphere

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